christian thought and the problem of evil henri blocherchristian thought and the problem of evil...

Christian Thought and the Problem of Evil

Henri Blocher

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Christian Thought and the Problem of Evil part 1 HENRI BLOCHER translated by DUSTIN E. ANDERSON, with footnotes translated by ROGER T. BECKWITH

In a series of four articles, M. Blocher offers us a critical description of the principal attitudes of Christian thought on the problem of evil, before presenting his own reflections on the subject.

These articles are reproduced from the journal Hokhma, by kind permission of the publisher.

It is not enough to say that evil is 'problematic'; it is, rather, the problem, the prob/ema opseos, that is, the obstacle which blocks the view, 1 which irritatingly impedes the intelligence wishing to see clearly. Nonetheless, each generation reviews the effort to understand. Ours has not forgotten the cries of Dostoevsky, nor the coldly indignant analyses of Cam us; it, in turn, and especially as represented by those thinkers influenced by Judaism, meditates passionately on evil. And Christians cannot side-step the issue, for, as Jiirgen Moltmann puts it, 'Without the theodicy2 question, where is the risk of faith?' 3

It seems to us high time to take stock of the principal attitudes taken by Christian thought, 'theological' in a narrow or broad sense, in coming to terms with the problem of evil. Our purpose in describing and classifying them is, of course, simply to appreciate them better and to bring out the teaching of Scripture, the Word of God.

To introduce the study (necessarily done in schematic fashion), it will no doubt be useful to recall which questions constitute the terms of the problem, as well as which major responses have claimed, and at times subjugated, those spirits outside the zone of biblical influence. But first we must situate the notion itself.

The rudimentary phenomenology All languages have a name for evil. What do they include under the term? A rudimentary 'phenomenology' allows one to locate the correlate of the judgements formulated, and sentiments expressed, in order to so close in upon the common, raw notion. Even if the method only approximates, one o~ght not to lo?~ down upon what it achieves: that is, the sense of evd nearest to hvmg experience, still naively free of all the composition, make-up, and conjuration at

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which the adept excel. What is one aiming at with the word 'evil'? That which arises in experience but ought not to; that to which the best in man says 'no'-in two words: the unjustifiable reality. Evil provokes indignation as well as fear, rebellion, stubborn acknowledgement, disgust. Evil is followed by shame, remorse, penitent confession, and pardon. More certain, more obvious than the classical distinction between natural evil, moral evil, and metaphysical evil is that between evil which is suffered (misfortune) and evil which is committed (malice). Indignation, above all, is linked with evil which is suffered (though it also happens that one becomes indignant over evil he himself has committed), while shame attaches to evil which is committed (though again it happens that one becomes embarrassed about evil where he is the victim, as in the case of the child beaten by its drunken father). The connected themes and symbols abound: ruin, illness, aggression, failure, night, errancy, loss, disorder, oppression, defilement, vanity. In the entire cycle of elementary, unaffected 'discourse', evil seems to have both a positive side (that is, evil is something and not nothing; one experiences it only too well) and a negative side (that is, evil tends to be destructive; it represents a lack with respecr to what ought to be, a lapse with respect to an at least implicit norm)-reality/unjustifiable!

The three questions At the heart of the problem of evil one generally finds the logical-speculative question of its origin, cause, or reason. Why? Why? From whence comes evil? The ancient Greeks had already posed the question, Pothen ta kaka?4 Plotinus, followed by St Augustine in his response to the Manicheans, argued for the priority of the question (a metaphysical one, if you like) concerning the essence or nature of evil: Quid sit malum.5 Yet the oldest question may well have been that concerning the end or elimination of evil: ad matay (until when)? This stereotypical formula found in the supplications of the Old Testament, and also present in Babylonian prayers, gives occasion to say that the existential and religious question merits being called the ultimate, if not also the original, question concerning evil-in the final analysis, the one that counts.

Pagan 'solutions' Optimism, dualism, pessimism: these school labels remain convenient to express the orientations (or disorientations?) of nonChristian thought concerning evil. 6 The first way is of the highest lineage, having indeed the name of wisdom. Wisdom, writes Etienne Borne,

... places man in a beautiful totality which cannot be other than it is, and the knowledge of which has the virtue of removing the evil from evil, that is to say, of cutting out that in evil which seems unjustifiable.7

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The optimistic negation of evil extends from the extreme forms of the Vedic religion and Christian Science, where evil is nothing but maya (cunning illusion) to the more common mitigated forms characterized by the reduction to subjectivity which one finds in Spinoza. (Parmenides also plays a part in this with his views on appearance, but unlike Spinoza does not distinguish the subject.) The Stoics offer an example of strained optimism, incapable of ignoring evil on the one hand, but nonetheless wishing to do so in order to be faithful to the dogma of divine, universal Reason, that allencompassing, beneficent destiny. Plotinus, who tied together the sheaf of antique philosophy, sings of the harmony in which evil finds its place: evil 'reveals itself necessarily captured in the bonds of beauty, as a captive loaded down with chains of gold'; given the image of individual instruments in the concert of the world, 'the wickedness of souls has its place in the beauty of the universe-that which for them defies nature, for the universe conforms to it. '11 Given the evidence, the optimistic doctrine represses the spontaneous apprehension of evil. It reminds one of the two-faced advice addressed to the unfortunate: 'Life has its own reasons'; and in its exaggerated versions it can resemble an anaesthesia produced by excessive pain or by certain pathological states.

Pure dualists are rare. As in the Mazdaism of Zoroaster and the Manichaeism of Mani (offspring of Persia's royal family) they dare to make evil a primary metaphysical principal. Evil takes on a substantive character, eternally at war with the good (despite the inconsistent hope in the latter's ultimate victory). An asymmetrical, mitigated dualism is encountered more frequently: while always affirming the superiority of the principal of good, it explains evil in terms of the interference of some independent metaphysical factor, often that of the resistance of matter (an idea found even in Aristotle and, of course, also in the Platonic doctrine of the 'receptacle'. substratum of the sensible world). The evolutionary systems which explain evil in terms of the inertia of a mass which evolution pushes ahead, are dualistic to the extent that this inertia figures in the schema as a primary given, opposed to the progressive tendency. On the other hand, they are optimistic when they minimize the gravity of the phenomenon and interpret it simply as indispensable to the global process.9 Dualism seems to intensify, exacerbate, the spontaneous apprehension of evil; but in reality it diverts this apprehension from its object, replacing the unjustifiable disorder with a more or less symmetrical order and so rendering indignation useless. Gerrit C. Berkouwer hits upon this nicely when he comments, 'Dualism is only a universal excuse clothed in metaphysics. ' 10

The pessimistic option is perfectly expressed in Buddhism, where ultimate reality is the void, and empirical reality, because of the bonds of attachment, is suffering. But the Buddhistic void seems to

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be the brother of the Vedic self to such an extent that the extreme generalization of evil rejoins in the end the extreme 'optimistic' negation of evil, an idea which would seem to accord with the role of reformer of the old Indian religion taken by Gautama (the Buddha). 11

After Schopenhauer opened the breach which let in contemporary irrationalism, it is as the philosophy of the absurd, according to Camus, and as a finally consistent (almost!) atheism, according to the early Sartre, that the pessimistic option is now presented to us. As admirable as it is ineffectual, the courage of Sisyphus cannot have any meaning in a world which has none itself, which is nothing but dark and distressing disorder. More recent writers-we think especially of Michel Foucault-who confirm the death of man following the death of God, seem to delight in skirting the edges of nihilism, but their desire to subvert language and their praise of deception do not facilitate a ready interpretation of their theses. The 'new philosophers' tend to confuse the world, completely 'master' and in some sense completely law, with evil, but they distance themselves from pessimism by invoking transcendent Intention, that which reveals itself through horror and defines itself through its absence in the world; they await 'the Angel to come'. 12

Pessimism, in improving on the spontaneous apprehension of evil, actually profoundly contradicts it. It is intrinsic to the perception of evil that it be mixed with good, that it actually assumes good; but the generalization of evil effectively cuts the protesting nerve in this clash. The modern pessimists are excessively given to indignation, but they also cut out the very basis of this indignation and so render their own excess, to use the celebrated term, insignificant.

A proposed itinerary We need not go further with our critique of non-Christian thought on the issue. Suffice it to say that, in general, the biblical record does not ratify any of the three described orientations. But given the background which our brief sketch has provided, we would now like to examine the relevant 'Christian' doctrines, that is those which at least wish to take account of the Judaeo-Christian Scripture, before putting together a synthesis of the scriptural affirmations. Once again the proposed solutions will be grouped around three key themes: that in which the vision of an encompassing order predominates, that in which the passion for freedom predominates, and that in which this or that dialectic predominates. It goes without saying that we can only deal with a selected few thinkers, those who appear most important or have been most accessible to us. Our account will show that pure doctrinal models are rare. One will discover right away the affinities of the first group with pagan optimism-it is not at all necessary to dig very deeply into history to rediscover the lines of

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communication! The second group shares in common with pa~an dualism the idea of God's independent causality, but the absolutization of freedom is an original trait. The third corresponds to pessimism only in the presence of an original negativity; one also perceives in it a kinship with optimism and dualism. In any case, these correspondences allow for neither domination nor exoneration-they aid in putting things in perspective, but the critical task remains intact.

The solution of universal order The church's most venerable discussion concerning the problem of evil has two main characteristics: evil, with respect to its origin and nature, is closely linked to the mark of nothingness imprinted on every creature as such (as finite, each creature was created ex nihilo and retains the imprint of this origin); on the other hand, evil as phenomenon or event is included in the universal order, contributing in its own fashion to it.

Coming first to mind is the version advocated by Gottfried Leibniz. well known due to Voltaire's famous publication. 13 Leibniz, the most commanding intelligence of his time and an ecumenical Lutheran, went to a great deal of trouble in dealing with the theodicy problem on several occasions in order to remain consistent with a faith in a sovereign and wise God. Unless one suspects the Lord of blunders or unworthy choices, one must suppose that there is a sufficient reason for all that happens. Since God must morally choose the best, this world can only be the best of all possible worlds. Evil is ineluctable in finite beings; as the pure privation of being, it is the ransom of the creatures' inequality. One cannot attribute it to God as if he were its author, since evil is as the inertia of the body carried by the river current: 'The current is the cause of the boat's movement but not of its retardment.' It is a 'concurrence for the beauty of all', like a fortuitous dissonance in music or those irregularities in mathematical series which become part of the rule.

Who today can allow themselves to be tempted by Leibniz's theodicy? One has become too aware of the horror of evil (a horror which is biblical). An optimism attempting somehow to be Christian strikes us as 'naive or cynical-Auschwitz with a "happy ending". >~ 4

We have unmasked the ruse which domesticates the freedom of God in the name of some preconceived view of his moral perfection, and instead makes the most of his mystery. Lurking behind the eagerness, which is just a shade too vigilant in proving universal harmony, we suspect there is a repressed doubt. Georges Friedmann convinces us with his flashing perspicacity: 'The Leibnizian optimism is in reality one of the first forms of the modern philosophies of anguish and despair.' 15

It is therefore noteworthy that Claude Tresmontant has really only one essential criticism of Leibniz, that is, that Leibniz would have

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ignored the genetic or evolutionist perspective according to which man is called to co-operate in his own divinization. This co-operation demands that man become 'more and more autonomous', and it is in this way that evil is explained. 16 It is well known, of course, that as a young man Tresmontant came strongly under the personal influence of Father Teilhard de Chardin. So it is only natural that his critique of Leibniz should lead us to the philosophy of Teilhard, which along with its 'cousin', Thomism-Teilhard received a Scholastic education in theology and philosophy-represent the two doctrines of evil in our first group which remain live options today.

Evil as the waste product of evolution Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's prodigious project is summarized, as is well known, in the formula 'Christianizing Evolution' .17 He was the visionary of convergence, of synthesis, of union. The least surprising synthesis for the uninitiated is that of Evolution and Creation (Teilhard always uses such capitalization). Others before him had so identified it, and the synthesis is virtually self-evident for the Christian evolutionist. The philosophy of Teilhard comes out more distinctly when he affirms Evolution's equivalence with Incarnation, the latter being a 'prodigious biological operation'. In Christ, God becomes an 'element' partially immersed in things, in order to 'create, consummate, and purify the world' and so take 'charge of and be at the head of that which we now call Evolution.'18 And looking through the same glasses, Redemption can hardly be distinguished as well:

... Christianity, sensitized by the conquests of modern thought, has finally realized the fact that its three fundamental, personalist Mysteries are in reality nothing but the three aspects of the same weighty process (Christogenesis), seen in either its principal motor (Creation) or its unifying mechanism (Incarnation) or its elevating effort (Redemption)-all of which lands us right in the middle of Evolution. 19

One could add to this the equation with divinization, the great theme of Teilhard's major mystical work, Milieu divin, 20 as well as the idea of the transubstantiation of the universe according to the vision of the World-Host. 21 In order to link together all of these notions, the idea of the unification of the many plays the decisive role. As Teilhard in fact says, 'Plurality and Unity-the single problem to which all physics, all philosophy, and all religion is ultimately reduced . .zz

But what about evil, that all too human phenomenon? Teilhard adds the Fall to the three mysteries already mentioned: 'all four become co-extensive with the duration and totality of the World; they are in some way the aspects (truly distinct but physically linked) of

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the same divine operation. m The Fall as well! Indeed, original sin 'is the reverse side of all creation';24 it 'tends to become confused with the mechanism itself of Creation. '25 Does one dare talk of necessity? Teilhard, that intrepid Jesuit, doesn't hold back, and his position has the merit of limpidity: 'Evil (not at all by accident-which would trivialize it-but by the structure itself of the system) appears necessarily ... '26 It is a rigorously inevitable accompaniment to Creation: 'necesse est ut adveniant scandala'. 27 'One notices that not all is absolutely false in the old idea of Fate reigning over the Gods as well. '28 Evil arises inevitably alongside creation; it is 'the truth confusingly expressed in all the myths where one finds the ideas of birth and evil associated.'29 In the different passages related to the subject, Teilhard associates suffering with error or sin. Moreover, it is the essence of his method to merge physics and ethics. 30 In either case the distinctions are not essential, but relative to the stages of Evolution.

How does Teilhard conceive of the necessity of evil? At times he calls it 'statistical'. 31 But he explains it most precisely where he speaks of the resistance of the many to the unifying hold of God. 'Our tendency is to imagine God's power as being supremely at ease in the face of the "Nothingness". This is wrong. m 'The general laws of Becoming, regulating the progressive apparition of (created) being from an unorganized many', are 'the modalities imposing strictly upon the divine action. m The Nothingness which can be created is identified with the pure many, burst forth at the antipodes of God through the single fact of God's self-'trinitizing'. To create is to unify this many into ever more complex arrangements, a process which even for God cannot be done without difficulty, without waste and by-products. 34 Evil attaches to us due to the many out of which we are born and which marks us still. It will disappear with the perfect unification in the 'plerome'.

Teilhard's theoretical solution provides us with the consolation of understanding, but the vision remains unsatisfying. For Teilhard the painful waste products are salvaged. By a singular turning round, they change into factors of divinization-such is the major thesis regarding the 'passivities of diminution', physical and moral sufferings by means of which God recoups and avenges, 'subjugating evil itself to the superior good of his faithful ... '35 Evil becomes the motor in some auxiliary way of the progress which it engendered. It serves as the goad which keeps us from stopping at the present stage of Evolution, detaching us from a still imperfect world and projecting us on, offsetting us in God. 36 There must be an 'uprooting' in order for one 'to become unified in oneself or to unite with others.' And beyond this uprooting of 'the inertia which tends to immobilize them', humans must abandon themselves to the 'agony' of a total transformation in order to further mature. 37 The last section of Comment je vois summarizes well this turning round of the negative:

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... the sufferings (themselves!) of failure and diminution, transformed into the factor of unitive offsetting . . . no longer appear as a waste product of Creation but rather become, through a marvel of spiritual energy, a positive factor of over-evolution Jsur-evolution ]-the supreme and true solution to the Problem of Evil. 3

The optimism would be thoroughgoing if one could foresee the continuation of the process. Often Teilhard seems sure of it: 'Under the tension of the personalization pressing them, the elements are urged on in an infallible direction ... '39 Due to the mass effect, and despite the tentative gropings, 'the process tends to become infallible. '40 However, Teilhard also notes that at the moment the machine seems to be running 'backwards'. 41 He stigmatizes the large modern cities as 'Molochs without heart or face'. 42 Now and then he can picture possible failure, yet his optimism, ascetic as the visage of a Jesuit, continually buoys him up. Since the Christ is found at the end of the process, in Omega, and since it is his ('redeeming' [amorisant]) attraction which propels the entire Evolution, the universe cannot miscarry, nor can humanity go on strike.43 The present difficulties are eddies caused by a crisis of belief, the 'critical passage to the Equator' (of a symbolic globe) of the waves of hominization, passing 'from Dilation to Compression'. 44 But the tide of Life, of the Spirit, never stops rising. This optimism seems to feed off the energy of despair, as when Teilhard, in 1942, speaks of the war then raging as a phenomenon with a 'positive sign' because it is universal, and so goes on to wish for a synthesis by convergence of the three great currents of democracy, communism, and neofascism.45 One can only hail the courage of the Teilhardians when they publish such texts!

Criticism of Teilhard's philosophy must needs be global, implicating for example the homogeneity postulate lucidly formulated at the beginning of The Human Phenomenon. But does it not implicate itself (if the Bible serves as the rule)? The statements themselves suffice, which is why we have simply gathered together the various citations and references which the hurried reader passes over, and Teilhard's advocates prefer to ignore. As for evil, we must only note Teilhard's exaggerated pretensions: 'the famous problem no longer exists'! 46 Regarding necessity, pagan kinship is acknowledgedFate's superiority to the Gods, the truth of the myths. Only one scriptural 'proof is ever invoked-Jesus' teaching on the necessity of scandals (Matt. 18:7)-but Teilhard is not about to get tangled up in exegesis. If the necessity about which Jesus is speaking is not simply that of the completion of the Scriptures or of the manifestation of latent sin, if it even refers perhaps to God's plan, it is certainly no reference to creation and to involvement in the many. Indeed, Jesus immediately underlines the responsibility of the sinner, an aspect

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which disappears in Teilhard's view of necessity. And so the indignation of the prophets is choked off, the meaning of the cross is overthrown, and judgement and grace are distorted. 47

Evil as the bite of nothingness Coming to the Thomist doctrine of evil, one is not simply confronted with the grandiose and vulnerable dream of a solitary thinker. The great work of a powerful and durable community of thinkers, tried and tested through controversy, sculpted by the centuries, it must be approached with fear and respect. Saint Thomas of Aquinas only built upon previously laid foundations, those of Saint Augustine above all, not to mention those of Origen, and the Thomists of our own era are not content with a servile repetition of their master's thoughts-their originality, though bounded by fidelity, asserts itself no less and bears its own fruit. The decline in influence suffered by Thomism since 1950, all the more brutal following generations of hegemony in the Catholic camp, must not lead one to believe that its voice has become negligible. And, moreover, it must be remembered that there exists a Thomism which is non-Roman Catholic, but rather Anglican or Protestant.48

The key insight involved here was formulated by Augustine in opposition to the Manicheans: that is, that evil is nothing, neither principle, nor su':::>tance, nor entity. It is strictly relative to good, default, lack, privatio boni. 49Etienne Gilson speaks eloquently of a 'fundamental unrealit~, determined and encircled on all sides by the good which limits it.' 0 With this understanding, not only does one avoid dualism, but one also shows that evil cannot come from God nor exist apart from creatures, good as they are. But misunderstandings must be anticipated. Privation is not just any absence-there is evil in lack of good only if good were somehow owed. Saint Thomas clearly distinguishes between privation, taken in this sense, and pure negation (for example, man does not have the agility of the goat nor the power of the lion), which can in no way be called evil. 51 Thus the inequalities among creatures are cleared of any accusation and evil is not confused with finitude as it is in Leibniz. 52 On the other hand, the anti-dualist analysis does in no way minimize evil. Like privation, evil exists in things: 'the paradox of evil is the terrible reality of its privative existence. '53 One does not water down the denunciation of the evil of deception by defining it as the privation of truth, nor that of the evil of blindness in recalling that it is the privation of sight.

From whence comes privation, however? The origin of evil is found in the 'bite of nothingness' (an e'Wression coined by Jacques Maritain) which marks every creature. ~ All finite being, coming from nothingness, retains a sort of affinity with nothingness-it is mutable, corruptible, fallible. The nothingness tendency is 'knotted to its bowels', as Journet expresses it. 55 And the Thomists could

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heartily concur with such sentiments: 'God can ... no more make the creature naturally perfect than he can make a circle square. •56

According toP. Sertillanges (member of the Institute and one of the most notable figures in French Thomism during the first decades of the century), the analysis of the nature and causes of evil rests

. . . upon a doctrine of ontological emmanation whose influence informs the entire Thomist system. Evil is presented there, in the final analysis, as a result of being's descent into the many and so into the imperfect, having left from the One, from the Supreme Being, which it realizes in a simple state, without any imperfection. In leaving this state, however, it necessarily degrades itself and the good with which it is identical. The multiplicity of the limited, and thus fallible, natures is compensated by the unity of order, and it is with respect to this order that evil is permitted. In this way evil returns again to good ... 57

Not all Thomists perhaps would ratify the terms of this declaration, but none would contest that Sertillanges' view is at least representative.

But has evil been sufficiently explained? Fallibility and corruptability are terms not quite as strong as fault and corruption! The Thomists must go one more step. To do this, St Thomas appeals to a principle he feels is unquestionable: 'It is in the nature of beings that those who can fail, do in fact sometimes fail.' 58 The Thomists follow his lead in this,59 and Sertillanges explains that, unless this were the case, the ability to fail (the creature can sin) would not be 'real or objective'. 'Since the ability is supposed in a nature which changes perpetually and is governed by the wheel of fortune, it is only inevitable that, one day or another, Jossibility becomes fact, that the lottery number is actually drawn.'

Saint Thomas treats natural evil and moral evil in joint fashion. Justifying the presence of many evils by the many goods which result, he offers these three illustrations in the same breath:

Fire would not be generated if the air were not tainted. The lion could not live if the ass did not die. And one would not praise avenging justice nor the patience of the persecuted man if the iniquity of the persecutor disappeared. 61

Gilson does recognize that 'the problem seems to become more complicated' when applied to rational beings, but he figures that 'it would be as well not to introduce new principles' to the given solution.62 Maritain and Journet, on the contrary, explore the difference. The prince of the lay Thomists warns that 'if one does not read it correctly ... one could confuse Saint Thomas' fosition with Leibniz' ... a rationalist corruption of Christian truth' 3-since the machine of the world will not console the mother weeping over her

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child, the idea must be forcefully opposed. 64 When one considers persons, each one a whole, a universe, 'the existence of evil in things throws an incongruity into being which nothing can set at ease: Et noluit consolari'; it is an 'incomprehensible anomaly'. 65 The future cardinal (Journet) is no less emphatic: 'Moral evil, contrary to natural evil, is linked not only with the self but also inseparably with the good; it serves only to destroy the divine work.' But if this is the case, 'it does not then imply that it ought to accepted, consented to, tolerated, in a word, desired in some indirect way since it is the reverse of the good sought by God.'66 Not that Journet rejects the idea of the evil backside of good (Felix culpa, he recalls, like the chant of the Roman liturgy: 'Blessed fault which has brought us such a redeemer!'), 'but to think sin desirable for redemption's sake would be a blasphemy along the lines of the Hegetian perspective. '67 In all of this, Journet is in agreement with Saint Thomas that the evil of pain in punishment is not an evil as such since it re-establishes order, and in this way natural evil, for man, is entire~ a punitive evil-his physical suffering and death is entirely his fault. 8

The new accents of our neo-Thomists, it seems to us, do not readily mix with other theses simultaneously defended by the same authors. According to them, God permits (without desiring) the evil of sin because he brings about good out of it. But isn't that a sort of 'consolation' which imagines itself dissolving the 'incomprehensible'? Maritain explains that 'the sin of Adam has been permitted to bring about the redemptive Incarnation' and does not shy away from the formula: 'Sin-evil-is the ransom of glory.'69 Recalling Saint Thomas' illustration of the usefulness of the death of the ass to the lion, Journet writes: 'The response remains valid, though transposed on to a much more mysterious plan, in allowing for the evil of fault. '70

The Augustinian-Thomist axiom, according to which God permits evil because he brings about good from it, 'remains valid, but in a transposed manner, proportionally similar but essentially different, when one moves from natural evil to the evil of sin'. 71

' ... The order of freedom and of morality is an order especially made to facilitate re-entry, in one way or another, into order.'72 What remains then of the consideration of the person as a whole, rather than as a part of the whole? Spicing up the statement with words such as 'transposed', 'mysterious' and 'in one way or. another' is more a sign of embarrassment than of elucidating assurance. The structure of the argument is not affected by these powerless attenuations.

Jacques Maritain has another passage from Saint Thomas to which he is quite attached, a passage which he feels has not been sufficiently noticed.73 It concerns 'the cause from which it results that a free action is evil', 'a particularly difficult problem', but one in which 'the solution proposed by him ~Saint Thomas] is one of his most original philosophical discoveries.' 4 It is necessary that the source of moral

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evil be in the will without itself being at fault ('which would be a vicious circle'). 75 The solution is simple in its subtlety. Because he ignores the rules, the carpenter cuts corners. Likewise, because the will ignores the rules (the divine law), because it does not pay attention to them as it is free to do or not do ('and herein lies the essence of liberty'),76 it commits the fault when it proceeds to act according to its choice. The lack of attention, the non-consideration of the rules, is not a fault, is not an evil 'because the soul is not responsible for, nor is it capable of, always paying attention to the rules while in the process of acting. '77 It is indeed a sort of negation, not that of a debt of good, but in such a way that the creaturely nothingness is seen a the cause of evil. The initiative not to act, not to observe the rules, 'is not yet sin itself, but the root of sin ... it is a pure absence, a pure nothingness, but one which is the original root of evil action. '78 Saint Thomas and Maritain do not have quite the same objectives in their use of this demonstration. If we read the former correctly, he seems to be combatting dualism above all, wanting to avoid attributing evil to an initially evil cause and thereby setting up a principle of evil. Maritain underlines rather that since the primary initiative of evil comes from the creature alone, God can in no way be its cause.79 This difference, however, does not render Maritain unfaithful to his master.

To conclude, one recognizes in Maritain and Journet leftovers of the theodicy of the second type, which we will examine later on, when the one excludes any idea of the divine plan as some 'scenario written in advance'80 and the other throws out accusations against Calvin. 81 but these elements are hardly characteristics of the Thomist doctrine of evil, which resolves the problem with the idea of universal order and of the efficaciousness of the nothingness.

Evaluation Let us give due credit to the efforts of the Fathers. The analysis of evil in negative terms, as the privation of good, constitutes an irreversible acquisition. In rejecting any confusion of evil with a primary substance or form, it performs a liberating service. It allows the absolute dependence of all things with respect to the most good, God, to shine out. It denounces evil as a parasite or a perversion. It accords well with living experience and above all with Scripture-the biblical language interprets evil with the help of terms evocative of the nothingness (four of them in a single verse, Zach. 10:2)82 and one also notices the privative prefix used in the New Testament vocabulary of evil: adikia, anomia, asebeia, etc. With the Thomists, we too subscribe to the beautiful lines from Saint Augustine:

Haec tua sunt; bona sunt quia Tu bonus ista creasti. Nil nostrum est in eis, nisi quod peccamus amantes, Ordine neglecto, pro Te, quod conditur abs Te. 83

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The danger accompanying this lovely lucity is that evil is perhaps under-estimated-if it is nothing, it ought no longer to weigh one down so much ... 84 But this snare can be foiled. When one recognizes with Journet the paradox of the positive aspect of this negative and its 'terrible reality', one begins to fully appreciate the horror of evil preached in Scripture, realizing that the positive aspects of evil establishes itself on credit (fraudulently!) borrowed from God's good creation. 85

The Thomists indeed offer consolation when they proclaim the reversal of evil through redemption: God's using evil in the service of his glory and of the salvation of man-etiam peccata! Without doubt God's plan, in its sovereign wisdom, takes into account even the perverse machinations of his free creatures and somehow brings about good from evil. But what if we follow out this line of thinking? Is the permission of evil justified by the wise, universal order encompassing it?

First, one must more decisively disassociate so-called 'natural' evil from the evil of sin and its consequences. To be sure, the cycle of physical phenomena is awe-inspiring and so justified, despite the perpetual destruction it causes. But where is the evil involved here? By what rule ought one to define it?86 With all due respect to Saint Thomas, it is simply abusive to call the union of the air's oxygen to carbon evil! Similarly, for the cell, death is life! Even with respect to the ass devoured by the lion, the term 'evil' is contestable, since the 'evil' in this case has to do more with an anthropomorphic projection, an imaginary identification with the victim (not necessarily without good reason, mind you!). Properly speaking, evil is linked only with persons. Maritain and Journet intuited this but did not dare follow out the idea to the end. Furthermore, the evil involved in penalty ought also to be better distinguished. Inasmuch as there is penalty, that is, the satisfaction of justice and the restitution of order, it is for the good. But inasmuch as it springs from sin, it is an evil, or more precisely, an effect of evil, since the evil is the will contrary to God. 'The characteristic of Christianity is just that it situates this infinite difference between what is called evil sometimes of one thing, sometimes of another, in a way which eliminates the confusion. Christianity properly consists in speaking of suffering and temporality with ever more frankness and victorious joy, because for it sin, and sin alone, is corruption. '87

As for spiritual and moral evil, it is one thing to say that God is capable of using it for good once it has already established itself,88

and another to conclude from this that God permitted it with this good in mind. One moves from the wonderment at the news of an unheard-of, liberating wisdom, to the possession of a 'reason' which makes God's decree comprehensible. Yet Scripture itself never takes this step of bridging the qualitative abyss. For if sin is truly, as

18


Maritain says, 'the ransom of glory', can the Lord be exonerated from his part in the affair? He is not perhaps the author of evil, but he is the author of the law which makes evil the ransom or 'reverse' of good! Isn't he thus linked to it? 'Ransom' and 'reverse' are images not far from the notion of a means. When some agent (sovereignty) permits a thing in order to further his own ends, how does this differ from using a means to an end? Isn't the agent responsible for the means he uses? It is not necessary to 'demagogically' evoke the most horrible forms of evil in order to feel the full atrocious force of the suggestion that a God had chosen them as his means. The scandal of personal evil explodes the idea of justification through universal order.

As for explaining the rise of evil in terms of the creaturely nothingness, the pagan parallels and links are so manifest that one wonders at the assurance of the Christian proponents of this view. Sertillanges goes to the extent of calmly confessing that 'our author concedes to Plotinus that being itself is the source of evil if one understands by this common being' (mixed with power).89 The nothingness which is something, the nothingness substantialized which, before the creation, enters into the composition of creatures, is actually the me on of the Greeks! The argument over fallibility, inevitably entailing the idea of fault, marvellously illustrates the equivocations surrounding the notion of the possible when linked with that of nothingness. When the Thomists talk of fallible man, they do not simply want to say that he is not infallible like God, but additionally that there is a 'real power', a tendency in him to commit the act like a germ of evil present from creation onwards. In this case, the notion of possiblity slanders God's good creation. And since the terms 'necessary', indeed 'fatal', come from the pens of the Thomists, why shouldn't the sinner excuse himself from fault? In other words, it is God, responsible for all being and for all the laws of being, who is rendered responsible for this necessity, unless one wants to appeal to some higher law (like the idea of Fate in Teilhard) to which God is subject. Does not Sertillanges in the end also invoke the 'wheel of fortune', the super-God of Chance?

Jacques Maritain's attempt to explain the origin of evil acts also tries to rejuvenate the idea of a natural evil created as such, to establish a continuity in place of the discontinuity of the shameful scandal. One can criticize his demonstration by simply stressing that the discontinuity remains intact, a gaping hole, when viewed in the light of Scripture. Let us suppose that for a given period of time it were actually legitimate not to take the divine rule into account-this in no way accounts for the idea of sin acting without respect for this rule! In this single move one finds the monstrous ingratitude, the criminal disobedience, the abominable arrogance of the creature, who owes everything to his Creator and so must respect God's will

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when he acts! Once again a qualitative abyss opens up between an anterior inattention which was permitted, and the inattention contrary to God's explicit command. And can we even agree that the 'non-respect', which Maritain refers to in the first instance, is legitimate? It is troubling that the agent he describes seems suspended in a moral void. Has one forgotten the first and greatest commandment, that is, to love the Lord with all one's heart, with all one's soul, with all one's mind, and with all one's strength? Doesn't this imply a permanent orientation of desire and intelligence towards the divine Will? If this ceases for a single instant, it is anomia, violation of the law, sin. Of course, what we call an 'orientation' is not an unceasing conscious, meditative concentration on the particular commandments; but then neither does J. Maritain first describe the 'respect' of which he is talking (not a requirement, he would say) before placing it at a level of metaphysical analysis similar to ours. Out of the heart of total love (the minimal obligation of the creature!) there is no continuity which leads to sin. Evil arises as a foreign intruder, without reason, without excuse.

Despite the riches and subtleties of the Thomist doctrine of evil, we are constrained to conclude that it ultimately fails. As in the less refined systems of Leibniz and Teilhard, it tends to excuse evil via a false idea of necessity, diluting the horror by viewing it, horribly enough, as a means to divine ends, permitted in order to be so used. Like the optimism of the Stoics and of Plotinus and Spinoza, it tends to take the evil out of evil. But this is simply not the case-the disorder is not so easily encompassed and thus justified by some greater order. Thomism provides a valuable service in stressing the privative reality of evil, but its explication of evil's origin must be denied. Let us listen rather to the 'voice of truth', the voice of Job, according to Philippe Nemo, where

... evil is not a being of the world, being in the world, co-ordinated with the world in a unique Order. The being of evil, says the voice of truth, is of the being of horror, throwing the soul into battle against horror. 90

to be continued

BENRI BLOCBER. lectures in systematic theology at the Faculte Libre de Theologie Evangelique, Vaux-sur-Seine, France.

NOTES

1 J. Bernhart is the one who makes this etymological note in his article 'Mal', Encyc/opedie de la foi, edited under the direction of H. Fries, vol. Ill, p.20.

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2 'Theodicy' literally means the 'justification of God'. It has to do with explaining the coexistence of God and evil. In French Catholic writing the word has taken on a larger sense, coming to encompass all of 'natural theology'.

3 Religion, Revolution and the Future, ET by M. Douglas Meeks (Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1969), p.55, with allusion to Martin Buber; cp. pp.62, 204.

4 As cited by Paul Ricoeur, La Symbolique du mal (vol.2 of Finitude et culpabilite [Aubier-Montaigne, Paris 1960]), p.15.

5 Plotinus, 1st Ennead 8, cited by Charles Journet, Le Mal. Essai theologique (Desclee de Brouwer, 196112), p.27; St Augustine, De natura boni, 4:4.

6 Despite the weak conclusions it draws, we recommend the simple and clear summary of the various systems given by Charles Werner (Le Probteme du mal dans la pensee humaine [Payot, Paris 1944]), 126 pp. The brilliant essay by Etienne Borne, Le Probteme du mal (PUF, Paris 1958/1), 119 pp., contains relevant historical information, on the views of the optimists especially.

7 Borne, op. cit., p.67. 8 1st Ennead 8:15 and 3rd Ennead2:17, cited by Journet, op. cit., p.21, n.1 and 2. 9 The personal views of Charles Werner fall in this area. Evil comes out of the

dissociation in creatures between (material) desire and intelligence. The submission of desire to intelligence demands a lengthy period of evolution. This need, along with the given dissociation, constitutes a second metaphysical principle, the cause of evil.

10 Sin (from Dutch, ET by Philip C. Holtrop [Eerdmans, Grand Rapids 1971]), p. 70. 11 cp. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Hindouisme et bouddhisme, French tr. (collection

Idees, Gallimard 1949/1), pp.69ff., thus on p.69: 'Buddhism seems to differ quite a lot from the Brahmanism out of which it came if one only studies it superficially; yet the deeper the reading, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between the two or to say in which respect, if any, Buddhism is not actually orthodox.'

12 Within the scope of this work it is not possible to enter the debate over the views of the 'new philosophers', a rather fiery debate as one can well imagine. What one can say briefly of these views is that they manifest striking foundational and formal insights and so provide rich soil for Christian reflection, despite the frivolity of their speculative acrobatics and gnostic temptations. The work closest to our subject would be that of Philippe Nemo, Job et l'exces du mal (Grasset, Paris 1979), 247 pp. The excess of evil, the beyond therein revealed in comparison with every technical solution (and so the breach made in the world), awakens the soul. It is the intention of Intention which then allows us to discover the good, the Father outside of the world, who is a soul related to our own and to every weakness--for us, it is nothing other than the inexplicable confusion of the excess of good and evil' (p.194). Against Nemo (and his friends), we would first like to argue that evil is nothing but disorder, defection, and perversion of a good norm, violation and corruption of the just law. Without this reference, the word no longer has any sense, a dead leaf blown about by every wind.

13 For what follows, see Claude Tresmontant, Introduction a la theologie chretienne (Seuil, Paris 1974), pp.683 ff., and the admirable work by Georges Friedmann, Leibniz et Spinoza (collection Idees, Gallimard, new ed. 1962), 444 pp.

14 Werner Post, 'The Problem of Evil', in Concilium, 56, June 1970, p.96, n.2. 15 Friedmann, op. cit., p.32. 16 Tresmontant, op. cit., pp.685, 694; also 688. 17 Teilhard goes as far as to say that 'truly the Christ saves--but shouldn't one

immediately add that he, at the same time, is saved by Evolution?' (Le Christique, [1955), last work completed by Teilhard before his death) in vol.13 of his Oeuvres (Seuil, Paris 1976), p.107-the same symmetry: 'One could say that Evolution saves the Christ ... the Christ saves Evolution ... ', Introduction a la vie chretienne, (1944), in vol.10 (Seuil, Paris 1969), p.184.

18 Le Phenomene humain, vol.l of his Oeuvres (Seuil, Paris 1955), p.327. 19 Introduction a la vie chretienne, p.183 (cp. p.156in the same vo1.10).

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20 Le Milieudivin (as early as 1926--7), vol.4 of his Oeuvres (Seuil, Paris 1957). 21 cp. the second and third of the Trois Histoires comme Benson (1916), in vol.12 of

his Oeuvres and in the volume Hymne de I'Univers (Seuil, Paris 1961), pp.4S-56; and also in 1955 in le Christique, p.109: 'It is the eucharistic mystery itself which extends to infinity in an observable universal "transubstantiation".' cp. Le Milieu divin, p.150f.

22 Esquisse d'un Univers Personnel (1936) in vol.6 of his Oeuvres (Seuil, Paris 1962), p.73.

23 Note sur quelques representations historiques possibles du Peche originel (1922), in vol.lO, p.69.

24 Chute, Redemption et Geocentrie (1920), in vol.lO, p.53. 25 Lechristevoluteur (1942), in vol.lO, p.175. 26 Le Phenomene humain, p.347. 27 Notesurles modes de /'action divine dons /'Univers (1920), in vol.lO, p.43. 28 ibid., p.44. 29 Christologieet Evolution (1933), in vol.lO, p.103n. 30 In his Lettres a Leontine Zanta (Desclee de Brouwer, Paris 1965), p.129, for

example, he exclaims: 'Little by little all is transformed, ethics merges with physics .. .',a citation noted by Jacques Maritain, Le Paysan de la Garonne (Desclee de Brouwer, Paris 1966), p.182.

31 For example, in Reflexions sur le peche originel (1947), vol.lO, p.227: 'Statistically ... it is absolutely "fatal" .. .';Le Coeur de la Matiere (1950), vol.13, p.62.

32 Notes sur les modes de /'action divine, p.42, n.4. 33 ibid., p.43. 34 The explanation is clear in numerous places, indeed already in the appendix on evil

in the Phenomene humain. On the other hand, Teilhard scarcely discusses the initial arising of the Nothingness-Many, except in Comment je vois (1948), published in vol.11 of his Oeuvres, and partially reproduced, with comments, by Georges Crespy, La Pensee Theologique de Teilhard de Chardin (Editions Universitaires, Paris 1961), pp.l13-22.

35 Le Milieu divin, p.89 (cp. the whole section). 36 ibid., p.92f., and again in Le Coeurde la Matiere, p.63. 37 Esquissed'un Univers Personnel, pp.107ff. 38 In Crespy, op. cit., p.231. 39 Esquisse, p.lll. 40 Le Phenomene humain, p.342. 41 ibid., p.285. 42 Esquisse, p.99. 43 One can follow the laborious debate Teilhard has with himself in the final section of

La Place de /'Homme dons la nature. Le Groupe zoologique humain (Union Generale d'Editions 1962, Albin Michel1956), pp.160-9. G. Crespy, pp.100-5, in order not to impute to Teilhard the idea of optimism as a scientific thesis but merely as the hope of faith in Christ, relies on a text from 1948, recognizing that the earlier Le Phenomene humain 'doesn't yet provide all the desired clarity'. Crespy neglects Le Groupe zoologique humain, upon which we rely (as already in our article 'La Vision cosmique de Teilhard de Chardin', Chantiers, 49, Winter 1966, p.22), which is from 1949 and speaks the most 'scientific' language possible. In 1955, Teilhard, beginning from the form of the Cosmogenesis, judges 'that it is necessarily in the senses where it coils back upon itself (and not in the inverse direction) that the universe takes on consistency' ... (Le Christique, p.101). Teilhard's faith and his view of the phenomenon intimately interpenetrate (herein lies the soul of his work). If he distinguishes them at times, it is only a matter of linguistic precaution so that scientists do not reproach him for too hastily imposing his Christ on them.

44 LaPlacedel'Homme,p.142f. 45 Passages cited by Jean-Marie Domenach, in Esprit, 326, March 1964, p.327. 46 Commentje vois, in Crespy, p.121.

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47 For an expansion of this critique, see our 'La Vision mystique de Teilhard de Chardin', in Chantiers, 50, Spring 1966, esp. pp.20-5.

48 We think, for example, of the Anglican, E.L. Mascall (High Church tendency, brilliant polemicist against reductionist modernism). The pastor, Henry Chavannes, and the American evangelical theologian, Norman L. Geisler, have Thomistic philosophical positions but we have not read anything from them on the problem of evil.

49 Ch. Journet, op. cit., pp.31ff., presents the patristic testimonies in this sense, in particular those of Origen (ouden esti), Athanasius, Basil (neither hypostasis nor ousia), and Gregory of N yssa, preceding Augustine.

50 L'Esprit de la philosophie medievale (J. Vrin, Paris 1932), vol.l, p.119. 51 Summa Theologica, treatise on Creation, la, qu.48, arts 2, 3, 5. 52 Ch. Joumet, op. cit., p.44, criticizes this sort of confusion in the German thinker's

ideas. One notes, however, that Gilson, op. cit., p.l16, in explaining Augustine's thought seems to admit that 'the less good, in one sense, is evil' (he is referring only to inequalities relative to creation).

54 De Bergson a Thomas d'Aquin. Essais de Metaphysique et de Morale (Hartmann, Paris 1947), p.295.

55 Le Mal, p.l65. 56 J. Maritain, op. cit., p.280; same image in Gilson, op. cit., p.l24. 57 Doctrinal note in the cited treatise of the Summa (ed. of 'La Revue des Jeunes',

Desclee, Paris-Toumai-Rome 1927). 58 la, qu.48, art.2; cp. qu.49, art.2. 59 Maritain, op. cit., p.274; Joumet, op. cit., p.280f. 60 Note in edition of treatise cited, p.218 (the italics are those of Sertillanges). 61 la, qu.48, art.2. 62 L'Esprit de la phi/os., p.l20. 63 J. Maritain, op. cit., p.274. 64 ibid., p.275. 65 ibid., p.277. 66 Ch. Journet, op. cit., p.160; cp. p.87. 67 ibid., p.161. 68 ibid., pp.56f., 201, 240f.; cp. St Thomas, la, qu.48, arts 5, 6, esp. pp.l5lff. of

edition cited. 69 J. Maritain, op. cit., pp.278, 282. 70 Ch. Journet, op. cit., p.87; cp. the following pages, including part of p.90. 71 ibid.' p.l60. 72 ibid., p.306. 73 Maritain, op. cit., pp.282-98; Maritain is commenting on De Malo 1:3, to which the

corresponding part of the Summa Theologica (la) is qu.49, art.l. Gilson, op. cit., pp.264ff., n.25, refers to the same passage, and Joumet briefly, p.76.

74 J. Maritain, op. cit., pp.284ff. 75 ibid., p.285. 76 ibid., p.287. 77 ibid.' p.288. 78 ibid., p.293. 79 ibid.' p.298. 80 ibid.' p.300. 81 Ch. Joumet, op. cit., pp.88f., 176f. 82 cp. our study 'La foi et la tentation du neant', in Pour une Reforme permanente

(Rencontres Protestantes 1973; Societe Evangelique de Geneve, Geneva), p.28. 83 Cited by Henri Marrou, Saint Augustin et l'augustinisme (collection Maitres

spirituels, Seuil 1955), p.l41, and translated by him in this way: 'All these things are Yours, and they are good because they have been created by You who are Good. There is nothing of us in them except the sin in which, despising order, we love instead of You what comes from You.'

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84 As heirs of the Reformation, we suspect a slip into this underestimation of evil when Gilson polemicizes against the idea of 'corrupted nature' (p.I26: Luther, Calvin, Jansenius) and then affirms that nature remains unaltered, p.l28f.

85 Again, Joumet doesn't seem to have plumbed the unfathomable wickedness of sin when he affirms that the sinner always desires good (but is then diverted from his final goal), p.82. Yet is the good desired in the suicidal bitterness of hate against God? Perhaps-if one conceives of the sinner doing it in order to affirm himself (is this the most profound reason, however?). In any case, the negative analysis still holds. Note that the great orthodox dogmatician, H. Bavinck, also subscribes to it, according to Berkouwer (Sin, pp.63f.).

86 Thomism tends to treat, rather surreptitiously, essences as norms; but this vestige of Platonism is not indispensable.

87 Soren Kierkegaard, Discours chretiens (French tr. by P-H. Tisseau [Delachaux et Niestle, Paris-Neuchatel, 1952)), p.lOl.

88 Note that no biblical text says, strictly speaking, that God changes evil into good. Genesis 50:20 reads literally: 'you had thought evil, but God has thought it for good .. .'Just a nuance?

89 Summa Theo/ogica, treatise and edition cited, p.277. 90 Job et l'exces du mal, p.28.

24

Christian Thought and the Problem of Evil HENRI BLOCHER translated by DUSTIN E. ANDERSON, assisted by ROGER T. BECKWITH with footnotes translated by GERALD BRAy

Resume of the previous article

part II

In naive experience, evil is perceived as the unjustifiable reality, provoking indignation and entailing shame. How can it be understood? Pagan optimism, dualism, and pessimism slide around the difficulty. partially veiling experience and attempting to take the evil out of evil: the first, by minimizing evil as an optical illusion; the second, by transforming it into a pillar of a bipolar metaphysical order; the third, by submerging it into an absurd generalization. Christian thought has recognized that each of these attempts fails. Yet the most traditional of the Christian solutions has affinities with pagan optimism (that of Plotinus in particular). Leibniz and Teilhard de Chardin have erected versions so similar to this optimism that they are wide open to criticism. Thomism, on the other hand, offers a proven doctrine. Its analysis of evil as privation, as absence of an owed good, remains a valuable acquisition. Nevertheless, its attempts to rationally explain this privation run aground. They rest on a pagan idea of 'nothingness' (both real and effective) and on an equivocal notion of possibility. Making evil the ransom of the good aimed at by God, Thomism is unable to completely exonerate the Lord of his role in the affair.

The Solution of Independent Freedom The Greeks came up with the idea of political freedom, but it is the biblical message alone which has made us conscious of human freedom, of its dramatic grandeur at the crossroads of history, of its essential distinctiveness in the world. Because of this message, stress was laid on the person-the Church Fathers, for example, came to increasingly stress free will the more they fought against the cosmic fatalism of late antiquity. The doctrine of the good creation of God, himself being absolutely good, also excludes the pagan notion of evil matter, for although the Fathers came under the influence of Nco-Platonism and made heavy concessions in explaining evil in terms of a 'nothingness', uncreated yet nevertheless(!) real, twin brother in a metaphysical sense to matter, 1 they be~~n by relating this evil back to the will. These conditions were so JOined to a second doctrine, one supposed to resolve the problem of the problems.

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The explanation in terms of freedom seems to be a Christian original. It rejects the excuse behind the idea of evil's necessity in the ~niver~ity order.. It av?i~s confusing evil with some metap~ysical mgred1ent of reality. It IS Immediately attractive to modern thmkers. It exists in numerous versions, some highly speculative, others more down to earth and popularly accessible, but there are three characteristics found throughout the range of different versions. First, evil is considered a possibility condition of freedom-there would be no sense in saying that a creature is free if it were not possible, a priori, for that creature to do evil. Second, the free choice of the personal agent, man or angel, cannot (for the advocates of this solution) be determined in advance by God. And third, since freedom is one of the highest, if not the highest value, God was justified in 'taking the risk' of creating free agents; he cannot be held responsible for the bad choices of these agents. At first glanc~, it seems that this doctrine, in explicating the 'evil of evil', does better justice to the goodness of God and of his works than does the doctrine of universal order, but it needs to be questioned more closely on the nature of the divine sovereignty.

We will first lay out several versions of this view rather distant from biblical orthodoxy, then others somewhat nearer, then those placing themselves under the Sola Scriptura. A critical analysis of the view will conclude the chapter.

The meonic freedom of Nicolas Berdiaeff The most exalted and explosive form, blazing and smoking, is without doubt that found in the work of Nicolas Berdiaeff (1874-1948). This Russian thinker, freed from Marxist influences, a 'theosophical Christian' as he classified himself,2 was dubbed the 'captive of freedom', 3 captivated by the passion and the cult of liberty! As he proclaims, without the slightest hesitation in his voice:

Freedom is the sole solution to the theodicy problem. The problem of evil constitutes the problem of freedom. If one does not understand freedom, one cannot grasp the irrational fact of the existence of evil in the divine world. 4

The irrational fact ... Berdiaeff polemicizes against the 'Euclidian' mentality and immediately qualifies the freedom he proclaims:

At the origin of the world there is an irrational freedom rooted in the depths of nothingness, an abyss out of which spring the dark torrents of life, the place containing all possibilities. ( ... )This irrational freedom begets evil as well as good.

This freedom is the 'source of evil'. Berdiaeff at times refers to it as 'meonic' because it springs out of nothingness, out of the paradoxical

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me o_n of the Greeks ('that which is n.ot', but of a sort of negation relattve only to that of the weak negatton particle me rather than to the. stro.ng ne~ation ouk):

7 The ~ntrepid thinker glories in his antmomtes. whtch he uses stmply to Illustrate the basic irrationality of the freedom he adores: 'I confess to being virtually a Manichean dualist. So. be i~. "The world" !s th~t which is evil ... ';yet in another place we ftnd: I confess to bemg vutually a pantheistic monist. The world is divine by nature, man is divine by nature·.~ With Berdiaeff it is no use quibbling over minor details!

. Even God boasts <;>f no mastery ov~r freedom. 'God is all-powerful wtth respect to bemg, but not With respect to nothingness. to freedom-that is why evil exists.'9 'As Berdiaeff never tires of repeating, the fundamental error is to regard God as the Creator of freedom:w The bard of the abyss knows who he is up against. According to him, Saint Augustine, when faced with Pelagian rationalism. 'renounced freedom'; and later 'Saint Thomas of Aquinas, in the final analysis, rejected freedom as well.' 11 In reproving these two doctors, Berdiaeff rejects the entire tradition concerning God's sovereignty, fully aware of the consequences of this rejection: 'The divine life is a tragedy.' 12 God's intention, in effect. stumbles over an adverse causality, absolutely independent of him. such that he is stymied by it.

As an expert on abysses, Berdiaeff nevertheless resists the vertiginous pull of despair. He knows how the tragedy will end and perceives that indomitable freedom, source of evil as well as good, is indispensable to the Sense of the World. 'Without darkness there is no li~ht. The good reveals itself and triumphs through the testing of evil.' 3 'The fall of the first Adam has a positive signification and a justification as a moment in the discovery of creativity, en route to the advent of Absolute-Man.' 14 The dramatic story moves from primitive, ambivalent freedom to divine freedom (that of man deified by the Christ) freedom for which 'evil no longer exists,' which opposes itself to domestic freedom. 15 In this way, despite the antinomies which effect even these propositions, Berdiaeff explains evil in terms of freedom.

Wilfred Monod-God at great cost If we strip away from Berdiaeffs solution the dark illusi~ns of Russian-style theosophy, we find ourselves not far from the vtews of the French pastor, Wilfred Monod. Monad, .figure-head of 'social Christianity', an orator inclined to lyric. e~aons, s~etc~ed out his views in a lecture given in 1904 before w1eldmg them m hts book, Le Probleme du bien (1934). God's omnipotenc:e must be excluded, in any case with respect to this world; 'God tnes but does not always succeed<16 Morally, God emerges stronger from th!s metaphysical diminution; divinity is, in effect, initially concetved as moral

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exi?ency-'God is the effort to transform reality'-rather than as Bemg and the cause of being. He even leaves direct charge over nature to a demiurge. 17 Monod's conviction is reinforced by relying on eschatology and Christology: the true God is the God 'who is ~oming' a.nd who will be omnipotent. His impotence reveals itself and 1ts meanmg on the cross of Golgotha, a demonstration of the suffering, imploring love which places itself at the mercy of the beloved. 111

Is Wilfred Monod still being read? His views bear striking similarities to the latest theological fashion, the American school of 'Process Theology'. Of course, in the work of those emulating philosopher-mathematician Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). tender eloquence has been replaced by metaphysical speculation and logical rigour while social messianism has been removed in favour of the cardinal theme of Process theology. that is, the divine immanence in the world, in evolving nature. In regard to God's connection with evil, however, the two are more or less the same.

At least with respect to his 'consistent' nature God is limited. In becoming, he progresses with the universe and cannot influence historical agents except through persuasion. Andre Gounelle compares him quite aptly to an orchestra conductor who cannot do all that he might want with his given instrumentalists but must, rather, work with their failings! 19 For Whitehead himself, the 'fundamental conceptual finality' of all temporal being comes from God. 'but with the indeterminations which will bring about the decisions appropriate to this being'. 20 Daniel Day Williams, in proposing that God is revealed through human love, attributes to him a limitation due to the freedom of others. bringing about suffering and exposure to risk. 21 David R. Griffin, in treating the theodicy issue ex professo, delivers a sort of theorem:

The entire real world will. of metaphysical necessity. be composed of beings endowed with a certain power of auto-determination, even vis-a-vis God, so that it is logically impossible for God to unilaterally impede all evil. 22

Without independence, there can be no reality :Eroper. This is the axiom upon which Griffin bases his assurance. 3 And the entire school of thought thinks in approximately the same way. 24

Faced with evil, God's impotence is excusable. He wishes, searches, tries, strives-he 'does his best'. Instead of reproach, he deserves sympathy, indeed pity. 25 Yet since it was the divine power of persuasion which first pulled the cosmos out of chaos, it can also be asked in what way God escapes culpability (for his imprudence, perhaps) in having allowed such a world to emerge. John Cobb and David Griffin analyze good as enjoyment and evil as that which blocks enjoyment, be it either discord or weakness (that is, triviality)

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when this weakness i<> unnecessary. Given these notions, they then conclude:

Leaving the finite domain in chaos when he could have stimulated it to become a world would have been in acquiescence to an unn~cess~ry ~eakness on God's part. In order to be loving or moral, God s obJeCtive must be to overcome unnecessary weakness while avoiding as much discord as possible.26

Apparently, God is justified in this because the sum of the enjoyments obtained through processive intensification prevails over the total sufferings so produced, or, in the absence of a sure prediction, at least because the game is worth the fight.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer On this side of the Atlantic it is the thought of Bonhoeffer regarding the 'weak God among us' which seems to take up and renew the Monodian paradox, shifting the accent from Golgotha to Geth· semane. Bonhoeffer hardly seeks to explain evil, yet his letters from prison are well-known, so much so that there is no need to treat them in detail. Let us note simply the double motivation behind the new theses which the theologian sketched out in his cell at Tegel and which he himself qualified as 'contestable' _27 Spiritually, Bonhoeffer is reacting against pagan piety, against the paganization of Christian piety. Whining and self-centred, this form of religion which disheartens him tries to exploit God, when actually Jesus calls us to follow him. Theologically, Bonhoeffer constructs a Lutheran version of Karl Barth's Christological concentration, holding that if the dualism of Law and Gospel, of God 'naked' and God 'revealed' is combined with the Barthian concentration, then the God who is identical with Jesus abrogates the God of traditional metaphysics just as the Gospel abrogates the Law. One can no longer think of God in other terms-he is The One who has totally renounced his power. 28

Bonhoeffer's intention in this is not to establish the independence of freedom nor to make it a last resort for theodicy. Yet his testimony, formulas, and prestige have been 'salvaged', as one knows, in the service of a secular and libertarian theology. One Dorothee Solie concludes her reflections on the identity of God in the world in this way:

If in the 19th century suffering was still the 'roc~ of_ athei~m' one can say in our age that nothing so manifests God as hts fat~ures m the world ( ... ) God is impotent and needs help ( ... ) he ~akes himself d~~endent on us ... The time has now come to do somethmg to help God.

The ethical vision of Immanuel Kant Paul Ricoeur, who certainly knows his stuff, says that the essence of the moral vision of the world and of evil is the 'mutual "explication"

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of evil in terms of freedom and of freedom in terms of evil'. 'Evil is an !nvention of f~eedol!'' and freedom 'is revealed in its profundity' .as capable of dtgressiOn, deviation subversion error'. 31' He qutte rightly sees in the prolongation of the Old Test~ment an example of this ethical vision of the world in the 'idea of a freedom entirely responsible _t<~ and c~>ntinually at the disposal of itself' as formulated by the rabbmtc Phansees. 31 One recognizes in this the doctrine of the two tendencies implanted by the Creator, the yetser hattob and the yetser hfira, between which the free will must constantly choose. And it is ~ant who, moyin~ beyond Augustine and Pelagius, brings this doctnne to perfection. 2 And since Kant sufficiently preserved the imprint of pietism in his work and sufficiently desired to defend Christian 'belief', it is only appropriate that we include him in this brief survey.

Kant specified the locus of evil. In spite of the hegemony exercized over his thought by the antinomy of understanding and sensibility, of Law and nature, Kant discerned that the sensible impulse is not in itself evil. Rather, evil comes from freedom. It is the free will's overthrowing of the hierarchy of its motives which deserves to be qualified as evil. The subversion of the order wherein personal interest and natural motive are subjected to the moral Law is that which merits one's indignation. Freedom itself continues to be conceived as the 'absolute spontaneity of free-will'; when it chooses evil, it does seem to reveal the Wilkur in its nature, the 'power of contraries' as Ricoeur puts it.33 Again, one is not far from the idea of evil as a possibility condition of freedom as such. Yet the theory of 'radical evil', developed along with the aforementioned ideas in the first part of Kant's Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793), introduces a different orientation.34 Kant asserts that within all humankind there is a penchant for evil which contradicts the ultimate aim of good. This commonplace of freedom, contracted by freedom, can not have come from any temporal event (for Kant there was no historical Fall)-it is inexplicable, its origin is inscrutable. Radical evil hovers like a shadow of mystery over the explanation in terms of freedom. Yet for all that it isn't some badly assimilated theological resolve, a dogmatic spatter which, as Goethe complained, might have soiled the philosopher's cloak. 35 The assurance Kant maintained of the free-will's capacity to overcome the evil penchant, of converting itself through its own resources, shows that he never actually departed from the 'moral vision of the world and of evil'.

It is not easy to find and designate original thinkers on evil who follow in the line of Kant. The work of Jean Nabert comes to mind, but Nabert avoided using Christian labels.36 Etienne Borne, whose brilliant essay eclipsed many others, attached himself to the Kantian tradition in his criticism of unifying 'wisdoms', in his reliance on the personalist Cogito which shatters the All, in the sense of exigency

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which calls upon faith beyond all knowledge, the faith that 'reason is right'. 37 But evil according to Borne is much more the evil of death than that of fault, much more metaphysical evil than disdain for the moral imperative.38

Kierkegaard What can one say of Kierkegaard? Isn't he considered the thinker concerning both sin and free choice? Didn't he sharpen the Kantian disjunction between knowledge and faith to the point of most glittering antithesis? Wasn't he, too, transfixed by the exigency of duty? Even when presenting the idea of the (teleological) suspension of the ethical, he does so in the name of an 'absolute duty towards God', who relativizes what is ordinarily called ethics. 39 Interpreting the connection between evil and freedom in Kierkegaard's work seems to us a task of the utmost delicacy. At first glance, the psychology in his Concept of Dread, in laying bate the 'real possibility of sin' found in the vertiginous dread of freedom,40 seems to follow directly along the line of explanation in tetms of independent freedom. Later, in his treatment of despair (which is sin, the sole sickness unto death), 'Anticlimax' (pseudonym for 'Christian') writes:

From whence comes despair? It comes from that connection wherein the synthesis (which is man) is related to itself because God, in making this connection of man, allows it as it were to escape from his hand, so that from now on it's up to this connection to guide itself. This connection is the spirit, the me, and therein lies the responsibility upon which every despair will always hinge ... 41

A me which escapes from God's hand seems to be an independent sort of existence, having in itself the power of evil. Yet Kierkegaard's unflagging insistence on a 'qualitative leap' when sin is at issue shows that things are not quite so simple. Kierkegaard detects the snare:

... sin represents itself as freedom without stooping to explain how this is so. To begin by turning freedom into a free-will (a move which is always false, cf. Leibniz) capable of choosing Good just as well as Evil is to render all explanation impossible from the start.

42

He is concerned in this section to speak against any idea of sin as necessary, as realization of the power of free-will. If so many people find this explanation plausible, it is only because 'thoughtlessness comes most naturally to most people', despite the work o~ Chrysippus, Cicero, Leibniz, to which Kierkegaard attach~s ~lms.el!, m denouncini: this 'empty argument', this 'hollow reasonmg , th1s lazy sophistry'. 3

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It is only after the_ qualitative leap, once sin has imposed itself._ t~at the d~ead of_ nothmgness 'appears as the preliminary cond1~1on wherem man ts pulled away from himself44-a bit of retrospection, on~ could s~y, without ~me having the right to proceed up~n .the log1cal path m the opposite direction. As for freedom itself, 1t 1s the formula which describes that state of myself when despair has been en_tire~y e_radicated', a _statement with Augustinian overtones: 'in onentmg 1tself towards ttself, in wanting to be itself, the me plu'!ges across its own transparence into the power which established it. '4:- Of course, Kierkegaard continued to treat the possibility of evil as a sort of preliminary reality and to make nothingness the correlative of freedom, but his intention is neither to glorify freedom's independence nor to dissipate the enigma of the surging up of evi I.

God's withdrawal There are many among the advocates of the solution in terms of freedom who would like to reconcile the independence of free-will with the omnipotence of God. They come together above all, in the vicinity of orthodoxy, for reasons which are easy enough to guess. The mediating idea seems fairly to glow: it is that of the voluntary withdrawal of God, of divine self-limitation. God could determine all that occurs, but doesn't. He freely steps aside so that his creature might be itself, indeed that his free creature might be free.

The Cabbala, with its sentiment for paradox, approached this idea under the name of zimzoum.46 The 'neo-orthodox' dogmatician, Emil Brunner, evokes the idea of kenosis and says without beating around the bush:

The maximum of the limitation which God imposes on himself constitutes the maximum of real being enjoyed vis-a-vis him, the free vis-a-vis which in freedom responds to the word of the creator ( ... ) From now on we represent at which point God consented to limit himself and divest himself in order to achieve this end, in order to realize it with respect to a creature who, in defying God, then abuses its freedom as creature.47

Fran~ois Laplantine abandons the neo-Calvinism from which he had drawn a large part of his inspiration to conclude in rather typical fashion:

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God did not create robots, puppets, or marionettes, but free human beings, free even to reject Him, to say no to him, to put him on the Cross. And so they did, but only because the God of Jesus Christ is not a despot, a monarch, a sovereign of unlimited powers. The God of Jesus Christ pulls back from creation,. renouncing the immediate consummation of man and the world m order to allow man the freedom to project himself and so .m,::.ke history. The unconsummated state of the world is the cause of evil.


These are ha~dly i~olated examples.49 In the evangelical ranks, two fam<?us .apolog1st~ d1screetly r~s~m to the same idea. Clive Staples Le':"t.s, m the m1dst of. descn~mg with accuracy and finesse the dehc1ous rapture at God s handmg over of Paradise finds there the possibility of sin, that is, 'the mere existence of a "~e" the simple fact. of saying "I", i~ply from the beginning the' danger of self-Idolatry'. He calls thts fact 'the "weak point" in the notion itself of creation, the risk which God apparently judged was right to take.'5° Francis Schaeffer, stretching the Reformed tradition out of which he came, presents as a solution to the problem of evil the fact that God 'created man as an undetermined person', as a man 'who could choose to obey God's commandment and so Jove Him or else choose to revolt against Him'. 51 Stephen T. Davis, critic that he is of process theology. also manages to speak of the 'risk' which God knowingly took in creating this world. He admits that 'God potentially controls all events but does not do so actually'. 52 This reconciliation of God's omnipotence (or lordship) with the existence of evil. primarily moral evil since physical evil is only a consequence, seems to have a rather broad-based following.

Evaluation Let us raise our flag without timidity. In our opinion, the efforts to resolve the problem of evil by appealing to freedom fail. Our criticism, however, must first pick out the strong points of the propositions we have reviewed. The majority of them involve at least the denunciation of any metaphysical interpretation of evil.53 They refuse to make evil a necessity. They preserve the antithesis between Good and Evil without trying to salvage the dissonance in the good name of the symphony. They thus respect the truth of the view that evil is inexcusable and unjustifiable. If moral evil is the unjust (ungrateful, senseless ... ) response to the Creator and if freedom in the creature is the power of response, ideas which we do ratify, then one must well conclude that evil comes via this created freedom. Scripture first and foremost links evil to the will, to the heart (the faculty of choice). The prophets in particular implicate freedom:

When I called, you did not answer. When I spoke. you did not listen; But you did what was evil in my eyes, And chose what I did not delight in.

(Isaiah 65:12, repeated in the 3rd person in 66:4)

Zechariah sums up his message in much the s~me way (Zech. 7:llf.) while Jesus himself strongly confirms the tdea:.he ~aments over Jerusalem's evil will (Mt. 23:37) and, above all, pmpo~nt.s the heart as the exclusive source of moral evil (Mt. 15:10-20), sm ts the

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evil, that which renders man subject to physical evils, which makes him vulnerable in the world (Gen. 3:16-19; Rom. 5:12). In the end, despite !he appa~ent conflict with several passages, we beli~v~ that the thes1s accordmg to which God is never the author of evtl ts the biblical o~e. Go~ neither c~u~s evil in any direct manner n~r do~s. he produce It of htmself. Evil ts defined in terms of the d1sposttton contrary to God, in terms of dissimilarity with him, and God is in no way compl~cent towards it. Over against pagan and paganized ideas on the subject, the 'ethical vision' of evil and the doctrines derived from it evidence a priceless lucidity.

Yet such praise does not extend to the other points ... Let us begin by looking at the attempt to safeguard God's omnipotence by appealing to the idea of his self-limitation. It must be pointed out that if God really wants the free-will to operate without him, he must withdraw himself from an enormous sphere of influence. It is, mind you, the entire history of the world which our freedoms shape according to their choices (if, for instance, Cleopatra had opted for plastic surgery. the face of the world would have been changed). Or perhaps God simply doesn't interfere and no longer controls anything of importance; or perhaps he arranges to limit the consequences of these choices, no longer playing 'the game' but reducing the drama of freedom to an unimportant superficiality. It is rare to find a theologian advocating this withdrawal position who actually denotes the necessary extent of this withdrawal. And what gives them the right to speak at all of some free self-limitation on God's part? The entire logic of their argumentation shows that God cannot determine freedom (as they conceive of it). He can, of course, constrain and suppress it, but he cannot determine the free act as such, even if he wanted to. There is something law-like in it which is imposed on God, a necessity which obliges him to limit himself. 54 But isn't this law just another expression of the divine nature, similar to the impossibility of God's lying or to his making of square circles? There seems no reason to suppose so, and indeed it is significant that in other places one speaks of withdrawal and self-limitation in ways which assume these words do not bring to mind the absurdity of square circles. The result of this has been that the most consistent thinkers of the group are also the least orthodox, the ones who simply renounce the idea of divine omnipotence. From the start God must take into account a factor independent of him.

The false clarity of the idea of limitation, like the conviction that God made man a puppet whose choices are determined, depends on the most profound trait of the independent free-will defence, that is, that of anthropomorphism, or perhaps one might say 'cosmomorphism'. The relation of God to creatures is represented in a manner similar to that operative in combinations of earthly forces. One creature must pull back in order that another may take its place (each

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is metaphysic.ally ~xclusive o.f ~he others); any earthly force, physical or psychol~gical, m d~t~rmn~mg my choices destroys my freedom. And the actwn of God ts zmagmed along these same lines! One forgets what 'God' signifies. One ~orgets his infinite presence which penetrates every creature and IS the only thing keeping the creature from. i~~edi.ately vanishing into non-being (Ps. 104:29). One forgets that It 1s m h1m alone that every creature lives and moves and has its being, according to all the aspects of this being (Acts 17:28, cf. verse 25): One forgets the lor~ship of God, the meaning of his Name to wh1ch he cannot be unfaithful. One forgets that with respect to the Absolute o~e . must thin~ in absolute terms: independence with respect to h1m IS absolute mdependence, that is, by definition, a rival divinity-and the supposition of numerous divinities borders on incoherence. One forgets what 'God' signifies; one uses the term, but it is a ratiocination devoid of thought. A little god does his best but incurs the Tillichian reproach for calling on a God beyond himself, a God who transcends him and is worthy to be called God. Berdiaeff is the only one proud enough to indicate the mythologies which inspire him. 55 His is a glorious defeat even if it implies the fall of reason: a defeat because the enslavement to paganism is evident, but glorious because Berdiaeff takes account of the immensity involved in attributing independence to human free-will. He at least does not share the incredible myopia of those who take this attribution as if it were self-evident and posed no problems for the believing monotheist!

Criticism of anthropomorphism is based upon the biblical idea of God: 'the King of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God' (1 Tim. 1:17), Sovereign Lord (despotes, Acts 4:24, Jude 4, Rev. 6:10), Pantocrator, that is, 'Sovereign of unlimited powers' (found nine times in Revelation), to say nothing of the title 'Lord'. Of course, these titles do not contain the pejorative nuance which Laplantine attaches to them, nor do they justify the view of man as robot or marionette (let's not confuse the clever subtleties of redaction with the elements of demonstration). Yet it is not only the global vision, but also the particular givens of Scripture which work against the solution in terms of independent freedom. It is here that the decisive criterion is found. (As we shall return to these givens in our third study, we will content ourselves here with sketching out the major outlines). No part of Scripture suggests that God ever suspends the exercise of his sovereign power with respect to the least occurrence in the world. He who 'operates according to the counsel of his ~ill' not oQiy 'produces the will and the ability' in those who obey h1m, but also includes in his Plan the evil acts of those who transgress his preceptive wi II! The various texts declare this fact in a general fashion and demonstrate it in several specific cases-even those .attacks in which He is the ultimate target depend upon the decreed Will of God.

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No part of Scripture suggests that man's choice is independent or 'absolutely spontaneous' (cf. Prov. 21:1) nor that this is a necessary condition of his responsibility ( cf. Rom. 1:18-2: 16 ). No part of Scripture explains the appearance of evil by virtue of its being an original possibility condition of freedom. No part of Scripture teaches that the possibility of evil is the ineluctable ransom for the creation of free creatures. No part introduces the idea of some 'risk' taken by God.

Modern thinkers have allowed themselves to be taken in by the paradox of 'God's impotence', no doubt because they enjoy the flashiness of paradoxes and above all because they centre on Golgotha, Gethsemane, and 'kenosis'. 56 They do not take care in following this path to avoid being ambushed by old heresies. Even in Christology, kenotism is a pseudo-solution: the humiliation of the Son in 'the days of the flesh' does not abolish his role as sustainer of the world, the Christ comprehensor distinguished from the Christ viator.57 And most important for our subject-to mix up the Persons of the Trinity is to topple into the abyss of modalism. If the Son did not use his divine omnipotence during the life he simultaneously led as a true man, if he suffered and died as a man to fulfil the indispensable expiatory sacrifice, the same things can never be said of the Father. In Gethsemane, the Son renounces the natural human desire to avoid death in order to execute the Plan of the Father, who could have instead sent legions of angels to his defence. To think of the Cross as the impotence of God is to short-circuit the evidence. Apostolic preaching proclaims it rather as the triumph of God, following the wonderful detour dictated by his mysterious wisdom in realization of the plan fixed 'before the foundation of the world'. Not, it must be added, that one sees in this the virtue of paradox, but rather the shedding of blood in bringing about pardon.

So why does the 'solution in terms of independent freedom' enjoy such wide popularity? It does because it has germinated in a nicely prepared compost: its idea of freedom constitutes the major presupposition of humanism, the ideological consensus still in force today. The more or less conscious heirs of humanism might doubt whether there is freedom, but they are sure that if it exists, it requires independence and indeterminacy. And it is just a small step from this to situating the origin of evil in the power of freedom. Yet even with respect to freedom one cannot cover over conflicts with Scripture (and experience!). The glorification of free-will stumbles over all the attestations concerning the 'enslaved-will', to adopt a term used by Luther in retorting to the claim of the prince of humanists. 58 From Jeremiah to the Apostle Paul, the denunciation of evil desire is accompanied by pointing out the enslavement of sinful nature and the servitude of the flesh. Under these conditions, the hypothesis of a free-will conceived as independent, even before the advent of sin,

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turns out to be unrealistic. Kant wanted to take 'radical evil' into account, but as Laplantine saw so well he didn't sound out the true gravity of evil nor its wickedness; indeed, he was unable to reach the depths of biblical radicality by way of humanism. 59

Refuted by Scripture, the explanations of evil found in this second group of our classification scheme reveal yet other insufficiencies wh~n ~u?jected to more ~igorous. ~nalysis. They are incapable of ma1~tammg ~o th~ end their oppos1t1on to the metaphysical solutions (agam, Berd1ae~f s wor~ serves .here as a mirror generally reflecting that of the ent1re family). If, m effect, freedom is understood to essentially contain, from the beginning, the 'real possibility' of evil,60

then evil lies therein as a metaphysical fact, it receives an ontological status (as the me on) within creation. It is not for nothing that evil is actually necessary to the definition of freedom. At one stroke we have evil firmly integrated, by implication, in the ingredients of being.61 Or perhaps one accepts dualism or admits that God created the real possibility of evil. Suddenly God is culpable again (can one indeed call the creation entirely good?) and one must search for an excuse. The slippery slope towards the finely crafted excuse of the rationalists of our first group is unavoidable: God was right in creating potential evil because of the good for which it was the price. Such a fine thing is freedom! One ends up with a 'rational' justification of evil in supposing that evil must be actually possible for man to be free. Hasn't one thus removed the scandalous prick, once again taken the evil out of evil?

It is one thing to note that evil arises out of freedom, but any theory which inflates this truth into some explanation of, some solution to, the problem of evil is nothing but an optical illusion.

The Dialectical Solution The third realm of discourse used in Christianity to rationally account for evil distances itself more than the other two from everyday ways of thinking. Disconcerting, obscure due to blinding brilliance or impenetrable profundity, it has captured little of the crowd (despite its diluted presence in all areas of modern thought). The intellectual fanciers of speculation are easily tempted by it, they of quick wit and verbal acrobatics, too aware of the aggressive power of evil to accept the 'wise' discourse of the Thomists, too clear on the bonds of freedom, on the inane pretension of absolut.e ind.e~ndence to be content with the 'ethical' solution. For them, daalectlc as the answer.

The thinkers of this third type differ amof!g t~emselves, r::r~aps even more so than the advocates of the 'solutaons already cntlctzed, but there are two principal affirmations whi~h ~ey hold in common. First, evil is for them present from the .b~gmmng of the worl~ as a unified power opposed to Good. This evtlts often called. no.n-beu~g or nothingness--once again the me on-but a present reality ts ascnbed

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to it, either in God or along with God. In the Augustinian and Thomist tradition, the nothingness is not evil itself but is limited to rendering every creature fallible-actual failure occurs subsequently. Even in Berdiaeff, the abyss of nothingness engenders an ambivalent sort of fr~e~om. Here, however, nothingness is clearly the negative. Does th1s tmply another wearying toad of pessimism? On the contrary, changing the for to against, or rather the against to for brings about a conclusion of the most optimistic sort! And it is here that the second key proposition is found. Evil, or at least the confrontation it implies, plays a positive role. There is a certain 'fecundity' attached to the negative because it, in turn, must be denied and thus reality is set in motion, being escapes mortal stasis and experiences progress. This accent on the dynamism born of contradiction is what makes 'dialectical' thought. When the representatives of the other philosophical or theological families celebrate the dissonance sounded in the service of the symphony, considering the power to do evil a ransom of the greatest value. they still fall short of dialectical thought (in its modern sense). Due to the dialectic, it seems that one can push the idea of black realism a long way without sugar-coating the power of evil aggression and yet allow hope to rebound, to spring back in keeping with the Christian message.

We will distinguish between three versions of this idea according to the theme which appears to predominate. The posterity of Germanic mysticism is fascinated by the depth of the abyss; it feels most at ease in the area of Religionsphilosophie. The second tendency is Hegelian, that of the most dialectic dialectic, centered on the kenosis and the Cross of Christ; from this centre one reinterprets the doctrine of the Trinity. Karl Barth holds to a position somewhat apart from these two, being much more concerned to work within the dogmatic heritage of the Church; his dialectic is used to glorify the free grace of God in Jesus Christ. Because of the very way in which the dialectical solution is set up, our concluding evaluation of it can be put more briefly than was the case for the preceding types of explanation.

Jacob Boehme: The dialectic of the abyss The precursor, indeed the father of modern dialectic has been dubbed the 'philosophus teutonicus', though a shoemaker by trade: Jacob Boehme (1575-1624). He is the one who, with an abundance of crude metaphors, made the breakthrough. Earlier, in antiquity, Heraclitus and Empedocles had indeed meditated on the play of contraries, but they saw in this the secret of equilibrium, not of progress. Stimulated perhaps by gleanings from gnostic tradition, Boehme, that ingenious theosophist, received his revelation right in his workshop at Gorlitz: one Sunday morning while fixing a tin plate to the wall he noticed a 'lovely Jovian ray' shining on the dark floor at the back of the shop and came to realize that light exists only by

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means of ~he opposition of darkne~s.('2 The no necessary to the yes, the no wh1ch urges on the yes-the 1dea of dialectic was on its way! It was only fitting that Boehme's first book was entitled Aurora.

Boehme consolidated his i~tuition by looking within himself: 'the heavens, the earth, every bemg, and God himself lie at the heart of man'. 63 There he discovered the boil of contraries which was present in the beginning, in the primordial Ungrund. He then proceeds rather audaciously to write:

All things exist by yes or no. be they divine, diabolic, terrestrial or whatever one likes. The 'one' as yes is power and love. the truth of God and Go~ in person. But it cannot be recognized as such without the no, and Without the no there would be neither joy nor grandeur nor sensibility. M

As Bloch summarizes it, 'there is thus at the heart of God an evil, diabolical element; the flip side of the divine is the demonic .. .'65

Boehme justifies this antithesis. even in God, due to its fecundity: 'the one is always opposed to the other, not hostilely but in order that it might move and manifest itself'. (>6 Humanity, identified with Christ. changes the work of Lucifer to good, and in this way the various defections and revolts, the sins of Paradise and of Babel are also justified.67 Ernst Bloch describes how it all ends:

All then opens onto a pantheism which carries in itself the antagonism postulated by the dialectic, an antagonism transposed into the divine centre of nature ('centrum naturae') while awaiting the divine nature to abolish itself in the process of the seven abundant forces-fire being the first metamorphosis, man being the second and the quintessence of the seven cosmic forces-and along with it the world's suffering rooted in desire with all its qualities ('Qualitaten'). In this way there is reconciliation in the end. a return to the one, and the suppression of all dissension. llll

Hope in a perfect reconciliation often accompanies the dialectic faith.

Paul Tillich The German Romantics plunged with delight into the obscurity of the Boehmian Ungrund, among them Schelling (1775-1854), the brilliant younger contemporary of Hegel and man of the two-fold philosophical career (before and after the grand Hegelian glory). It was on this same Schelling that a young Lutheran university student named Paul Tillich defended his doctoral thesis in 1911 in Germany. Paul Tillich seems to us to be the great thinker of our. ~ntury in the t~adition of Boehme and the dialectic of the abyss. Hts mfluence, havmg spread out across Europe in just the last twenty years, is reason enough for us to be interested in his views.

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. ~eing-itself is at ?nee theJoundation and the abyss of all beings, as Tilhch loves to re1terate. 6 Without doubt this formula has been thought out by playing upon twists of the German language, putting together the terms Grund and Abgrund, or with an even more Boehmian twist, Urgrund and Ungrund. Being-itself grounds what is, but transcends and so denies what is only finite. This can be said in another wa~, using Tillich's own words: 'being is essentially bound to non-being'; 0 'there cannot be a world without the dialectical participation of non-being in being'. 71 In effect, finitude is denied by the abyss insofar as it implies mixture with non-being, a new sort of me on.72 And since being-itself is not a being with a distinct existence, the polemical relation of being and non-being in the world must be said to be 'contained' in itself: 'being "embraces" itself and non-being. Being includes non-being "inside" itself as that which is eternally present and eternally surmounted in the development of the divine life. m God (the other name of being-itself) then 'is the eternal process in which separation occurs and reunion surmounts it, '74 in which 'the demonical, the antidivine principle which nevertheless participates in the power of the divine'75 must be subdued.

The German-American theologian-philosopher did not have a mythomania nor was he a visionary of any radical sort. Why then the mythological resonances of his language? Tillich is consistent in his rejection of supranaturalism-if God is not being above the world and if the negative is felt in the world, God must be represented as struggling with this negative. Tillich opts above all for an ontology of power-being is power of being, which suggests that there is some resistance to overcome; 76 'we would not be able to even think "being" without a double negation: we must think being as the negation of the negation of being'. 77 Non-being is indeed that which must be denied, that which produces dread in the conscience, the dread with three faces like non-being itself: the dread of fate and death, the dread of the void and the absurd, the dread of guilt and damnation. 78 And if alienation (which Tillich incredulously analyzes as hybris, concupiscence) is distinguished from dreaded finitude, if the rupture with the foundation awaits the passage from essence to existence/9 it is 'inevitably linked' to the realization of self as finite freedom 80-'at this point the doctrine of creation is rejoined to that of the fall'. 81 Due to non-being, the existential divorce, mediated by freedom, is fatal. 82 The dialectic thus explains that which we call evil.

Little inclined to utopian talk, Tillich does not promise total Reconciliation as triumphally as his dialectician colleagues are ordinarily wont to do. He proclaims the New Being conqueror of alienation; he uses the symbol of the Kingdom of God, but he does not await a golden age in history nor anything beyond history-the thrust is rather to call forth, here and now, the courage to be. Despite the absurd, sin, and death, let's believe that meaning, acceptance,

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and life do prevail! The reversal of evil into good thus remains rather discrete. But _it c~n be I?e~ce~ved when one appreciates the c~urageous a~f1rmat10n of TIIhchmn valour (which couldn't happen wtthout confltct), and even more clearly when one considers the Model of the cou_rag~ to be, that i_s, the effort of being-itself 'in eternally overcommg tts own non-bemg' .113 In effect, 'it is non-being which turns God into a living God. Without the No which he in himself and in his creature must surmount, the Yes which God says to himself would be without life. 'x4 In Tillich as well one ends up with a justification of the negative by the good which its presence provokes; again, evil works for the affirmation of life.

Hegel: The dialectic of the cross Paul Tillich attaches the courage to be, the victory over alienation, to the symbols of Christianity-to the 'continual renunciation by the Jesus who is Jesus of the Jesus who is the Christ', as in the evangelical image, that is, to Jesus' self-negation in the service of God; and to justification by faith, which must be understood as the 'act of accepting that one is accepted without there being any person or thing doinf the accepting' during the night of doubt and absence of meaning.x. But given the evidence in Tillich's case this link is rather loose. 1111 Our second dialectical strain is wedded much closer to the themes of the biblical message. It looks for its inspiration to the Cross.

Hegel! His name dominates, overwhelms. He is 'our Plato', as Fran<;ois Chatelet expresses it, the one who determines the modern discussion just as Plato determined what constitutes philosophy. 87

We recoil before the 'terrifying' task of doing justice to the Hegelian system. xs But one cannot fail to see the role of evil at its centre. Each of us can recall with what disheartening pointlessness, to Hegel's taste

9 'the seriousness, pain, patience, and work of the negative' saves us. 8

The Spirit always denies and thus realizes itself-it opposes itself as Idea in setting up the finite; then in denying this negation it reconciles itself to itself, becoming infinite for itself to the extent of the plenitude of the concrete Universal. As Kojeve summarizes it, 'the source and origin of human reality is the Nothingness or the power of Negativity, which realizes and manifests itself only through the transformation of the given identity of being in creative contradiction to "dialectical" or historical becoming.'90 Hegel goes so far as to speak of the 'magical force' of the extended sojourn of the Spirit beside the NegativeY' The Negative includes what one would ordinarily call evil. Suffering and death-'the "dialectical" or anthropological philosophy of Hegel is, in the fi~~l analysis, a philosophy of death'. 92 Violence and war-the .recogn,ttt<:>n of persons demands a bloody struggle in which one must nsk ones hfe;

93 war:

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preserves the moral (sittliche) health of the peoples ... just as the movement of the wind keeps the water of the lake from stagnating ... for what is [as Man] negative--or-negator of by nature (which is Action), must remain negative--or-negator and must not become something fixed-and-stable (Festes).'14

All the passions which humiliate law and morality are the instruments of progress, hidden from the actors through the ruse of Reason.<J5 Hegel is able to distinguish the 'evil' of negativity in general as the obstinate particularity, rather than universality, of the natural will in choosing itself. Yet this evil itself is necessary, an inevitable historico-Iogical stage, and if it 'must not he', this means only that it must be gone beyond.'16 Not that Hegel allows himself to move in the direction of any superficial optimism-no such rosewater for him! 'No pessimist has ever painted a gloomier portrait of history than the one presented to us by Hegel. ( ... ) Having cleared the field of all morality and all Eudemonism . . . (he) accepts everything with his unshakeable faith in the rationality of the event. m Since the wound of evil is ontologically inevitable, since it is the condition for the growth of the Spirit, and since it will heal without leaving a scar, Hegel, who understands all, pardons all:

He thus pronounces the absolute ·yes' of the spirit's reconciliation to itself directly out of the action of history, henceforth absolutely understood because absolutely pardoned. This is the principle of the Hegelian theodicy in action.9x

Due to the negativity which moves the life of the Absolute, which encompasses all, there is a theodicy. As Papaioannov nicely puts it, 'the "calvary" of history will be at once theogony, theophany, and theodicy' _<J<J With this last term Hegel defines the work he is proposing and stresses that 'the evil in the universe, including moral evil, must be understood and the thinking spirit must reconcile itself with the negative.' 100

It was via a variety of routes, of course, that the (self-styled) 'Lutheran' philosopher arrived at his justification of God and of the World (the world being a phase of God). His reading of Fichte could have suggested to him the positive necessity of the negative-the Me sets itself up in opposing itself. The very lively sense of the decrepitude of all things and the influence of the Romantic entwining of life and death taught Hegel to see in the negative the secret of every life, not to mention the experience of the spirit's inquietude and the uprooting implied in the free act. One could demonstrate, we believe, that the suppression of every haughty and judicial insistence ('God is dead') depends ufton a dialectical conception, that is, one integrating contradiction. 1 1 Hegel was impressed by the nobility of the warrior's courage; he perceived the spiritual uplift involved in

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overcoming fear, the clear decision to expose oneself to supreme ?anger an? face death. Mo~e ~rofoundly, he presents the new mterpretatton of work as reahzatton of the self-his dialectic is an absolutization of a work whose God knows no Sabbath· 102 if there is joy only th~ough the trouble one has taken, then th~ negative is ~ec~ssa~y, 1~deed preferable a~d so justified. Yet the primary msp1rat1on of the former student m theology at the Stift in Tiibingen does seem :o have been ~~ristian, linked to the Gospel. It is the Concept ve1led by the rehg1ous Representation which he wishes to extract, that in Christianity which elevates religion to its culminating point. 1113 The alienation necessary for the spirit to accede to the concrete and so realize itself is a philosophical translation of the kenosis formulated in Philippians 2. The role of the negative operates on the level of a 'speculative Good Friday'-where else, other than in the GospeL does the most horrible crime give birth to the broadest reconciliation. a reconciliation brought about communally by the Spirit? There is no let-up in style when Hegel talks of history as the Calvary of the Absolute. One cannot imagine a more glorious theodicy-the entire tragedy is sal\'aged, its sign is reversed, and all from the starting point of the Cross!

Jiirgen Moltmann Jiirgen Moltmann. the Reformed dogmatician of ecumenical fame at Ti.ibingen, is today the one most strikingly bringing the Hegelian heritage to fruition. The multitude of references to Hegel in his major works attests to his extensive reading of the philosopher. Of course, he also often wears the glasses of the neo-Marxists, of Ernst Bloch and the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer). He supplements his work richly with other readings, taking for example from Jewish thinkers and Dr. Adrienne von Speyr of Basel. His recourse to the various potentialities in history, latent and expressed, gives his discourse a definite vitality-his idea of non-being mixed with being in creation. for example, awakens the ancient musings of the Greeks. 104 But first and foremost he is indebted to Hegel. Extolling the virtues of a Realdialektik, he himself has declared that it is his intention to 'bring the notion of paradox linked with Kierkegaard together with the most all-encompassing dialectic of Hegel and Marx'. 105

The Hegelian thread in Moltmann is brought. out star~ly in his views on evil. Already in his Theology of Hope, .h•~ bo~rowm~ of the expressions 'cross of the present', 'cross of reahty umversahzes the sense of Christ's pain and suffering. 106

• . .

In his The Crucified God, Moltmann eloquentl~-m our. opm.ton Moltmann is first of all an orator-lays out hts new dialectical theology for which the Crucified One is the 'criterion'. 107 Extrapolating from the cry of Jesus found in Mark, 'My God, my God, why hast

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thou forsaken me?', Moltmann remarks that 'the forsaken ness on the cross which separates the Son from the Father is an event in God himself, a dissension within God-"God versus God"-if one must furthermore maintain that Jesus testified to and lived the truth of God'. 108 Insisting on this dissension, he perceives 'an enmity manifested and surmounted in God himself, drawing from this the theological-Eolitical consequence that enmity ought to be abolished. u If God is love, this is due to an 'internal opposition in God' so that 'God surmounts himself'. 1111

The kenosis theme inspires Moltmann as do the remarkable Jewish speculations on the Shekinah (the Glory of YHWH). humiliated and dragging through the dust. 111 What can be more Hegelian than this description of the theology of the cross?

(Because] it sees the nothingness itself which is incorporated in the being of God revealing itself in the death of Jesus in the nothingness and establishing itself there, it converts the general impression of universal decrepitude into the perspective of hope in universal liberation. 112

Moltmann cites with approbation the preface of Phenomenology of the Spirit on the 'magical power' of the sojourn alongside the negative. 113 Such a theology must take exception to the traditional distinction between 'God in himself' and 'God for us'-'lt is not some divine nature separated from humans, but the human history of Christ which must become the "being" of God'. 114 The Trinity proceeds out of the cross, as in Hegel; one must not in any case think of it 'as if the Trinity existed as some preliminary prerequisite as such in the divine nature'. 115 'But what sense is there then in speaking of "God"? I think that the unity of the tense dialectical history of the Father, Son, and Spirit at the cross on Golgotha can-after the fact, so to speak-be designated as "God".' lit• Theism is overtaken due to the negation-'a trinitarian theology of the cross sees God in the negative and thus the negative in God and is, in this dialectical manner "panentheist".' This negative comprehends the most abominable evil: 'Auschwitz is also taken into God himself, that is, taken into the pain of the Father, into the sacrifice of the Son, and into the power of the Spirit'. 117

In this way Moltmann rejoins Hegel: 'We take part in the historical process of the God-Trinity.' 118

Regarding evil and its role, however, there are some significant differences between Hegel and Moltmann. Moltmann personally seems more sensible to the scandal of personal suffering. His passion for the theodicy problem is born of the experience of the great collective tragedies of our time.U9 He particularly stresses political evil, which for our generation has replaced cosmological evil in the

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foreground. 120 Yet he does not neglect evil's other forms such as neurosis, metaphysical meaninglessness, and death, for whi~h one is not comforted by t~e .thou~ht of some pleasing posterity. 121 He does not want to rest sahsfie? WI~h a speculative Good Friday but to move on from there t? the htston~al .Good Friday. 122 He basically rejects Hegel's panlog1sm and this IS why in his view no dialectical consolation for Maidanek and Hiroshima can be found. 123 It is not the necessity of cosmic Reason which appeases the tormented heart, but the proclam~tion. of a God who becomes himself in taking on evil through love. H1s bemg the only one capable of thus overcoming evil gives us hope.

To the extent to which Moltmann distances himself from Hegel, one does not find a distinct theodicy in his work. But because he continues to so often depend upon Hegelian modes of thought, 124

even in the general economy of his doctrine-for example, his conviction that without the negative there would be neither life nor love-and because he clearly ends up with a universal salvation, 125

we will consider Moltmann's theodicy a solution along Hegelian lines-blurred, broken off, but recognizable.

The dialectic of grace Karl Barth would have raised his eyebrows at finding himself placed in the company of this chapter. Paul Tillich? He has hardly any appreciation for him; Barthians and Tillichians in the United States do not get on well together. Hegel? Barth is the one who defined the Hegelian system as the greatest attempt (Versuch), but also the greatest temptation (Versuchung) for the Christian thinker. The dialectic which provides the current heading for the theology of the 'early' Barth, between the two wars, comes from Kierkegaard, implacable foe of Hegel. And yet ... Hans Urs von Balthasar thought he perceived in Barthian thought 'a sort of congeniality' with that of Hegel. 126 Even if the dialectic is original (which it is), it too furnishes a solution to the problem of evil. Our exposition will concentrate on this aspect of Barthian thought, taking for granted a general knowledge of the work of the greatest dogmatician of this century.

The name determines. Karl Barth directs the train of his reflections along the track leading to the goal by starting with a car~ful choice of terms. He principally designates evil as the . Not.hm~ness, das Nichtige. According to the translator, the word 1mphes m German 'the idea of noxiousness, of nuisance, of negative but active power'. 127 Our dictionaries stress rather connotations of vanity and futility. In any case, the name of Nothingness, c~rrently pre~erred to das Bose, indicates the adoption of an ontologtca~ perspectlve~the problem of evil is treated in terms of being, non-bemg, and negation. This characteristic merits close attention, because although it is characteristic of Barthian thought, it sometimes passes unnoticed

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under the surface of the biblical language used by the theologian. Barth, of course, does not stop with the theme of the Wholly-Other or with 'the infinite qualitative difference between time and eternity', metaphysical problems par excellence; but, as Henri Bouillard notes, the conception of the Dogmatics offers a striking 'parallelism' with 'that of Romerbrief, which it means to go beyond'. 12 At the outset of his doctrine of reconciliation, the centre which encompasses the whole, Barth defines salvation in a clearly ontological fashion-'the consummation of being', 'being in perfection through participation in the being of God'. 129 The message is summarized thus: 'Because he is God, he acts in his omnipotence in order to be in our place and in our favour the man we are not.' 130 Evil is thus first conceived as a certain negation of being.

These metaphysical notions refer back to the originary. From whence comes evil-the Nichtige for Karl Barth? The Basel theologian is too concerned with scriptural fidelity either to give evil the status of a second eternal principle or to make it proceed directly from God (by virtue of a phase of the divine life, perhaps as an element of the creation). With all desirable vigour he denounces the error which makes evil into a naturaigossibility of created freedom, an error which becomes an excuse. 1 1 And yet ... evil-nothingness cannot arise after the fact. It is not simply original (a result, after creation, of created freedom); it is originary, radically contemporary to created being itself. A new thought allows Barth to hold to this thesis. As he explains it, the divine yes which manifests the creating act necessarily contains a no. God 'says yes, but at the same time also says no to that which he does not approve', and this no causes to appear that which he denies. 132 In creation with his right hand (as Luther put it) God affirms and chooses his creature, but in the same breath he rejects and repudiates the chaos or nothingness, and this rejection 'with the left hand', 'also a powerfully determining action', establishes and grounds the reality of the nothingness. 133

Barth suffers no hesitation in repeating this:

The nothingness is what God does not want. It exists only because God does not want it. But it does exist due to this fact. For like his desire, God's non-desire is efficacious, and from this it follows that it cannot exist without there being anything real to which it corresponds. 134

One must not confuse the nothingness with the 'dark side' of creation as it is represented in the world of Genesis by the night and the sea. 135 This side participates in the goodness of the creature. Yet it is the side 'turned towards the nothingness', which 'confirms the nothingness' and so signifies the menace hovering over the creature due to the fact of the nothingness. The Devil and the demons concretize, in a way, the power of the nothingness-they 'exist' even

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though 'they participate neither in the being of God nor in that of the creature, celestial or terrestrial'; they are 'nothingness and so are not nothing'. 136 When creatures themselves commit evil they succumb to the nothingness. '

One discovers without difficulty the motive behind this Barthian concentration. Since the Christological concentration demands that everything be derived from the event of reconciliation, and since the covenant (of grace and salvation) is the 'internal foundation of creation', it is necessary to endow the work of the beginning with an analogous structure. In Jesus Christ, the yes of God, still accompanied by the no, is victorious; the free grace of God, still accompanied by judgment, triumphs over evil. It is only fitting that the creation, prelude and type of the reconciliation, also appear as a liberating conquest by defeating a very real adversary. One must also remember that in Barth sin is logically subsequent to the event (and to the law founded by the Gospel) by which it is abolished-just as it is with the nothingness with respect to creation. To ignore these reversals is to misunderstand Barth. For him, Jesus Christ is always primary (according, as he thinks, to Col. 1:18), even the primary transgressor in the eyes of God with respect to the judgment: 'Adam's being this man and indeed our being this man ourselves is true because of what occurred first in Jesus Christ, conforming to God's eternal decree and to the event at Golgotha. ' 137 The thesis is paradoxical, but far be it from Barth to shy away from paradox!

'Jesus is conqueror'-the glory of his victory demands both the recognition of the power of the enemy and the assurance that nothing remains of it. Yet for Barth this duality is in operation from the very beginning and is compressed into the same time period. Thus he continually oscillates between a solemn or vehement denunciation of the noxiousness of the nothingness, of the gravity of evil, and the proclamation of the Good News that the irruption of the nothingness is 'completely in vain in the eyes of God', a mere 'episode', that sin is 'overtaken in advance', 'liquidated for all eternity' ys It is 'only a limit which moves back and is blurred, only a fleeting shadow', and 'even though it is inevitable . . . it remains something completely provisional and transitory'. 139 Even in Jesus Christ himself this 'fleeting consistency' is removed; 'the permission in virtue of which the nothingness was able to be something is abrogated'.

140 .

'In regard to Jesus Christ, one can in no way say of the nothmgness ... that it must remain dreaded, that it continues ... to represent a danger and to provoke disasters'. 141

. . .

For each and every human, 'incredulity has be~o~e an obJective, real, ontological impossibility' a~d ~~ith has stmt!a.rly

1 be~ome a

necessity. 142 All men are already JUSttfted ~nd s~ncttfted. Thts truth 'is like the fixed stars of heaven shining mvanably above all the clouds produced by man' .143 These clouds only have a frightening

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efficacy when one considers humans in themselves-their deceit is a mortal danger . . . And here the dialectical pendulum swings back again, even if Barth is quick to assure us that the yes is ultimately victorious. This is why he never goes so far as to embrace the doctrine of the apokatastase (the final restoration of everyone), though he does approach it and guides his disciples in that direction. 144

Once the origin of evil is explained and its defeat affirmed, does Barth unveil his rational conclusiveness in order to perfect the solution? After the 'why' will we know the 'for what'? Barth sees the danger of the gnostic excuse and lucidly critiques the famous felix culpa. 145 But the association of the inevitable nothingness to the display of God's free grace as such is too narrowly linked for the Barthian dialectic not to end up as well with a theodicy. One important schematic passage (often overloooked) demonstrates with what secret assurance Barth knows how to unroll the logic of God's plan with respect to evil:

[God says yes to what he wants and no to what he doesn't want and] destines equally the object of his love and the sign of his glory to the heart of the world he created in order to be a witness to this double intention, that is, to attest to his yes and to his desire as well as to his no and to his non-desire( ... ) To do this even this man must be, in turn, truly confronted with what God has repudiated ... But one sees right off what this confrontation with what God has repudiated, that is, with evil, necessarily signifies for man, who is not God and is therefore not omnipotent: it signifies that he must measure himself against a power superior to him. This is why the victory over evil cannot have, for him, the undebatable character it has for God. This victory must become an event, must mark history, the history of a distress and its abolition ( ... ) Given the fact that God desires man, the chosen man, he desires this way of doing things; in other words, he desires the confrontation of man with the power of evil, he wants man to struggle with it and be pinned underneath it since he is not God ... he thus desires to be God in such a way that man is obliged to live exclusively on his grace. 14

"

Evil was thus necessary that grace might return: Quod erat demonstrandum. Despite his caution, Barth offers a dialectical solution to the problem just as much as the Hegelians do.

Evaluation The critique of this third type, the 'dialectical' type, of 'Christian' discourse on evil can be put more briefly than that of the preceding two. The tracts to which one objects can be seen quite clearly in the majority of the systems under review-their authors have chosen to stress as strong points what we consider weaknesses. It is significant that none of them subscribes to the orthodox doctrine of Scripture, not even Karl Barth, who is so attached to the texts. 147 The idea of a

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real no.n-being (noth!ngness) which is something other than the cor~uptwn or p~rver~u:_m ~f the acts of a creature has no scriptural basis, a fact which dismclmes one from seeing its logical obscurity (monstrosity) as being somehow profound.

Alan Richardson attributes the admiration which Tillich has excited in American readers, despite the desert-like aridity of the route taken, to the 'c~ntinual ambiguity' of his language: 'by means of a sort of hypnosis they are comforted by oases which are sometim.es only. mirage~·~ 14

x We admire in Tillich the synthesis of a great philosophical tradition, but we also note the evident Jack of any biblical concern. It is with a rather frightening serenity that he professes to 'an ecstatic or self-transcendent naturalism', 149 that he specifies in formulating his substitute for justification by faith the 'acceptance of being accepted without there being any person or any thing who accepts.' His spiritual family, as he well knows, is situated alongside gnosis, gnosis with all its mythologies.

Hegel's attempt represents a stronger temptation (there are Hegelians of the theological 'right'). His prowess is imposing and the will to be Christian, to wed his representations with those specifically Christian, is seductive. Yet Kojeve sees clearly the anthropo-theism which results.Iso And Jacques Maritain comments appropriately: 'Such an absolute immanentism is more pantheistic than ordinary pantheism'. LSI Evangelical theology must protest against the distortion which implies the confusing of the eternal trinitarian relations with creation and incarnation and of this latter with some mutation of the divine nature changed into its contrary. And what about the great find, the fusion of logic and life which is the dialectic? It seems, simply, to dry out life, to force the real through the rational mill, to even disguise it through the logical process. At the same time it breaks apart logic, handing it over to the arbitrary and to proof by pun. 1s2 Maritain calls it an instrument 'perfectly designed for dogmatic hoax'. ISJ The arbitrary once again resorts to identifying the negative with moral evil 1s4-in a beautiful piece of analysis, Paul Ricoeur shows that the passage from variability to tragedy under the common name of the negative 'is an optical illusion'. tss And if the Hegelian proceedings are not simply regarded as harmless illusions, the effects are rather of unspeakable horror-since there is no criterion which permits one ultimately to discern good and evil in history, then all that happens is essentially God's ~wn doin~, 1s6 the God who is realized as the universal State! Hegelts the 'thmker of ma&tery' par excellence, the father of the ~bo~inations of totalitarianism-Giucksmann is certainly right on thts pomt. 1s7

Two other criticisms deserve to be made of the Hegelian theodicy. First, one must protest against the travesty done .t? t~e noti?n of pardon in justifying crime by the progress of the Spm~, md~e~sAn the absolute suppression of the event as such by the dtalectlc. The

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biblical idea of pardon, on the contrary, implies the condemnation of sin but the restoration of a J!ersonal relationship in keeping with the repentance of the sinner. L Second, one must point out that one form of evil does not make it into Hegel's gigantic recuperation project-the evil which is truly evil. This 'evil' is the conscience's objection in saying no to the State, in pretending to judge for itself whether to obey God rather than men-this resistance to the Spirit's movement is the unpardonable sin. 160 The presence of an irrecoverable residue, of a truly hated evil is in itself only a symptom of failure (one finds it in other systems; those which dissolve evil in progress, hate, as true evil, immobility and fixation, for example), but for Hegel this true evil becomes the noblest sort of courage! Even if Hegel, more than other philosophers, did draw his inspiration from the Gospel, it only goes to demonstrate the old adage: corruptio optimi pessima. Even if Hegel had conceived of the perfect theodicy, it would be enough to cast suspicion on all theodicies ...

To the extent that Moltmann depends on Hegel, the criticisms we just sketched out apply equally to him. Where he distances himself, the question must be asked: hasn't he borrowed in to a part of the system at least? Aren't panlogism and the work of the negative two sides of the same idea? Moltmann definitely leaves too many ideas hanging in the air or lost in the fog. Where is his God? Who was he before assimilating the nothingness? 161 His 'panentheism'-Tillich was also attached to the term--cannot be admitted. 162 Moltmann, in very moving fashion, knows how to communicate the horror of evil, but his doctrinal construction suffers from fragility and too many equivocations. 163

Karl Barth, on the other hand, proceeds from a different authority and is not an accomplice in Hegelian 'justifications'. Without implicating the entire edifice of his dogmatic one must, however, deplore his sliding towards a pseudo-rational gnosis of evil. In his thought as well, evil is metaphysically necessary-doesn't indignation wither away at the very thought? George Tavard, with respect to the thesis concerning demons, well notes that the 'ontological explanation' undermines the Christian view of life. 164 The dialectical oscillation, despite the power of Barth ian oratory, ends up with a reciprocal neutralization of both proclaimed theses-Barth no longer convinces us to take the noxiousness of evil seriously, even if he does keep us from awaiting the apokatastase with absolute certainty. As for the explanation of the initial uprising of the evil-nothingness, what is this but academic jugglery? One tosses about words, but the idea of an 'eificacious non-desire' remains irremediably hollow. The doctrine of the evil-nothingness is a weak spot for which the Barthian construction is answerable. Perhaps it will give rise to a more global critique, one impossible to undertake here.

The dialectical solution to the problem of evil has the merit of

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pointing out the Lord's ability to bend the work of the wicked to his ow_n _ends,_ to employ it in th~ service of good, an ability seen most stnkmgly m the supremely wicked case of the crucifixion of the Son. But with respect to the problem posed, it is a pseudo-solution, a solution even more virulent in its (evil) apologizing than those invoking universal order and the independence of freedom.

to be continued

HENRI BLOCHER lectures in systematic theology at the Faculte Libre de Theologie Evangelique, Vaux-sur-Seine, France.

NOTES

Cf. our treatment of the Thomist doctrine (already outlined by Origen and defined by Augustine) in the first article, and especially the quotations from P. Sertillanges.

2 Esprit et Liberti. Essai de philosophie chretienne, trans. from Russian, Paris, 1933, p.23. Among those whom he puts in the same category Jakob Boehme stands out as his most admired spiritual ancestor.

3 Title of a book, dedicated to Berdiaeff, by Matthew Spinka, 1950. 4 Espritet Liberti, p.l77. 5 Ibid., p.323. 6 Ibid., p.l81. The abyss is Boehme's Ungrund, but Berdiaeff locates this outside

God, whereas Boehme locates it in God himself (which is why Boehme and Berdiaeff are treated separately here).

7 C. Journet, Le mal. Essai theologique (Paris, 1962), p.l08, mistakenly derives the word meonic from the Latin mea-!

8 Le sens de Ia creation. Un essai de justification de l'homme, Paris, 1955. 9 EspritetLiberte,p.i77.

10 C. Journet, op. cit., p.107. II Esprit et Liberti, p.l47. 12 Ibid .. p.l82. 13 Ibid. 14 Le sens de Ia creation, p.l95. 15 Ibid., pp.l95ff. 16 C. Werner, Le probleme du mal, Paris, 1944. 17 Ibid., pp.62-5. . . . . . 18 J. Bauberot. Un christianisme profane? Royaume de Dteu, SociDltsme et modermte

culturelle dans le periodique "Chretien Social" !'Avant Garde (1899-1911), Paris, 1978, pp.238ff. . . .

19 A. Gounelle, Dieu selon Ia Process Theology. Etudes Theologtques et Reltgteuses 55, 1980,pp.l97ff.

20 Process and Reality, London. 1929, p.317. 21 The Spirit and the Forms of Love, New York, 1968. 22 God, Power and Evil: A Process Theodicy, Philadelphia, 1976, pp.201ff. 23 S.T. Davis, God the Mad Scientist, Themelios, 5, p.21. 24 C. F. Henry. The Reality and Identity of God: A Critique of Process Theology, in

Christianity Today 13, 1969, p.582.

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25 S.T. Davis, op. cit., p.22. 26 Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition, Philadelphia, 1976, p. 71. 27 Resistance et soumission. Lettres et notes de captivite, Gencve, 1963, p.l77. 28 This way of putting it is devised in order to show that the divine weakness acquires

its meaning from the idea of a power denied or abrogated. The antinomy docs not cease being a link, which is why non-religious Christianity is not atheism.

29 La representation. Un essai de theologie apres Ia "mort de Dieu··, Paris, 1969. 30 Le conflit des interpretations. Essais d'hermeneutique, Paris, 1969, p.297. 31 The Symbolism of Evil, Boston, 1967. 32 Le conflit des interpretations, pp.297ff., 422ff. 33 Ibid., p.424. 34 Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, London, 1960. 35 Quoted by W. Post, Concilium 56, 1970, p.97. 36 F. Laplantine, Le philosophe etla violence, Paris, 1976. 37 Le probleme du mal, Paris, 1967. 38 Borne naturally inclines towards a metaphysical tragedy when he admits the

existence of a final conflict of moral values, with the good divided against itself, (pp.21, 92). This is why he praises suffering, not virtue.

39 Fear and Trembling, London, 1939. 40 The Concept of Dread, London, 1946. 41 On Despair, London, 1949. 42 The Concept of Dread, p.163. 43 Ibid., p.162. 44 Ibid., p.92. 45 On Despair, p.59. 46 C. Journet, Connaissance et inconnaissance de Dieu, Paris, 1943. 47 The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption, Church Dogmatics II,

Edinburgh, 1957. 48 Le philosophe etla violence, p.l97. 49 C. Bergot, Resurrection 60, Paris, 1979. 50 The Problem of Pain, London, 1943. 51 The God Who is There, London, 1968, p.103. 52 S.T. Davis, op. cit., p.22. 53 Schaeffer rightly insists on this, op. cit., p.l04. 54 A. Plantinga, God, Freedom and Evil, New York, 1974, p.147. 55 F. La plan tine, op. cit., p.l81. 56 One should add also the devaluation of authority, and a general resentment

against power as such, but we cannot develop these ideas here. 57 J. Maritain, De Ia grace et de /'humanite de Jesus, Paris, 1967. 58 Of course, Renaissance humanists are not the same as their modern counterparts!

Nevertheless it seems clear that Erasmus, who defended human freewill, was indeed the ancestor of modern humanism.

59 Le philosophe etla violence, p.126. 60 Kierkegaard's expression. 61 Both Kant and Kierkegaard suffer from a metaphysical antithesis which gets in the

way- reason and feeling in the first instance, time and eternity in the second. 62 E. Bloch, La philosophic de Ia Renaissance, Paris, 1974, p.79. 63 Ibid., p.85. 64 Ibid., p.95. 65 Ibid., p.86. 66 Ibid., p.87. 67 Ibid., p.93. 68 Ibid., p.94. 69 Systematic Theology/, Chicago, 1951, p.235. 70 Ibid., p.202. 71 lbid.,p.187.

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72 Ibid., p.253; II, 20. 73 Ibid., I. p.209. 74 Ibid., p.242. 75 The Courage to Be, p.46. 76 F.D. Wilhelmsen, The Metaphysic of Lave. 77 The Courage to Be, p.l75. 7!\ Ibid., p.48. 79 Systematic Theology/, pp.201ff. 80 Ibid., p.259. 81 Ibid., p.255. 82 Ibid .. p.202. S3 The Courage to Be, p.47. S4 Ibid., p.l76. 85 Systematic Theology/, p.l34; The Courage to Be, p.181. 86 A sign tha~ ~illich finally abandoned any belief that Christianity is superior to the

eastern rehg1ons. S7 Hegel, Paris, 196S. XX Cf. J. Brun, Hegel et Ia theologie, Hakhln41, 1976, pp.l-15. 89 Phenomenology of the Spirit. 90 A. Kojeve. Introduction a Ia lecture de Hegel, Paris, 1947, p.574. 91 Ibid., p.541. 92 Ibid., p.539. 93 Ibid., p.566. 94 Ibid., p.560. 95 Philosophy of History, pp. HXJff. 96 Philosophy of Right, London, 1942, p.l7l. 97 K. Papaioannou, in the introduction to the French edition, 1965. 98 D. Dubarle, Absolu et histoire dans Ia philosophic de Hegel, in Hegel et Ia

theologie cantemporaine, J. Leuba and C.J. Pinto de Oliveira edd., NeuchiiteiParis, 1977.

99 Philosophy of History, p.l7. 100 Ibid., p.100. 101 F. Chatelet, op. cit, pp.43-52, has brought out the dialectic between fulfilment

and denial in earlier philosophy. 102 J. Moltmann, Der Sinn der Arbeit, in Recht auf Arbeit, Sinn der Arbeit, Munchen,

1979, p.75. 103 Cf. J. -M. Palmier, Hegel. Essai sur Ia formation du systeme hegelien, Paris, 1968. 104 J. Moltmann, Resurrection as Hope, in Religion, Revolution and the Future, New

York, 1969, p.6l. 105 Quoted from G. Sauter, Gottesoffenbarung und Wahrheitsfrage, in Theologie de

/'Esperance II: Debats, Paris, 1973. 106 Theology of Hope, London, 1967, pp.88, 181, 182. 107 The Crucified God, London, 1974, p.ll. 108 Ibid., p.177. 109 Ibid., p.l78. 110 Ibid., p.220. Ill Ibid., p.233. 112 Ibid., p.248. 113 Ibid., p.293. 114 Ibid., p.276. 115 Ibid., p.283. 116 Ibid., p.285. 117 Ibid., p.323. 118 Ibid., p.295. 119 Ibid., p.7. 120 Ibid., p.100.

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121 On this point, see his reply to E. Bloch, appendixed to A Theologv o( Hope. 122 Theologie de /'Esperance II; Debuts, p.268. 123 Reply to Bloch, n.48. 124 Hope in Action, p.l9. This is Hegel's doctrine of necessity. 125 This reversal of the dialectic is quite frequent, without faith being given as the

necessary cause, cf. e.g. The Crucified God. p.l20. 126 H. Bouillard, Karl Barth, Parole de Dieu et existence humaine. Paris. 1957. 127 French edition of Church Dogmatics 1/1, p.l. Gcncvc. 1963. 128 Karl Barth, genese et evolution de Ia theologie dialectique. Paris. 1957. p.Dii. 129 Dogmatics IV, I. 130 Ibid. 131 Ibid. 132 Ibid .. III, 3. 133 Ibid. 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid. 136 Ibid. 137 Ibid., II, 2. 138 Ibid., IV, I. 139 Ibid., III, 3. 140 Ibid. 141 Ibid. 142 Ibid., IV, I. 143 Ibid., IV, 3. 144 Ibid. 145 Ibid., IV, 1. 146 Ibid. ,II, 2. 147 Hokhma, ll, 1979. 148 Le proces de Ia religion, Paris, 1967, p.51. 149 Reply in C.W. Kegley and R.W. Bretall edd., The Theology of Paul Tillich. New

York, 1952, p.34l. ISO op. cit., p.572. 151 La philosophic morale, examen historique el critique des grands systi!mes. Paris,

1960, p.236. 152 S. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, p.19. 153 Ibid., p.l75. 154 Ibid., p.21. 155 Negativite et affirmation originaire, in Histoire et Verift?, Paris, 1964. p.320. 156 J. Maritain, op. cit., p.244. 157 And before him, Jean Brun who is very clear-sighted and has revealed Hegel's

secret in his vast summaries of his work. 158 Cf. J. Maritain, op. cit., p.231 n.3, who quotes Hegel on this point. 159 C. -J. Pinto de Oliveira, Conclusion, Hegel etla theologie contemporaine. p.241. 160 Cf. J. Maritain, op. cit., p.207. 161 Cf. Hegel etla theologie contemporaine, p.224. 162 Of course, his etymology of the term would make it acceptable to orthodox

opinion. But both Tillich and Moltmann see in him a rejection of theism. 163 An example which would be ridiculous if it were not so pathetic; The Crucified

God is based on an interpretation of the cry 'Eli, Eli .. .' which Luke himself rejects, when Moltmann considers that the quotation of Ps 22 by the Crucified One is probably a post-Easter tradition!

164 Les Anges, Paris, 1971, p.236.

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Christian Thought and the Problem of Evil pa:rt o1 HENRI BLOCHER translated by DUSTIN E. ANDERSON, assisted by ROGER T. BECKWITH with footnotes translated by GERALD BRAY

Resume of the preceding articles Man experiences evil as the unjustifiable reality, a reality producing shame and indignation. He stumbles up against the question of the origin of evil, of its 'why?'. The attempts at an explication made by paganisms ancient and modern all come down to hushing up the evil of evil. Christian thought recognizes their ultimate failure. But do the solutions elaborated by the numerous and famous doctors of Christianity better resist criticism? Understanding evil in and through the idea of universal order as something necessarily attached to finitude (at least in terms of a possible preceding actualization) and as the ransom of the greater good involves too many equivocations to be satisfactory-the line taken by Leibniz, by Teilhard, or even by the Thomists cannot be followed. To define freedom as the power behind both evil and good, to explain the origin of evil in terms of the independence of free will, and to justify the risk implied in its existence by the worth of the freedom conceived in this way is to display a sort of myopia, to immerse oneself in a pseudo-solutionBerdiaeff holds up a magnified reflection of the thoughts of this family, a family broad enough to encompass F. Schaeffer along with the Process theologians, Kant, E. Brunner, and many others. Resolving the problem by means of the dialectic which makes ( originary) evil into a positive factor ends up more overtly with a justification of the horror-one must reject the dialectics of the abyss (Boehme, Tillich) as well as the dialectics involving some unnatural, distorted Good Friday (Hegel, Moltmann); even Karl Barth is a source of illusion when he speaks of the evil or 'nothingness' produced by the divine non-desire at the time of creation, a frightening evil but one already 'overcome in advance' and 'liquidated for all ~ternity'. In these three major efforts at a rational theodicy, our analysis has uncovered irremediable affinities with the myths and arguments of the pagans. Putting logic into action always tends to ascribe evil in some way to being and so render it more excusable for man while also imputing it to God if (and to the extent in which) being comes from and depends upon him.

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Scripture's view of evil and its origin The failure of the explanations of evil outlined and scrutinized in our previous ~tudies acc?rding to three fundamental types 'is reveal.e~' when the Ideas are drssected and confronted with experience. But 1t IS

Revelation itself which truly reveals--and with complete certainty! Scripture, the Word of God, the 'normative norm', alone permits making the distinction between those contributions which conform to it and those all too human false trails in the systems of thought. By its light we gratefully receive the fruit of the discernment of these other systems even if we do not actually follow them. We learn from the Thomists the privative nature of evil and its close relationship to the nothingness. From the evangelical apologists such as C. S. Lewis and F. Schaeffer especially we learn that evil is a fact of created freedom and cannot come from any other source. We voluntarily concede to the dialecticians that evil, supremely represented by the crime of Calvary, enters into the plan of God in the service of reconciliation. All of these aspects are true and attested to biblically. Yet the discussions which take hold of these truths, thinking to develop them and to ultimately find a reason for evil, all stumble over the rock of Scripture and are shipwrecked ... The first type of solution blunts the biblical hate of evil, of an evil irreducibly opposed to good, and does not clearly enough affirm the perfect goodness of all things created by God. We would say that it constitutes the temptation of the sage, of the royal sage, respectful of hierarchy, zealous of order, admirer of the balance of nature, concerned to integrate all 'accidents' into the political plan-the one, in short, who needs a thorn in the flesh in the form of a sharp prophetic reprimand. The second type of explanation, that in terms of freedom, can find an explanation of evil in freedom only by 'forgetting' the Lord's lordship as it is taught in the Bible. Perhaps this is the temptation of the prophet who must in effect implicate freedom and the heart. as the immediate source of evil and call for repentance-yet the biblical prophet always keeps in mind that he is announcing and denouncing in accordance with the t6ra of the covenant, that he is communicating the royal counsel of YHWH the King. The third type, the dialectical solution, once again and in more brutal fashion than the first type, attacks both the thoroughgoing goodness of God and of his work and the affirmation of the malignancy of evil. Can we detect in this the temptation .of the priest, the man accustomed by his link with sacrifice to the proptatory effects of innocent blood? The priest must understand, through the t6ra and prophecy, that no sacrifice operates in virtue of a dialectic of reversal and that only one sacrifice is. truly efficacious, that ~f the .L~mb of God who freely delivered htmself up for his own m ~lftlhng the justice of God. Over against these !hree temptatiOns Scn~ture makes the threefold affirmation of the evil of evil, of the soverergnty of the Lord, and of the goodness of God and his similarlY good creation.

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We will study these three affirmations in greater detail as forming the 'T', the crux, of biblical doctrine, looking at each one in tum. Then we will ask ourselves and Scripture about a possible combination, conciliation, or synthesis of these themes before concluding with some thoughts on the results obtained.

Theev.Urealltyofev.U Scripture never leaves off denouncing the reality and noxiousness of evil-evil is totally, radically, and absolutely eviL Well-meaning non-Christians become tired and annoyed at such insistence, from the third page of the Bible to the last, not to mention sometimes shocked at the horrible crudity of the painting-they see the abscess under the lamps of the surgeon. The biblical authors obey the exhortation of the apostle: 'Abhor what is evil' (Rom. 12:9).

With respect to sin, the 'capital' evil, the generally restrained Hebrew vocabulary suddenly displays an exceptional wealth. 1 The law, Paul explains, serves to reveal the hateful magnitude of transgression (GaL 3:19, Rom. 3:20, 5:20, 7:8ff., 13, etc.). The prophets, such as Micah (Mic. 3:8), at the risk of death but through the power of the Spirit unleash torrents of indignation against the heinous crimes of Israel. They are treated as trouble-makers (I Kings 18:17), but over against the demagogic false prophets it is their strange 'obsession' with evil, their uncompromising 'rigidity', their very intransigence (Elijah's discourse takes up two-thirds of the chapter!) which authenticate their ministry. Jesus, the Prophet, is definitely within this tradition-implacable with hypocrites, he unmasks the mortal infection of the heart disguised under a cloak of piety. From the day of Pentecost onward the preaching of the apostles is confrontational-it demands a turnabout in the fragmenting conduct of a perverse people and interprets the death of Christ primarily in its relation to sin. Even in John's Revelation with its hallucinating visions of evil, its deafening echo of the cries of evil and the cries against evil, the theme is sounded ... 2 How can anyone read the Bible yet take evil as an epiphenomenon?

With massive obstinacy Scripture holds to the antithesis between evil and good. There is no vertiginous dream of a fall to where the opposites somehow coincide as in virtually all the pagan versions. There is heavy resistance to the acrobatic seduction of paradoxical reversals. 'Woe to those who call evil good and good evil', says the prophet (Is. 5:20). With deliberate, pedagogical monotony, the contrast swings between obedience and sin, or to use the corresponding human categories, between the just and the wicked, the faithful and the ungodly, the humble and the proud, the wise and the foolish-this systematically developed contrast is an original tract of the biblical Proverbs in comparison to the products of Egyptian wisdom.3 Jesus certainly did not disdain its use (Mt. 7:24ff., also

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12:36, etc.). Even the final page of the.Bible affirms the mysterious necessi~y of. t~ese. contra~ies. to manifeat themselves as irreducible contranes-mJusttce and JUSttce, filthiness and holiness (Rev. 22:11 ). One recalls the reaction of the Apostle 8aul to the slander circulating under his name, to those who imputed to him the thesis of the 'fecundity of the negative', of evil as the source of good (Rom. 3:8). One recalls his readiness to explain that tbe·mortifying effect of the divine commandment came not from the commandment itself but from sin (Rom. 17:22ff.). Paul refuses to turn the antithesis into a dialectic .. Hostilely fac_ing t~e g?Odness of good is the unchal!e~geable mahgnancy of evil wh1ch stgnals the concentration of ev1l mto the Evil One, the Adversary, the Prince of darkness opposed to the God of light, 'the god of this age' (II Cor. 4:4), the Deceiver at war against the true God.

Nothing better demonstrates the evil reality of evil than God's anger against it and the eternal perdition of those who choose and remained attached to it. Judgment (the certainty of which dominates Paul's thought in Rom. 3:5ff.) and the expiatory efficacy needed to appease it prove to what extent God takes evil seriously-more thinkers ought to listen to Anselm's refrain in the Cur Deus Homo: 'You have not yet considered the weight of sin .. .' Even if evil is vanity ('awen) or the lack of good (privation) this does not lessen its weight, for evil borrows on the credit of creaturely goodness, diverts it from its end and turns it against its Creator-such is the weight of deception, the taking on of a disguised and perverted truth. Its abominable reality brings down the judgment of God.

Here, however, an initial complication brings us to a halt. Is the penalty to which condemnation subjects the guilty also an evil? There seems to be evidence for this view-the suffering and death which follow the fault as its payment in Genesis 3 are the evils themselves of which man complains, and Scripture ratifies this way of viewing the issue. With all due respect to Saint Francis of Assisi, death merits the title of the 'last enemy' (I Cor. 15:26). Pagan infiltrations (and perhaps mechanisms relevant to psychoanalysis) have become diffused throughout traditional Christian spirituality in the forms of dolorism and the asceticism of mortification for mortification's sake to which the Bible makes no reference (cf. Col. 2:2~3:11 to avoid any misunderstandings on this point). But the Bible clearly does not deem good loss, frustration, infirmity, illness, or persecution ('Flee ... ,' says Jesus in Mt. 10:23). The classical analysis of this seems to conform with Scripture-'physical evil' afflicts humanity as the consequence and penalty of sin (considered globally). Yet as the execution of God's judgment and the restoration of justice the infliction of penalty must be said to be a good. It is a good for God and is thus a good for the order of the world, for all creatures, and even for the one who receives it (the good of the creature is always to

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be in accordance with its Creator). The punished sinner sanctifies and glorifies the Lord and so attains the essential end of every human (Lev. 10:3, Ezek. 38:16), that which in effect all will confess at the last day (Phil. 2: lOf. taken from Is. 45:23}-this is why punishment does not exclude a universal 'reconciliation' but is rather included in it (Col. 1:20).4 Good and evil are combined here without the use of dialectic-the death of man is evil because God does not desire it, in the sense of Ezekiel18:32; but once sin has established itself, death becomes good through its connection with the satisfaction of justice.

Yet other texts come to mind. Don't they teach that sometimes evil, and not simply by virtue of its penalty, brings forth the fruits of blessing? Don't they again threaten the thesis of this completeness of malignancy? Aren't we to consider trials as 'counting for joy' (James 7:2)? Doesn't the apostle tell us to give thanks in all things (Eph. 5:20, I Thess. 5:18)? Jesus excludes the connection made by his disciples between the blindness of the man born blind and some particular sin and instead gives this infirmity, this physical evil, a positive significance-'that the works of God might be made manifest' (John 9:3). Moral evil itself seems capable of fortunate effects-the most striking example of this is perhaps that of the criminal actions of Joseph's brothers against him which God ultimately used for good (Gen. 50:20, cf. 45:8). In a more general fashion 'even the wrath of men' praises the Lord (Ps. 76:10). One more step it seems and we will rejoin the parade of those singing 'felix culpa' and praising harmonious dissonance along with the paradoxical fecundity of the negative!

Scripture, however, never goes this final step, never gives in to the temptation which so easily solicits our intelligence. Rather, it reproves and deplores sin even when God knows how to rectify the situation. If the wrath of man-a wrath which never fulfils God's justice (James 1:20}-comes in the end to be divine praise, it is in diverse ways and without any sugar-coating of the judgment involved. One finds this in the resounding failure of the wicked when he is ensnared in his own machinations (Ps. 9: 17, etc.) because such evil can indeed counter other such evil-the atrocities committed by the Babylonians, for example, purged Judah of the crimes committed by King Yoyaqim (cf. Hab. 1).5 One also notes this in the effects which can trickle down from the evil act, though not from the malignancy itself (such a distinction is possible here because evil always perverts a previously created goodness so that the malignancy of an act is based upon a function of creation). This last idea helps clarify the case of Joseph-his presence in Egypt is an effect of an evil act but it is not as such that it becomes salutory; it is not the evil of the action which engenders the good. The text (Gen. 50:20) nowhere indicates that the evil had been 'changed into' good, contrary to many translations, but only that God 'thought for good' that which the

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?rothers. of Joseph ~ad thought for evil. The story displays t~e mterventwn of God, m comprehending all the various events and m remedying the evils, as the sole source of the beneficent effects. In the. same way the evil of t~st~ng does not produce as such -~hristian pattence or endurance-thts ts rather the fruit of the Spint s work, the fruit of ~race in ~llowing one to stand firm. Scripture never giv~s thanks for sms or evtls as such, but rather in each case for the Lord s present help and for the sovereign direction he maintains over all that occurs. Evil comes to serve good only in spite of its malignancy, one form chasing out another; it only gives occasion to a 'greater grace' (James 4:6).

When an evil furnishes the occasion for God to manifest the supremacy of his wisdom and the power of his love, one presumes that he permitted it to this end. It is a good rule-Jesus' commentary on the man born blind authorizes it as do other biblical passages (for example, Rom. 9:17 on the hardening of Pharaoh's heart or Rom. 11:32 on the relation of disobedience to the two different human categories). Yet one goes beyond the teaching of the texts in believing one has found therein the ultimate explanation of evil. For in each and every case the evil is already present in the world-God simply channels it, orients it, breaks it down into its component expressions that these might serve his purposes. The permission granted which rationally justifies the end aimed for has to do only with the particular crystallizations, the faults and misfortunes, and the arrangement which God imposes on them. One extrapolates unduly in supposing some similarly taken decision as the first permission, the permission of evil. The significance is not at all the same. When evil-alas!-is already present and if God takes this hostile reality as an occasion to act and even as a means to punish and warn, this fact does nothing to attenuate the malignancy of evil nor does it insinuate in any way the idea of God's complicity; what is proclaimed rather is God's victory over evil. On the other hand, if God had permitted 'the' evil for his usage of it, the evil, counterpart to a good, would explain and excuse itself, at least in part. Rather than being horrified, we would have to undetstand that all works out for the better in the best of all possible worlds ... Scripture, if we read it closely, never follows this last route-it affirms that God, whose skill infinitely transcends the 'demonic' skill of his adversaries, knows how to play evil off and so reverse the stratagems of the enemy to serve his glory; yet he does this only in the capacity of riposte once evil has already been introduced.

No biblical given, carefully scrutinized, leads one to turn from the denunciation of malignancy. Logical rigour cannot be blunted in arguing that God makes use of evil and permits it in order to realize his ends, for good does not come out of evil as such and any linking of evil to the divine ends is not taught with respect to the initial

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permission, to the origin of evil. This evil remains totally, radically, and absolutely evil.

The universal sovereignty of the Lord Scripture never doubts God's mastery over every event, never doubts his determination of all that happens, both globally and in detailGod is totally, radically, and absolutely sovereign. Certain thinkers believe they have undermined this certitude by criticizing the translation of the divine name Shadday with the term 'All-Powerful' since the old Jewish interpretation she-day ('who-enough', the Suffient One, the Autarkic One) carried over the Greek (ho Hikanos, 'He who can') depends more on word-play than etymology. 6 Yet it is not upon this that the affirmation of sovereignty rests! We previously argued that this affirmation is derived from the notion of monotheism and not to see this is to fall victim to an indefensible anthropomorphism. We note chiefly the massive attestation of both Testaments to the effective government of the world by the Lord of (the cosmic) Hosts, the Master (despotes), the Pantocrator, the Lord of whom, by whom, and for whom all things are, to whom belongs forever and ever the kingdom, the power and the glory.

The multitude of spontaneous, rather accidental expressions of God's sovereignty eclipses the major proof-texts. Of course, one cannot minimize the weight of these latter texts-'Our God is in the heavens; he does whatever he pleases' (Ps. 115:3, cf. 135:6) contrasts the Lord with idols, and of course the gods of the Semitic world already have a much more 'volitional' aspect than those of the Greeks (note the wealth of volitional vocabulary concerning the 'masters', the Baals), highlighting even more the God of Israel's ridiculing of the Baals due to the efficacy and universality of his lordship (cf. also Ps. 103: 19). And the dogmatic theorem of the apostle leaves hardly a loophole: 'He works all things after the counsel of His will' (Eph. 1:11). But the constantly used language of biblical piety testifies to the fact with an even greater eloquence. The Creator does not content himself with fixing the times and assigning the places (Acts 17:26)-all that happens depends on his pleasure. He is the one who causes the sun to shine for all and the one who sends down or holds back the rain (in the Old Testament, it is said, 'God rains' replaces 'it rains'). It is God who clothes the grass of the field, who feeds the birds of the sky as well as the clamouring lion cub and all the animals in the vastness of the sea. It is God the Most-High, holder of domination, who makes and defeats kings, who raises up and puts down, who kills and brings to life, who opens and shuts the matrix ... The list of such familiar expressions in Scripture goes on and on. It goes without saying that God is related not only to the course of nature and the global march of history but also to the most particular

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events, to the fa~ilial misfortunes Of Naomi (Ruth 1:13, 20) as well as to the occupattonal or hunting accident in which the person involuntarily respon~ible escapes from the hand of the blood ay~nger (Ex. 21:13).' Jesus, m order to dem~ate that the divine sohcttude extends to the smallest facts (how much do our conceptions limit the Lord?), teaches that not one sparrow falls to the ground apart from our Father's will (Mt. 10:29). 8 Trust as well as prayer makes no sense except on this foundation. ·

The exercise of absolute sovereipty does not exclude the 'rel.ativ~' gam~ of secondary causes bu! o~ the contrary includes it and gtves tt conststency. As Jacques Mantam declares, 'The world is not a clock but a republic of natures, and it is in this way that the infallible, divine Causality, even though transcendent, makes events happen according to their proper conditions, necessary events necessarily, contingent events contingently, random events fortuitously'. 9 Given that 'transcendence' is no pretext for emptying 'causality' of meaning ('causality' being the seignorial determination within the strictly monarchical 'republic' of creation!), and given that chance does not take on the allure of being an independent factor, one could subscribe to this proposition. This is also what Calvin teaches-many things 'for us are fortuitous' or 'quasi-fortuitous', for they display no other appearance when considered in their nature or estimated according to our judgment and knowledge'. 10 Calvin also preserves the distinction between necessity and contingency in the modalities of realization of God's plan-the necessity that all occur according to the ordinance of God does not render any such event, certain though it is, 'specifically necessary or essentially necessary'. 11 Calvin throws the activity of secondary causes into relief. 12 He is thus in agreement with Scripture, which portrays the Lord unceasingly sending out and employing servants, servants with or without a soul, angels as fast as the wind, winds as docile as angels ... God operates through their means-he incites more often than he executes; he puts into play the laws, constants, stable properties and capacities, the 'natures' as Maritain calls them. This discernment wards off the spectre of fatalism and deters one from drawing any objection to the sovereignty of the Creator from the activity of his creatures.

Scripture also includes the decisions of free beings under the notion of divine sovereignty. Indeed, if the facts of this category are left out, what is left of history for God to govern? The sages recognize that the choice orienting the life of humans belongs to the Lord (Prov. 16:1, 9), and Jeremiah echoes the thought (Jer. 10:23). More precisely, they teach that God inclines the heart, the organ of freedom, as he pleases, even the heart of the king, the man free among all-it is like water in the hand which one swishes to one's liking back and forth (Prov. 21:1). It is in this way that God 'changed the heart' of the Egyptians with respect to Israel (Ps. 105:25). And so we find

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Ephraim imploring in Jeremiah's prophecy: 'Bring me back that I may be restored' (Jer. 31:18). The New Testament confirms that God gives the repentance and faith he ordains. As the apostle says, 'for God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure' (Phil. 2:13). An admirable formulation, blocking in advance any temptation to get around it-if Paul had used only 'to will', some people would have explained that 'man's part' is to carry out the impulse evoked by grace; if he had used only 'to work', some would have added, 'given that we first desire it'-Paul himself doesn't hesitate: 'to will and to work'! He can be even more brutally clear about it: 'So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy' (Rom. 9:16). To many this is a hard message; to others it is sweet and savoury ...

Objections to this do not spring from actual biblical difficulties but rather from a priori affirmations held as evidence. In the realm of the great anthropomorphical misunderstanding wherein the unique relation of the Creator is forgotten-'God is wholly other than an other', as the abbot J. Monchanin put it-one presupposes that if God infallibly determines, freedom is strangled and responsibility disappears. Yet the subjective (and collective!) conviction investing this presupposition does not replace the sanction of Scripture. No part of the Bible endorses this so-called 'evidence' of common sense. Of course our decisions are free (of a creaturely freedom); of course we are responsible-God does not treat us like marionettes. As Calvin exclaims, 'Who is so foolish to suppose the man is pushed about by God in the same way as we throw a rock? This certainly does not follow from our doctrine' }3 The appeals and reproaches, the promises and threats in which Scripture abounds are perfectly explained in this way. 14 But there is no trace, no evidence of the idea of the indeterminacy of the will as a necessary implication. In attempting to preserve a remnant of such an implication within a generally Augustinian doctrine, the Thomism of Ch. Journet displays its embarrassment.15 We can not intellectually dominate the operation of the Kingdom which made us free, nor can we take apart the mystery of the 'how', but we can receive without balking at Scripture the revelation of God's sovereignty over our most intimate choices, even our heart.

Scripture also includes the evils, plagues, and faults themselves under the notion of divine sovereignty. Indeed, if the facts of this category were left out, what would remain of History for God to govern? Regarding the evil of calamity, there is such evidence for this thesis, from the Flood to the plagues of Revelation, that it needs no special insistence! The prophets testify to it-Amos 3:6 stigmatizes the spiritual stupidity of those who fail to see the Lord's authorship behind a city's calamity; Isaiah 45:7 proclaims that good and evil proceed from him; Jeremiah 31:28 (cf. 45:4f.) recalls God's faithful-

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ness in keeping his t~r~ats. The lamenting found in the Psalms springs from the same convtctlon and Lamentations recognizes that the Lord in ~ffect b?th d.etermines. (3:~8) and afflicts (3:33) humans: .Less easily admitted IS the attnbutton of moral evil to divine dectstons, which one encounters in several spots--according to a variety of texts, God seems to actually produce this evil, thus throwing the affirmation of his goodness into question. Jesus does not define the necessity of 'scandals' (Mt. 18:7), but according to the analogy of his other /ogia on 'it is necessary' (dei) one can presume that he has in mind the necessity which the Scriptures fulfil, themselves expressions of God's plan. In any case, God 'hardens whom he pleases' (Rom. 9:18, which refers back to the Exodus story) and the following verse (v.19) demonstrates that the blameworthy acts do not occur apart from God's will (Paul knows that his doctrine provokes the objection he formulates yet does not push it aside as inaccurate given his premises; in effect even the sinner does not withstand the will of the Lord). In this way God successively shuts up the nations and Israel in disobedience (Rom. 11:32). The historical books abound in illustrations of this--the sons of Eli refuse admonishment 'for it was the will of the Lord to slay them' (I Sam. 2:25); Shimei wickedly curses Da\id and the latter understands that God had so commanded it (II Sam. 16:10); it is the Lord, in his wrath, who incites David to take a census (II Sam. 24:1 ). With good reason, Calvin again cites the revolt of Jeroboam. 16 God approximates to the position of author in the case of Absalom's crime, where he says, 'I will do this thing' (II Sam. 12:12), and in the case of the evil-minded envoy who stirs up Saul (I Sam. 16:14 ... )or that of the spirit of deception who seduces the prophets of Ahab (I Kings 22:21 ff.; cf. II Thess. 2:11)-indeed, the evil spirit does not escape divine authority but remains, as Luther put it, 'the devil of God' (cf. Job 1)! In Ezekiel, God goes so far as to call himself the seducer of the false prophet (Ezek. 14:9) and the donor of the abominable custom of the sacrificial burning of the first-born (Ezek. 20:25). In all these cases the malignancy of evil benefits from no indulgence or attenuation; the text, on the contrary, severely condemns it. What is excluded is the illusion of the creature's independence, even with respect to eviL

The Augustinian and Reformed tradition maintains that in one sense God 'desires' evil and determines its occurrence. Calvin objects to the term 'permission' (though he does nevertheless at times use it), finding it too weak and also suggestive that God is simply a spectator17 when in reality, he declares, God is involved to the extent of 'moving the will' of the wicked. Many are scandalized by this thought. Journet bitterly reproaches Calvin for speaking of God's 'willing' in such a way. 18 He can tolerate only the language of 'permission'. Berkouwer criticizes his tradition on the same grounds--even Bavinck was wrong in writing that God 'wills' evil in a

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certain fashion. 19 We are obliged to stand up to such accusations, first of all because of the audacity of the sacred writers, of Paul and Ezekiel, beside which the most explosive formulations of Calvin pale in comparison-our citations are evidence enough of this. And then why dispute over words? As Calvin argues, 'Isn't God's permitting of such evil, though he has the power and authority to block it, just as if he actually did it?'20 Not much is gained by refusing to use the verb 'to will' if one also maintains God's sovereignty. Berkouwer is obliged to concede that sin is never committed 'outside of (praeter) the will of God'21-isn't this the avowal of a certain sense of willing? In vain, Journet tries to oppose Calvin and Saint Augustine on this point. 22 One might as well stick with the tough frankness of Scripture-if evil is produced under the reign of God, his will is involved in it.

The assurance of the absolute sovereignty of God contributes to the 'fear of the Lord', a fear lacking among the people and even among the Christians of our time. This fear nourishes a humble confidence; it applies the balm of consolation-as Calvin said while tortured with disease, 'You are crushing me, Lord, but I am content that it is the work of your hand'. This fear alone can appease, beyond pardon itself, the anguish of having sinned, of having caused irreversible wrongs-even this is in the hand of God: etiam peccata. By including it in his plan he relieves us of the insufferable burden of being the ultimate cause (cf. Gen. 45:8). He is the First and the Last. He reigns.

The undefiled goodness of God and of his work Scripture resolutely rejects, as diabolical slander, as blasphemy, the suggestion that God is an accomplice of evil, that he harbours the germ of it in his heart or, what amounts to the same thing, incorporates it into that which proceeds from him. God is totally, radically, and absolutely good. Versus the 'tragic' myth of divine wickedness and versus the seduction of the dialectic, God's goodness is the great biblical a priori, as Berkouwer calls it. 23 The testimony to the perfect justice and goodness of God is one of the constants of Scripture (Deut. 32:4 ... }-it is an unending theme of praise; the conquerors, in the song of the Lamb, make it their eternal theme (Rev. 15:3ff.). Many times this affirmation is sharpened in the face of doubt and false doctrine. The Lord who sends out the ferocious Chaldeans has 'eyes too pure to see evil' and indeed his indignation boils over at the sight (Hab. 1:12ff.). No sinner ought to imagine that he can excuse himself by imputing the causality of evil to God, for God neither tempts nor is tempted (James 1:13). John thoroughly condemns the speculation of the Proto-Gnostics (precursors of Boehme) on the presence of darkness in God (1 John 1:5). The issue cannot be put more dearly than that.

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The biblical definition of evil if needed would corroborate this attestation. The 'capital' evil, ~ we bav~ named it, is anomia, violation of the divine Law (I John 3:4). The so-called 'physical' evil derived from it is measured by the separation from God's original intention for man (in the sense of Ezek. 18:32). Evil then. is that which is opposed to the will of God, to his commandm;nts and to his 'vows' or desires, to his 'preceptive' wiD and to his 'votive' wilL At the he~~t of e~il, its decisive motiv~, hidden but ready to break out, is a hostility agamst the Lord-a pemtent David discerned this fact (Ps. 51:6). Sinners are the enemies of God (Rom. 5:8, 10, etc.). Indeed, the biblical God is not divided against himself-he has no part in evil and evil has no part in him.

The creation as such is in the image of the divine goodness since it proceeds from no other source. That it is ex nihilo adds nothing to this equation according to the biblical perspectives and it certainly doesn't signify that some second principle named nothingness, me on, vaguely hypostasized, is combined together with the being given by God! This formula is found only in the apocryphal books-in the canonical books everything is ex Deo rather than ex nihilo, or else the world 'comes from' the Word of God (Heb. 11:3). The work of God, in the images of its author, is thus 'good in the extreme' (Gen. 1:31) and this applies to each of its particular elements as well (this is stressed again in I Tim. 4:4). God made each thing beautiful in its time (Eccl. 3:11), especially upright humans (Eccl. 7:29)-their perverse subtleties have another origin, such as the subjection to futility (Rom. 8:20). Purity comes first.

It is at this point that the debate concerning possibility is located. What is more natural, apparently, than to conclude that since man has fallen he was fallible, that since evil arose it was possible? In the work of those authors who most readily cultivate this idea, the virtuality of fault in creation plays the explanatory role for the ideas of weakness and vulnerability, indeed for those involving a fissure, a rift, some hidden germ. The goodness of creation is thus at issue. In order to completely describe it one must make a place for the 'real possibility' of evil, as Kierkegaard expresses it, in such a way that its actualization one day be inevitable-the choice contrary to God specifies from the beginning a real ability within the real freedom. 24

Evoking evil before the Fall in such a fashion seems to us to be strictly absent from Scripture as well as hardly compatible with its affirmation of original goodness. We are pleased in this respect with the lucidity shown by Karl Barth when he says that the event of sin 'is devoid of any necessity and thus of any internal or external possibility' ,25 and, when he notes that man's ability to perpetrate sin 'does not, as is often pretended, depend on his freedom as a reasonable creature'. 26 Barth realizes quite well the stakes involved: 'The result of seeing in the freedom to disobey a possibility of human

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nature is that one can always excuse the freedom by considering it founded in man such as he is. m And we might add that in order to excuse, one must implicitly accuse (the creation and its author). The idea is cast off in favour of an equivocation. Sin is possible in this sense only because it is not impossible. The sliding consists in making, confusingly enough, 'something' of this non-impossibility. 'In the beginning' the notion of evil enters into the idea only as the logical negation of the good which alone is real, enters in as an abstraction. It is related to nothing in creation, but is a radical foreignness for the powers and weaknesses, all good, of the work of God.

We openly confess that often the language of Scripture seems to oppose our thesis, not with respect to 'possibility' (which is significant) but with respect to the major affirmation of the goodness of God and of creation. We have cited the strongest, most shocking texts as evidence (which they are) of God's complete sovereignty over evil. One could add to these perhaps the meditation in Ecclesiastes on the disposition of time with its inclusion of hate and war (Eccl. 3:1-8) or the Lord's discourse to Job with its praise of monsters, of Bestiality and Deviousness ... But on a closer look these latter figures are seen to embody not evil but the incomprehensible (that Job might worship transcendence). As for the reflections of Ecclesiastes, we won't flatter ourselves on having the last word, but we believe they have in mind the enigmatic diversity of historical experience rather than the created order. For the rest, one first notes that the evil inflicted by virtue of penalty for the restoration of justice is in this respect a good-this principle, which we have already established, resolves the difficulty of numerous passages. When evil has to do with sin, however, even if falling into this sin sanctions previous faults (God hardens .. ), a better expianation is needed since the God whose 'eyes are too pure' cannot 'tempt' anyone. Here the 'analogy of faith' guides the interpreter. In order to respect the internal agreement of the Word of God, one must assume different senses and modes, must assume forms of language which are distanced from literalness-the prophets, for example, when they deliberately shock by attributing evil to the Lord (Is. 45:7, Ezek. 14:9, 20:25), uniquely want better to trumpet his sovereign majesty.

Theologians distinguish between the divine will of decree and the preceptive will, or the will of desire-God does not will in the same manner every time. Moreover, in the decree evil is not willed as good-it is certainly a sovereign, but also a permissive will which relates to it. The divine causality is efficient with respect to good (every grace and every perfect gift descends from the Father of lights) and deficient with res~ect to evil (God did not produce the contrary willing and working). Though God himself works good in making it work, evil is always the doing of a creature. These fine points, which

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Revelation taken as a whole authorizes are confirmed in detailed ~x~ges!s. The co_nd~mnation which acco~panies the mention of ~vii willed by God mdtcates the complexity of the willing under rev1ew and suggests that the creature alone actually produces evil. This sinful agent turns up often. In this way I Chronicles 21: 1 explains II Samuel 24:1-Satan has been the effective tempter, but as he does not act independently of the decretive will of God the earliest text employs the same shortcut Ezekiell4:9 does.29 The 'deficient' rather than the 'efficient', character comes out in several expressions-God 'gives' sinners 'over' to their evil ways (Rom. 1:24, 26, 28); they 'did not receive' the love of the truth (II Thess. 2:10); in the case of King Hezekiah's sin of imprudence and vanity, 'God left him to himself, in order to try him and to know all that was in his heart' (II Chron. 32:31).30 In specifying that God does not 'willingly' (millibo) afflict humans, the inspired poet gives credence to the idea of a permissive and paradoxical will (Lam. 3:33); even the severe statements of Romans 9 can be taken in this sense since there it says that God endured with much patience the 'vessels of wrath' and not that he himself actually prepared them for destruction (v.22). Genesis 50:20 with its accent on the implied thought (hltshab) is a point in favour of Calvin's analysis which demonstrates, in the same work, the difference in intention and in vehicle (in end and in means) between God and the agents of evil, a difference which separates God absolutely from all malignancy. 31 The great biblical a priori still stands, permitting us to praise the Lord for his undefiled goodness which extends to all his works!

The thorn iD. the fiesh of reason The evil of evil, the lordship of the Lord, the goodness of God-three unshakeable theses forming the 'T' of the biblical teaching! Divine sovereignty forms the trunk, the denunciation of evil and the praise of the good God form the two branches . . . The real difficulty, however, is in holding them together! Because they stumble on this difficulty, the Christian thinkers of the three groups we have criticized tend to obscure or even reject one or another of the elements. Can we, like the magician pulling a rabbit from his hat, cause the secret of the synthesis to appear?

We maintain that the three theses do not formally contradict one another. If one accords the distinctions encouraged by Scripture itself on the different modes of the divine will, a strict incompatability cannot be proved. Such a proof demands presupposing this axiom: a good and sovereign God cannot permissively decree that the creature will choose against him. Many people uncritically . accept this proposition as evidence. But an evidence it is not an_d 1t bumps up against the biblical testimony. As a naive extrapola~10n. from rul~s which no doubt apply in the case of human conduct, It stlll stands m

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need of a primary demonstration. But by what means, what criteria? How is man (the sinner!) to decide without looking ridiculous what the Lord can and cannot do? Listen to Pascal laugh ... The homo who modestly attires himself with the title sapiens sapiens has in recent days forced his reason to swallow so many insults and gibes that it can no longer remain silent.

Yet our triumph is not secured for all that, we claim only to have barely escaped contradiction. The gnawing problem remains. The necessary, legitimate distinctions do not resolve this problem but on~ pose it again in different terms. How are those wills united in God? How does God at the same time will and not will the hardening of the sinner and his death? How is one to reconcile the perfect goodness of God, his love for his creature, his hate of evil with the fact that he does not work in all the willing and the doing of good? What does sovereign permission signify? The thorn of these questions digs into reason, even into that of the renewed mind of the believer-in grasping after the 'T' of doctrine his mind strains itself and is wrenched apart.

Scripture teaches us that at least in this life we will not find the rational solution we are seeking. It does not give the solution to us, but instead goes even further and itself aims the spotlight on the difficulty, inviting us to view it from a different perspective. This at least is one of the intentions of the book of Job. The wisdom of Job's friends splinters and scatters under the divine reprobation. The authentic function of Job's suffering as condition for a testimony glorifying the Lord does not respond to the final question concerning the original permission. Again, as he does in this case, God avails himself of the original permission. Again, as he does in this case, God avails himself of evil once it has entered the world; but it would be odious if he had permitted its origin to this end. This is why Job knows nothing of the celestial episodes and why the crowning piece of the book, the theophanic discourse, also does not refer to them. There is in the Theophany not a rational solution but a sovereign Presence, humiliating and, as such, pacifying and healing. Habba· kuk, too, poses the theodicy problem and one finds in his 'grievance' the three scriptural convictions. He as well receives no insight into the 'why' or the 'how' behind the permission of evil-God simply calls him in his age of darkness to live by faith (Hab. 2:4). And the apostle, who of course does not ignore the protests of 'natural' reason (Rom. 9:14, 19), is no more satisfying. He puts the clay creature back in its place, as if saying, 'You cannot understand' and simply glorifies the mastery of the sovereign Potter. For us, pilgrims that we are, there is no rational solution to the problem of evil, that is, to the theoretical problem of the origin of evil. 34

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Of opacity, the Cl'088, and hope The pain suffered by the Christian intellect in struggling with the problem of evil seems at first to be a sign of weakness. Isn't it simply confessing to its inability to solve the principal objection and so subdue the 'rock of atheism'? We suggest, rather, that upon a deeper examination the matter appears otherwise.

If consenting to the incomprehensible pulls us through each time we box ourselves in, there would be good reason to suspect a certain methodological irresponsibility and irrationality on our part-the old 'The mystery has two sides' approach. We argue, however, that the mystery of evil is the unique opaque mystery, unique as evil itself, sui generis. And, again, it involves no contradiction. All the other mysteries which go beyond us, those of the Trinity, of the union of the natures in Christ, of created freedom are mysteries of the light-the intellect, if it comes to them biblically, frolics with delight in their intricacy. It is the 'opaque' enigma of evil alone which causes the intellect pain.

If the solution proposed, rivalling the scriptural response, were capable of satisfying the mind of man, they would enjoy an indubitable superiority. But haven't we demonstrated just the opposite in our respectable sampling of these various proposals? Under the name of 'solutions' analysis uncovers-rather attempts to dodge-the givens of the problem; to deny evil and 'forget' the primary and most veracious apprehension each one of us has of the reality of evil, a reality causing us indignation and shame. Scripture alone does not do this. Isn't there a miracle in this 'chastity'? No Word takes away the excuses of the guilty as this one does (water down any one of the three truths and evil becomes more or less excusable, as we have shown)-would it be as true to life if it had proceeded only from man?

Our reflection on the matter continues: the meaning of evil requires the biblical God. In a novel by Joseph Heller we read that 'the personages who reject faith in God find themselves constrained to postulate his existence in order to have an adequate object for their moral indignation'.35 To whom is the objection against God addressed if not to this God? Without a sovereign and good God the complaint is inane, the evil cannot be named. Did John Lennon, the recently assassinated Beatie, understand this fact? He sang, 'God is a concept/By which we measure/Our pain'. 36 Does one arrive at a proof for God through the apprehension of evil?

We do not understand the why of evil. But we can understand that we cannot understand. Our reason is made for the continuities of the work of God; it weaves the harmony-to understand is to unite. A rational solution to the problem of evil would necessarily signify an integration of evil into the harmony born of God! Likewise, to move back from sin to its preliminary 'real possibility' is to apply to it the

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logic of continuity which prevails in the play of creation. But evil is scandal, discontinuity, disorder, foreignness; it is ultimately unnameable in terms of creation (except in negative fashion)! To look for its causal explanation, its ontological reason, its why is tantamount, due to the essence of the research enterprise, to trying to reconcile it with the rest and so justify it (the 'rest' is in effect the justified). To comprehend evil would be to comprehend that evil is not evil (to understand all is to excuse all).

The object is not to comprehend evil, but to combat it. The absence of a solution to the theoretical problem of evil's origin is the 'reverse side' whose 'right side' is even more valuable than righteous denunciation. This 'right side' is the solution to the practical problem of the elimination of evil. That which one thinks he has lost on the speculative plane is won on the existential plane. And we think above all in terms of the horizon of the practical task, in terms of the end of evil, an end of more interest than the beginning, the 'until when?' of more weight than the 'why?'. Only the assemblage of the three theses, the 'T' of the biblical doctrine, assures the victory. If under the disguise of evil there were good, why would one want to make it disappear? If God were not sovereign, how could he lord over that which does not depend on him? If God hid the darkness in himself, would it not be eternal as weU? Yet for all this 'the solid foundation of God still stands'. When scatterbrained hopes blow away and are lost like chaff in the wind, the foundation of hope is revealed, that is, the sovereignty of God who combats evil and invites us to combat it with him.

God combats evil and conquers it. God has already combatted and conquered it. We have reserved for our conclusion the supreme consideration, that of that other 'T' formed of two small beams on a hill called the Skull, the place where the opacity of the mystery thickened from the sixth hour to the ninth hour, the place from which the light still radiates. In the light of the cross how can the truths we have learned be doubted? The abominable reality of sin is demonstrated there, as hate in the snickering of tbe criminals, as hateful in the weight of guilt which could only be removed through the sacrifice of the Lamb of God. Even thinking only of myself, when I see my Lord suffering I cannot say, 'Felix culpa'. Shame. Indignation, against evil, against myself. The complete sovereignty of the Lord is demonstrated there-all this happened 'according to the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God' (Acts 2:23), because it was necessary that the Scriptures be fulfilled, those attesting to the destiny God had assigned to his Servant. If there is a revolting 'scandal' here it is that of Judas' betrayal which, like the infamous reconciliation between Herod and Pilate, also fulfilled 'all that the hand and the purpose of God had predestined to occur' (Acts 4:28). There is no event to which it is more abundantly attested that God

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'willed' it. The undefiled goodness of God is demonstrated there. At the Cross who would dare be so blasphemous as to imagine the slightest complacency on God's part towards evil-when in the Person of the Son he died there?! Holiness is revealed, Love is revealed, pure love-there is no greater love than this. Because of the cross we will eternally praise his goodness, the goodness of his justice, the goodness of his grace. At the Cross God turned evil against evil and realized the practical solution to the problem. He atoned for our sins, conquered death, triumphed over the devil, and laid the foundation for hope.

Is any further demonstration necessary? Ave Crux, spes unica.

BENRI BLOCBER lectures in systematic theology at the Faculte Libre de Theologie EvangeJ.ique, Vaux-sur-Seine, France.

NOTES

1 Cf. e.g. L. Ligier, Peche d'Adam, peche du monde, in Bible, Kippur, Eucharistie I (Paris 1960).

2 See the Apocalypse by the painter Sassanova. 3 A. Barucq, Le Livre des Proverbes (Paris 1964), p.34. 4 Cf. H. Blocher, La doctrine du cbiltiment eternel, lchthus 32, 1973, pp.2-9. 5 Pr. 16:4 can be interpreted tc mean that God has made everything, including evil,

for the day of judgment, when it will be used as a rod for the divine anger. 6 The etymology is uncertain. 7 Calvin, lmt. chr. I, 18, 3 cites the parallel passage, Dt. 19:5, which does not

attribute the accident to the will of God. But earlier on (1, 16:6) he also quotes Ex. 21:13.

8 The translation of the Traduction Oecumenique de Ia Bible, which seems to be the most accurate.

9 Cf. C. Journet, Le Mal. Essai thtiologique (Paris, 1%2), p.l22 n. 10 lnst. chr. I, 16, 9. 11 Ibid. 12 lnst. chr. I, 17, 6. 13 Ibid., II, 5, 14. 14 Ibid., II, 5, 9-11. 15 Cf. C. Journet, op. cit., p.162. 16 lnst. chr. I, 18, 4. 17 Ibid., II, 4, 3. 18 Cf. C. Journ~t. op. cit., p.l76. 19 Sin (Grand Rapids 1971), p.52. 20 Eighth sermon on Job. 21 Sin, p.148. 22 C. Journet, op. cit., p.l%. 23 Sin, chap. 2. 24 See the previous two articles. 25 Dogmatics IV, 1. 26 Ibid.

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27 Ibid. 28 On this distinction, see A. Lecerf, Introduction a Ia dogmatique reformee I (Paris

1931), p.253. 29 There is no question here of a forced harmonization. When Calvin says that it all

holds together well, be is only recognizing his own teaching in the complementarity of the two verses.

30 An obvious anthropomorphism appears in the expression 'to know', which must mean 'to make appear'. It is particularly interesting to note the negative 'God abandoned him'.

31 lnst. chr. II, 4, 2. 32 Ibid., I, 18, 3. 33 Sin, p.13l. 34 lbis is basically Calvin's view. 35 E.L. Mascall, Theology and the Future (London 1968), p.62. 36 Time magazine, 22 December 1980, p.25.

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Christian Thought and the Problem of Evil part 1v HENRI BLOCHER translated by DUSTIN E. ANDERSON, assisted by ROGER T. BECKWITH with footnotes translated by GERALD BRAY

Resume of the preceding article Evil, spontaneously apprehended as the unjustifiable reality, shameful, scandalous, is the object involving the most poignant 'why?' Christian thought has recognized the failure of pagan explanations of evil, but has often slipped into related illusions of its own-when it pretends it has reasonably taken account of evil; when it believes it has resolved the enigma of evil's origin by considering it the ransom of order or the risk of freedom or the motor of the dialectic it separates itself from the teaching of Scripture and begins to excuse the inexcusable. The scriptural teaching demands the confession of three associated truths: the hateful reality of evil, which produces destruction and calls for condemnation; the complete sovereignty of God, who determines every event, including the free act and the evil act; and the goodness of God and of his work, perfectly free of any trace of complacency towards evil. In all logical rigour the three affirmations are not mutually contradictory, yet the mystery they highlight remains 'opaque', the thorn in the flesh of reason! Is this a weakness in the biblical doctrine? At first it seems so, but on reflection the matter is reversed. One can understand that one cannot understand. It is only in this way that one recognizes the horrible singularity of evil. Only in this way can a response be given to the question concerning the end of evil, 'until when?' Hope has something by which it sets itself off from dreams and escapism, something on which to found itself. The cross of Christ is the real crime, supremely hateful, which God has placed at the centre of his plan and through which he reveals his pure goodness-the cross of Christ is the foundation for hope.

Evil and the ld.ngdom 1

Is our obscure question still obscured? Is there a new knot tied to the enigma? The absence of a theoretical solution to the problem of the origin of evil is like the reverse side, in Scripture, of the practical solution-it permits hope for the elimination of evil. The biblical expression of this hope is the expectation of the reign, or kingdom, of God-'Thy kingdom come!' Isn't the good news which the heralds of Christianity bear the fact that the kingdom has come? The Church

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preaches the establishment of the kingdom through the mmtstry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And yet evil, from that time, has not disappeared, in fact, many would say it has proliferated more than ever ... We are forced once again to face this difficulty, this offshoot growing at the foot of the problem of evil, the difficulty not of evil's existence through the sovereign permission of the good God, but of its persistence after the victory of Christ and his entering into his kingdom.

We will first call upon the apparent supports of the given affirmations, between which the tension seems a live one. If it were possible right off to take exception to any single one among them. the difficulty would vanish. But if all three must be taken seriously, and if all three must be affirmed initially (given the benefit of an inventory following this initial glance at the problem), then the theologian cannot sidestep the task of getting to the bottom of the matter.

Belonging also to the coming of the reign or kingdom2 is the elimination of evil, a point hardly contested nowadays. George Eldon Ladd, who devoted his career to studying this theme, concludes quite naturally with this comment his review of evangelical texts: 'The coming of the kingdom of God will see God's creation completely purged of evil'. 3 In this manner one distinguishes between the reign or kingdom which the Gospel announces and which is at the heart of Christian preaching (Acts 20:25) and the permanent empire of the Pantocrator, unalterable for all time and eternity. And so the reign which is coming is distinguished from the reign which is. The latter mysteriously encompasses evil while the former expels it. The latter assures the execution of the decretive will of God while the former coincides with the fulfilment of his will of desire and of commandment 'on earth as it is in heaven'. Evil is biblically defined by its non-conformity to the vows and precepts of the Lord-the realization of this will, baffled by the rebellious choice of the creature and bruised by the consequences of the rebellion, is by definition the end of evil.

The prophets, who raised up this hope, understood it in this way. When they proclaim the eschatological reign of YHWH or that of the expected Son of David-which amounts to the same thing since the prince in his filial relation to God serves as his lieutenant (II Sam. 7:14; Ps. 2:7)-they associate it with the triumph of justice and peace. Hosea holds out hope for the symphony of universal harmony (2:18-23), for this 'sequence of time' wherein the Israelites will be converted to YHWH, their God, and to (the new) David, their king (3:5). For Amos, paradise-like prosperity and security will accompany the raising up of the 'booth of David that is fallen', the coming of the Messiah whom the rabbis, in keeping with this oracle, named 'son of decadence' (9:11-15; Sanhedrin 966). Micah links healing and peace to the reign of YHWH, king and shepherd (4:6f., cf. 4:3f. and

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2: 12f. ), in such a way that it would be out of place to separate it from the reign of the infant of Bethlehem who feeds his flock 'in the majesty of the name of YHWH' and who is in his own person shalom (5:1,3f.). The eyes of Isaiah have seen the King (6:5) and he contemplates the future reign in his beauty (33: 17ff. }-that YHWH is King (and saviour) coincides with the healing of all sickness and the absolution of all faults (33:22, 24). To the shame of the haughty powers (24:23) this will be the time of the feast of God where 'he will swallow up death forever ... (and) wipe away tears from all faces' and will slay with his great sword the Adversary, Leviathan, the fleeing and twisting serpent (25:6-8; 27:1). The promised child, the Davidic prince of peace, so united with YHWH that he bears the divine name 'Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father' (9:6), will be invested in the sovereignty of this reign (9:6) and under his government 'they shall not hurt or destroy' in all the holy mountain, the traditional enemies shall be perfectly reconciled, and the earth 'shall be as full of the knowledge of YHWH as the waters cover the sea' (11 :6-9). Using the two elements of this last prophecy gives some approximation to the vision of the new heavens and the new earth, of Jerusalem re-created-there all past distress will be forgotten, one will no longer hear weeping and wailing nor run the risk of frustration, and the sentence pronounced on the Serpent (Gen. 3:14) will be fully executed (Is. 65:16-25). 4 Many interpreters consider the theme of Isaiah 40:66 to be the kingdom of YHWH, from Mount Zion to the extremities of the earth, whose triumphal coming is imminent.5 With the phrase 'Your God reigns' in 52:7 we have the key to the entire message: 'It is not the potentia absoluta which is first implied in this, but the relation of the covenant and the kingdom of grace, of love, of justice, and of divine power in serving to bring about this ultimate objective'6-'sorrowing and sighing shall flee away' (51:11; cf. 35:10). The other prophetic books confirm this message. Zephaniah echoes the promises of Micah in celebrating the presence of YHWH, King of Israel, mighty saviour, in the midst of his people (3:15ff.). Ezekiel describes the covenant of peace wherein YHWH will make himself the unique king-shepherd of Israel and his servant, (the new) David, will be this unique shepherd (34:1lff., 23ff; 37:21ff.-the apparent contradiction of the duality of David himself/ David is resolved only in Jesus). Zachariah is perhaps the most eloquent. He associates the marvellous day wherein YHWH will be King over all the earth with the disappearance of every curse (v.ll), then with the holiness of the most ordinary objects, of the house pots and the horse bells (v.20). This will be, identically, the reign of the Messiah-YHWH will cause to spring forth living waters of purification and will achieve his ends (13:1, 9) due to the passion of an 'associate', a 'Shepherd' one with him who must, according to Zachariah's strict plan/ be identified with the new, 'humiliated'

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('ani, and not simply 'anaw) Solomon, the 'bearer of salvation' (nosha; 9:9f.). Certainly the kingdom according to the prophets. a major reference for the New Testament. includes the victory over evil, over error and war, sin and penalty. sickness and death.

Has the reign or kingdom already arrived according to Scripture? This second thesis is broadly supported. in forms of varying purity. It is gloriously inscribed on the standard of the school of 'realized eschatology' in the field of New Testament studies. Stimulated by the observations of Rudolf Otto. Charles Harold Dodd successfully championed this idea with his Parables of the Kingdom ( 193.5; at his death in 1973 the work had gone through sixteen editions). In this book he argued that for Jesus the kingdom is not simply near but actually present-the crisis coming as a thief in the night coincides with his ministry of the moment he speaks; this is the time of the final harvest (the sowing took place in the Old Testament). Well-known scholars, particularly British ones. remain in the tradition established by Dodd-one could cite the famous John A.T. Robinson as well as the numerous less-radical authors influenced by him.x According to this reading, the apocalyptic costume of the message ought not to deceive us-it is easy to imagine Jesus and the Fourth Evangelist playing with the imagery without tying it to any literal sense. Among dogmaticians, Karl Barth in certain respects is linked to realized eschatology through the effect of his Christo logical concentration-he strongly affirms the already accomplished aspect of reconciliation, of the justification and sanctification of all men. of the abolition of evil, and of the establishment of the kingdom. The fact of the sanctification of man in Jesus Christ 'is the ground on which we are placed. the horizon which surrounds us, the air which we breathe· .'1 The man of sin, who 'has been liquidated, conquered. and slain in Christ' is now nothing but 'a phantom evoked by caprice· and this truth 'is like the fixed stars of heaven shining invariably above all the clouds produced by man'.w 'Every tear has already been wiped from our eyes (Rev. 21:4) and, to tell the truth, there can no longer be found among us either mourning or weeping or sorrow'. It has been revealed. 'the kingdom of God (this ring inserted in the chain of history) coming with power-not in a restrained or reserved manner, but completely with power. •ll

These triumphant accents do not lack scriptural encouragement. Of course, the translation of the perfect 'eggiken' ('the kingdom of God eggiken', Mk. 1:15, etc.) by 'has arrived' is a bit tendentiousthe verb probably limits its reference to proximity, a notion quite at home in eschatological discourse (Mk. 13:29-'near, right at the door'). 12 But the imminence dramatically proclaimed at the start of Jesus' ministry, and even dating from John the Baptist's ministry of preparation, suggests the coming of the kingdom in the months which followed, months full of the works of Christ, or at least in the years

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leading up to the unimaginable, the crucifixion of the Son of God, and the first man to conquer death! Jesus confirms this now by saying that certain people listening to him would not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come (perfect participle) with power (Mk. 9: I). Before the Sanhedrin he declares: 'henceforth you shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven' (Mt. 26:64). He is even more explicit when he unveils the meaning of his exorcisms: 'the kingdom of God has come upon you' (Mt. 12:28; Luke 11:20), implying the defeat of the 'strong man', the Devil, henceforth in chains. Satan falls from heaven 'like lightning' (Luke 10:18)! And Jesus adds once more: 'the kingdom of God is in your midst' (Luke 17:21), a word which cannot be reduced to the sense of imminence. 13 We understand the enigmatic logion of Matthew II: 12 in a related sense by considering biazetai a middlevoice verb-from the days of John the Baptist until now 'the kingdom of heaven forges the way with (liberating) violence and those who gain this violence lay hold of it'. 14 The Passion narratives place the accent on the royalty of the Crucified One and the promise made to the penitent thief suggests that the entering of Jesus into his reign is that very day (Luke 23:42f.-is the veiled paradox already found in the dialogue of Mark 10:37f. ?). These are rather weighty givens, preparing the way for the Johannine insistence on the judgment already passed, on the passage from death to life already accomplished, on the prince of this world's being cast out (3:17f., 5:24f., 12:31 ... ).This accords with Paul's usage of the expression 'kingdom of God' to signify the reality which Christians experience (Rom. 14:17; I Cor. 4:20; Col. 1:13), and with the teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews on the 'unshakeable kingdom' received by the grateful hearers of the word of the new covenant (12:28). Sin has finally been effectively condemned, something impossible for the law to accomplish (Rom. 8:3). The Christ has triumphed over the hostile forces (Col. 2: 15). He has abolished the works of the Devil (1 John 3:5, 8). He has triumphed over evil. The kingdom has already arrived!

Who would not like to be able to refute the third point, that of the affirmation of the persistence of evil? No one can shut his eyes to all the atrocities committed and all the horrors endured since the time of Jesus Christ. One hardly dares argue that the influence of Christianity continuously improves the state of the world. The optimism of progress seems to have died with the Great War and the Depression-in Europe dialectical theology read its graveside eulogy as did the so-called 'realist' theology of Reinhold Niebuhr in America, and the images of Auschwitz and the Gulag, of the boat-people and Beirut discourage its reappearance. The tendency among our contemporaries is rather to accuse Christianity and blame it for its historical effects-the myth of the 'noble savage' (or 'happy savage') has enjoyed a recent rejuvenation and one hears the sighing

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of nostalgia for the traditional cultures, for the old pre-Christian equilibriums, when man was not yet an individual and was not yet divorced from nature; others more radically overturn the affirmation of the world and of time characteristic of the West and instead search for peace in the void of the East. As the most sarcastic would insinuate: have the Churches contributed to the repression of evil or to the repression of man? The Christian resists the temptation to impute to the scriptural message the evils which afflict civilization, but he cannot fail to note their prevalence nor the languor of the Churches, their errors and dissensions, nor above all the pain caused by the evil he, the one living for the kingdom, continually commits! After having trumpeted the triumphal proclamation which we have already cited, Karl Barth hastens to add: 'But are we in dreamland?'15 As he declares: 'Be it an aspect of the reality of the world or of the reality of our own existence, virtually all that we see stands in opposition to our Easter confession as if totally, universally, and definitively determined.'16 Faced with the continued, devastating flow of evil, faith wants nothing to do with any pious schizophrenia!

The believer, in recognizing the present reality of evil after the institution of God's reign, finds scriptural support for this fact as well. More reliably than experience, scripture defines the 'evil' of the present age and does not depict the 'last days' in very pleasant colours (cf. II Tim. 3:lff. and the parallel texts). Jesus foresees the progress of iniquity and the cooling of charity which would come after him (Mt. 24:12), and even wonders whether upon his return he will still find faith on the earth (Luke 18:8). And how could we forget the Beasts and the Great Prostitute depicted in Revelation? These givens do not resolve the difficulty but rather sharpen it. They show that it is present within Scripture itself and call upon us to dig even deeper in our biblical studies.

An unforeseert. postponement? Two doctrines now solicit our attention. Both attack the central thesis we have provisionally admitted, that is, that the reign or kingdom of God has already come. For both, the traditional teaching on this subject rests upon a major error, that is, that one has not taken into account the unforeseen postponement of the hoped-for event. The similarities between the two analyses are rather surprising since the first, called 'dispensationalist', comes out of a reputedly hard-line tendency in fundamentalism while the second, called 'consistent eschatology', depends on the most corrosive liberalism. For the former it is only the readers of the Bible who are mistaken and it is only for the prophets of the Old Testament that, due to the structure of history, the postponement was 'unforeseen'. For the latter it is Jesus, the master, who led his disciples into error and was himself deceived in his expectation! But no matter which of the two is right,

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in both positions the status of the central problem has been overturned.

The astonishing genius of John Nelson Darby gave rise to dispensationalism; the talent of law writer-popularizer Cyrus Ingerson Scofield as manifested in the explanatory notes to 'his' Bible widely diffused it; and Dallas Theological Seminary, founded by the systematician Lewis Sperry Chafer and renowned for the teaching of Charles C. Ryrie and John F. Walvoord, is its major academic citadel. According to their doctrine, to preach 'the kingdom of heaven is near' to their compatriots was for John the Baptist and Jesus to offer it to the nation. If the people had welcomed it, then the reign of the Davidic Messiah, his political and religious reign of justice and peace and the hegemony of Israel over the pagans would have been established all in one shot. 17 But the Jews spurned the offer and rejected the kingdom: 'We do not want this man to reign over us' (Luke 19:14) and so the Lord withdrew the offer; but since he couldn't fail to keep his promises made in the Old Testament he postponed their realization until later. 'Postponed' is the word ordinarily used to express the situation18 but a recent spokesman for dispensationalism also used the terms 'delay' and 'suspension'. 19 The kingdom will instead be established on earth after the Parousia for its thousand-year reign (the millenium). The entire schema is buttressed by two major doctrines of dispensationalism: on the one side by the insistence on literal interpretation,20 the principle according to which Israel has only terrestrial promises,21 for example, that 'a real king will sit on a material throne (Is. 33:17)';22 and on the other by the strict separation between Israel and the Church with respect to the heavenly promises, the Church being a stranger to the Old Testament and 'sandwiched in' like a 'parenthesis' unforeseen by the prophets.23

This separation is the 'touchstone', 'the essence of dispensationalism'. 24 It is clear that as the dispensationalists conceive of it the kingdom of heaven has not yet been established and so they presume its postponement. The Church, which would not have been born had the Jews accepted the offer, 25 fills up the vacuum; it does not become the heir of Israel. Dispensationalism could adopt Alfred Loisy's famous saying: 'Jesus announced the Kingdom and it is the Church which has come'.

Our critical examination of dispensationalism must concentrate on the theory of the postponement or suspension of the kingdom, leaving the connected doctrines to one side.26 What this examination turns up is not favourable to the dispensationalist cause. Its formal declarations can only be accommodated with the aid of a rather astounding distinction, that is, one made between the 'kingdom of heaven' and the 'kingdom of God', despite their seeming equivalency as attested to by ~optic parallelisms and in such passages as Matthew 19:23-24.2 Only an impassioned a priori position could

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keep one from recognizing in the substitution of 'heaven' for 'God' a euphemism of respect quite in keeping with Jewish practice of the day. 28 Even in distinguishing the two kingdoms the dispensationalists have difficulty accounting for the attribution of all authority to Christ starting from the Ascension (Mt. 28:18). 29 They are obliged by the parables in Matthew 13 to speak of 'the kingdom (of heaven) in mystery' or in its 'mysterious form' for the present time, this pure 'parenthesis' (according to them), and without any connection to the Davidic kingdom!30 They are hardly in agreement over the reiteration of the offer to Israel in the book of Acts. 31 But where above all, is the support for their major affirmations? Where does one find Jesus offering the kingdom to the Israelites? John the Baptist and Jesus announce its imminent coming as an event depending on God alone. As Donald Guthrie expresses it, 'Man is not even invited to comment on the matter. The kingdom is simply announced as a fait accompli. God has acted in history. '32 A metanoia sort of decision is demanded since the coming of the kingdom initiates the great sorting process predicted by the prophets, but that is not to say that the coming of the kingdom itself depends on this decision! The kingdom forges the way through its own power and man will be either the chaff carried away by the Breath of judgment (that is, the carnal part of the people will be as represented in Romans 11 by the branches cut off from the Olive Tree) or, if he repents, the grain gathered in the granaries of God (the believing Remnant, heirs to the promises). But, the dispensationalist suggests, 'at the moment of the first announcement of the kingdom Christ knew it was contingent. The offer of the kingdom was authentic but so too was the human contingency (Mt. 10:5-7, 15:24). 'If you care to accept it, he himself is Elijah, who was to come' (Mt. 11:13-15, 17:10-13).>33 Really? In reading back through the cited texts one does not find the slightest trace of the idea of contingency with respect to the coming of the kingdom or to this Elijah, of whom Jesus elsewhere affirms, 'But I say to you that Elijah has already come'! Does it depend upon the good will of his hearers for what he says to be true? Does the axe ask advice of the roots of the tree it is attacking (Mt. 3: 10)?!

Similarly, where does one find that the reign or kingdom has been 'postponed' due to Jewish unbelief (that of the masses and the authorities)? Of course many of the Israelites rejected this kingdom so different from the image they had formed of it in their minds. 34

They nullified the plan of God, but only 'for themselves' (Luke 7:30). As to the establishment of the kingdom, their hostility had no more effect than did the Jewish embassy to Rome against Archelaus (alluded to in Luke 19:14). Ascended to the right hand of the Father, the Ancient of Days, the Son of Man has been invested in royalty, and forty years later his enemies received their punishment. Jesus made no mystery of the immediate consequences of the

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people's rejection nor of its effect on the disposition of the kingdom: the carnal Israelites (natural heirs to the kingdom by birth) are cast out and perish (Mt. 8: 12) and the kingdom is taken away from Judaism, not deferred with respect to some fixed time but transferred to another nation, the Israel of the spirit, which bears the fruit of faith (Mt. 21 :43). 35 There is nothing about some supposed postponement! Luke 10:11 even seems to teach the exactly opposite principle, that is, whatever the welcome, the reign is instituted with the same majestic certitude: 'know that the kingdom of God has come near'. The zeal and cleverness of dispensationalist interpreters ought not to render palatable theses too foreign to the texts.

For Loisy and 'consistent eschatology', if the Church has come instead of the kingdom it is because Jesus himself was badly mistaken. Following the route opened up by Johannes Weiss (Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes, Gottingen, 1892), Albert Schweitzer is the one who firmly set the decisive bond and took over the title as head of the school (Vom Reimarus zu Wrede: Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, Tiibingen, 1906, as well as his subsequent works). One could cite Martin Werner and Fritz Buri among his successors, but suffice it to say that the idea of the error committed by Jesus as well as the formative role played in primitive Christianity by the (poorly admitted) disappointment in the Parousia put-off sine die, he infiltrated into most of the thinking in New Testament criticism. The 'consistent' eschatologists clearly see that Jesus borrows from the apocalyptic tradition of his era ... and more than just the outer garment of images. If one is not to sink into a self-destructive scepticism regarding the historical testimony of the Gospels, one must admit that Jesus expected, for sometime in the very near future, the grand cosmic revolution involving the royal glorification of the Son of Man. According to Schweitzer, he first believed he could release this revolution by sending out his disciples into the towns and villages of Israel (Mt. 10:23). But then he had to revise his conception. Thinking he understood that his death and torture would constitute the 'messianic sufferings' necessary to the birth of the reign, he delivered himself up, sure that the end of the world would promptly follow (Mk. 9:1, 14:62, and the synoptic parallels). The disciples, intoxicated by the spiritual experiences, once again hung on to the illusion-they enthusiastically expected this glorious advent during their generation (Mk. 13:30 and parallels; I Thess. 4:15, 17-Paul pulls an entire new mysticism out of this brief interim). It became necessary, of course, to sing a different tune, to adapt to the hard evidence (again the reality principle!), settle down in the world, and be content with the sacramental presence, ersatz of the promised one ('protocatholicism'). This schema thus welcomes the givens of 'realized' eschatology, that is, it interprets them in the only sense of immanence possible (imaginary immanence!), as in

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Luke 17:21, or rather it denounces the additions to and retouchings of the story performed by the Church when the delay started to become embarrassing. There is no hope of us reviving the literal sense of the naive original message, especially if we want to be 'consistent'. There is no recuperation possible except via hermeneutics, be it mystical, ethical, existential, political ...

Regarding the debate of the specialists surrounding the idea of 'consistent' eschatology, a single glance will have to be enough for us--necessity makes law. 36 One would hope that believers knew right off how to react to any such hypothesis implying the self-deception of their Master! Is the Lord only Lord of us in certain respects, not including the intellectual domain? Are we anything else besides being disciples? But since it is a following and serving of the Lord to demonstrate, if one can, the frailness of adverse argumentation, we must take our glance at the issue!

Despite the treasures of erudition handed out, what is the profit from the works of 'consistent' eschatology? They have nicely evidenced the future expectation found in the New Testament, an expectation impossible to absorb completely into the 'realized' past. They have also shown the impossibility of explaining the imminence of the royal advent solely in terms of the metaphysical pressure of eternity: 'There is not a trace of some concept of a vertically suspended eternity which would absorb the eschaton into a permanent, un-temporal relationship and leave neither place nor meaning to the continuity of history as such'. 37 Yet imminence, not to deny the chronological element, does not imply a definitely defined delay-a thunderstorm, for example, can be 'menacing' on the horizon for quite a long time (note that 'immanent' and 'menacing' have the same etymological root). One must not exaggerate the eschatological fever of the first community: 'the very archaic discourses at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles in no way give the impression of a feverish and anxious expectation of the end; they insist more on what the disciples have already received than on what they do not yet possess. '38 Paul expresses himself by saying 'we the living' (I Thess. 4) just as every Christian in each generation naturally does. The procedure which consists of excising or excluding a priori those textual facts contrary to the thesis is inadmissible-it is too easy to simply eliminate as inauthentic the gestures and words of Jesus implying that time is going to continue to pass before the end of which no one knows the day or the hour. Luke is distinguished less from the other Evangelists in this respect than is usually maintained;39 and without prejudging the issue, there is no sufficient reason for denying Jesus' paternity of the parables where growth demands a time interval or where the Master, the Bridegroom delays in coming.40 The affirmations of 'realized' eschatology merit greater consideration, especially the event of Easter, which so-called

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'consistent' theology simply sweeps out along with other temporal illusions! Karl Barth, on the other hand, actually uses this event as a primary support in affirming a single return (Wiederkunf) of Jesus who descended into death, but under three interdependent forms-at Easter, at the Parousia of the Last Day and as the Paraclete in between the two. 41 As Heinrich Off observes, this move is not due to circumstantial apologetics, but is simply 'the product of his fundamental theological discovery, '42 a Barthian discovery we have no reason to scorn. As for the signs of the kingdom and of the end, 'realized' eschatology suggests that a delay could elapse without contradicting the notions of imminence and suddenness-they are signs, in effect, and not simply signals; wars, famines, earthquakes, anarchy, immorality, apostasy do not have as their primary function the signalling of the precise moment of the ultimate phase, but rather the signifying of the decrepitude of the old world, hanging in precarious suspension.43 'Consistent' eschatology subjects the rich complexity of the New Testament to disastrous mutilation-Or. Schweitzer and his assistants in this case do not wield a very well-aimed scalpel.

Can the several verses continually cited be explained in another way besides that of the supposed error of Jesus? And is it still possible to believe in this 'imminence' after nineteen hundred years? Matthew 10:23, without doubt, does not merely signify the simplistic solution that Jesus himself is going to visit the towns of Israel shortly after sending out the disciples to scout things out. 44 Or could Jesus have in mind the specific judgment of Israel in the year 70?45 Moore himself sees in it a warning against excessive optimism of the thirst for martyrdom-the mission to the Jews will fail; you will not have succeeded in convincing them before the Parousia!46 We prefer to understand either that, with Barth, Jesus is thinking of the resurrection, starting from which the mission of the Twelve will increase from the towns of Israel to the extremities of the earth,47 or else that, with Guthrie, Jesus is reassuring the disciples being menaced by persecution.48 Regarding a second passage, the intention of the Evangelists is hardly in doubt-they refer the declaration of Mark 9:1 to the Transfiguration directly following, the revelation in anticipation of the resurrection of the Parousia glory of Jesus; whJ would we want to balk at receiving their illumination of the issue? Jesus' response to the high priest (Mk. 14:62 and parallels) combines two citations clear to him, Daniel 17:13 and Psalm 110:1, because they refute the idea of the kingdom and of the Messiah held by official Judaism. In neither of these two citations is there anything about a return to earth-the scene in Daniel 7, where the Son of Man advances toward God on a theophanic cloud, describes his coronation.50 After being accused, Jesus proclaims his subsequent rehabilitation and justification by God, a sequence in which, with

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R.T. France, one can distinguish three principal stages: the paschal resurrection, the judgment of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and the final parousia.51 There remains the difficult discourse on the Mount of Olives with its affirmation that 'this generation will not pass away until all those things take place' (Mk. 13:30 and parallels). We can indicate the orientation of the interpretive choices on this passage. Despite the attraction of R.T. France's brilliant interpretation, where he shows that the first thirty-one verses of the chapter could concern the destruction of Jerusalem (in A.D. 70),52 we remain inclined to attribute to the chapter a mixture or a superimposition of the two ends 'clearly' evoked by the two-fold introductory question (in Mt. 24:3), that is, the end of the Jewish 'world' and the end of the world in general-this association is rich in meaning and it reflects the function of Israel as representative of humanity (in terms of grace and judgment); one also should not underestimate the theological importance of the destruction of the Temple and city. In any case, it is not Jesus' intention to set up some definite timetable! The blepete which mark the progress of the passage permit Dam Jacques Point to approve:

. . . A discourse which first announces itself as an apocalyptical revelation becomes finally what one could call an 'anti-apocalyptical discourse'. In place of the curiosity with which apocalypses usually seek to know what the future will be, it substitutes a Christian attitude born of defiance towards overly well-informed people and of constant vigilance regarding a coming of the Lord which may occur at any moment. 53

In this perspective Mark 13:30 reads quite well provided that one takes the aorist genetai as ingressive-Jesus refers 'to the entire complex of events which one could call "signs of the end" and which the contemp,oraneous generation will experience without necessarily outlasting'. 4 Watch therefore! All of this will begin to happen by your time, but it will be merely the beginning of the birth-pangs. (Mk. 13:7, 8)! Having explained these various passages in this way one is tempted to endorse Karl Barth's unmerciful comment regarding 'consistent' eschatology: 'the largest triviality, in its genre, of all time'. 55

Imminence is no longer primarily a matter of fixed date. It translates rather the essential relation of our present to this future which is the next act of salvation and which proceeds, as its first corollary, from the past work of Christ.' The Parousia is near not because it must necessarily come before a certain number of years but because it remains, in keeping with the suspension involving God's patience and his plan of grace, that which necessarily belongs to the things already accomplished in Christ, the unveiling of the mystery of the Incarnation and the revealing of the glory of Christ. '56 Moreover,

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in the same way the Old Testament knows the 'days of YHWH' in order with partiality to decide, in order to judge or save such-and-such a people at such-and-such a moment in history, in the same way it can then speak of the 'coming' of YHWH, indeed on a cloud (Is. 19:1), so also the New Testament can, with the last coming of the Lord, aim at other intermediate 'comings', the 'small change' ofthe Last Day. It is currently allowed that the judgment of the year 70 prefigures the end of the world-the letters to the seven Churches also evoke a localized coming, in judgment, of the glorious Christ (Rev. 2:5, 16).57 It is necessary to bear this in mind with respect to imminence and the necessity of maintaining watchfulness-the end is already encroaching on the present in the form of these personal or collective 'denouements' of which the Father alone knows the day and the hour. Over against the dogmatism of the school of 'consistent' eschatology, it is given to us to be always on the watch, knowing in which fashion 'the Lord is near'. John Henry Newman saw and wrote of the image in this way:

... Until the coming of Christ in the flesh the course of things ran straight on towards this goal, moving closer with each step. Now, however, under the Gospel the direction has changed (if I may say so) and as for the second coming the movement is no longer towards the end but along the end, at the edge of the end. It is near at all times to this great event and will reach it just as soon as it turns in that direction. Christ, then, is always at our door, as near 1800 years ago as today and not any nearer now than then, nor will he be any nearer when he comes than he is today.5x

The deployment of time The examination of the theories of postponement shows that we can still maintain that the reign or kingdom has come, but that we must also bring out the other half of the biblical teaching, equally veracious and non-illusory, that the kingdom is also still to come-'Thy kingdom come!' remains the prayer of the Church. This two-fold structure can perhaps throw some light on the phenomenon of evil's persistence.

The duality of the present and future aspects of the kingdom, of the 'already' and the 'not yet', is a widely-accepted truth via media aurea between 'realized' eschatology and 'consistent' eschatology. Joachim Jeremias and Werner-Georg Kiimmel lean slightly towards the 'already' side; Oscar Cullman maintains the balance, as do the evangelical specialists Herman Ridderbos, G.E. Ladd, I.H. Marshall . . . Richard Longenecker brings to light the regularity of the attestation to both stages: Acts 2:16ff. is complemented, after 3:18, by 3:20f.; Hebrews 1:1 by 2:5; Hebrews 9:26 by 9:28b; I Peter 1:20 by 1:5 ... 59 We willingly add to this the parallel and distinction of the two resurrections, the first present and spiritual and the second corporeal

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and general, as it is found in John 5:25 and 28 and in the clear testimony of I John 3:2. C.H. Dodd himself loosened up his position a bit60 and accepted the formula of Jeremias: sich relisierende Eschatologie, eschatology in the process of realizing itself or in the course of realization.61 We still prefer Georges Florovsky's formula: inaugurated eschatology.62 It seems to us to best fit the biblical image of the first fruits employed with respect to the resurrected Christ (I Cor. 15:23) and with respect to the gifts of the Spirit (Rom. 8:23; the metaphor of the down payment is found in II Cor. 1:22, 5:5, and Eph. 1:14). There is more to 'first fruits' than 'anticipation' or 'prolepsis' (prolepsis), the notion which retains the favour of Wolfhart Pannenberg63 and Jiirgen Moltmann.M The idea of anticipation lends itself to the conceptual games and jugglery at which both authors excel-its foundations are unstable in Pannenberg65 and in Moltmann it promotes a bizarre spatial treatment of the future and of time,66 giving privileged place to the future pole as evidenced in Moltmann's reticence to come clean with respect to the idea of the accomplishment already realized67 even though the biblical 'first fruits' themselves have preeminence of quality over the future harvest! Regarding this last point, our reproach is exactly the opposite of that which one could make of Karl Barth, for whom the 'fulfilled time' of the Resurrection (pteroma ton kairon) shines with such brilliance that it eclipses the consummation still to come.68 We propose calling the introduction of the kingdom beginning with John the Baptist, when it is forging the way with force (biazetai, Mt. 11: 12), 'anticipated' eschatology while calling the active role since Easter and Pentecost 'inaugurated' eschatology. In this way 'the times and the moments' are distinguished.

One characteristic precisely and clearly renders the distinction of the 'times' of the reign or kingdom in the New Testament, a characteristic too many authors leave in the background. The presence of the kingdom, discrete as a seed, is experienced only in the Spirit, a fact the Apostle Paul, who most has the anthropological side of things in mind, correlates with the 'plans' of human life. The Spirit enlivens the 'inner' man, while the future aspect of the kingdom is only for the external order of the world, to which we through our bodies are united. Jean Hering previously noted on the subject of the kingdom 'that it is presently realized [for the gospels] as spiritual in the heart of those who accept the Message in Faith and who repent', adding that this 'partial' realization 'abides even in the moral realm'. 69 Without this elucidation, the already and the not yet confusingly mix and clash in the same plan. One oscillates from one to the other, baptizing this instability 'dialectical' without coming to any clear and well-defined conclusion. When it is necessary to deduce directives for the behaviour and mission of the Christian, arbitrariness cannot be avoided (who is to say what the proper dosage of 'already'

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and 'not yet' is?). Of course, one recognizes that the kingdom has been instituted in a concealed fashion, perceptible by faith and not by sight, but one should not push this insight too far. Anthropological monism (the refusal to distinguish soul and body as constituents of humanity), so agreeable to the modern mentality and between 1930 and 1960 clothed in the prestige of being the supposed Hebraic mentality, looms in the way. One wants to avoid at all costs being accused of promoting a 'Platonism for the people' or even idealism, but all this does is produce a reverse idealism! Such excesses must be avoided. 70 Unity does not exclude duality-man is his body, but he also has it (such is the mystery of his incarnation); he has this piece of the earth, a solidarity with it as a part of his distinct being and intimate me by which he expresses himself and suffers, receives and gives, a part he must keep in check. Despite the constant interaction, the two plans do not become confused. The New Testament never says that the regeneration of the world has already been accomplished nor has the liberation of the body (the miraculous beatings are only the signs of a kingdom one does not yet see). Nor does the New Testament ever say to the believer that he has still to await the resurrection of the inner man or to await participation in the life eternal and in the life of the kingdom. The kingdom of God is justice, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit, the one who is life in close union with the spirit of man itself and who renews the inner man day by day (Rom. 8:10, 16; II Cor. 4:16). And since the face of this world is passing, the body, in solidarity with the entire groaning creation, still awaits its redemption; the outer man wastes away with the thread of time. Here as well we discern the kairoi!

If the kingdom or reign which is victorious over evil comes in several stages, and if it is present only in Spiritu Sancto, then the persistence of evil after its institution is no longer such a threatening scandal since not everyone has the Spirit and since the old world, rotten with sin, does endure. Death, though conquered in the One who is the Pioneer of life and in the spiritual resurrection of his own, has not yet been 'put under his feet' (I Cor. 15:20-28). The Adversary, cast out and bound in such a way that he cannot stop the evangelization of the world, strews his rage over the earth in the little time he has left (Rev. 12: 12). Indeed, many Old Testament prophecies of the kingdom let it be understood that the elimination of evil will not occur in an instant, following the typology of the royal history-David the warrior before Solomon the peaceful! The Messiah, in his reign, will make use of valour as well as retributive justice (Micah 5:4f.; Is. 11:2, 4; cf. the use of this latter verse in noting the final end of our way of life in II Thess. 2:8). YHWH installs him on his throne, commanding him to subdue his enemies (Ps. 110: lf. )-this initial militant or conquering phase of the kingdom is stressed by the apostle against those who deny the resurrection as

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implying victory over death, the final enemy: 'For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under his feet, thus until the resurrection of his own (I Cor. 15:25f.). Could it be suggested that a certain amount of time is necessary for the 'small stone' of the kingdom of God to grow and fill the earth while the statue crumbles (Dan. 2:34f., 44; cf. the enigmatic 'prolongation of life' left to the first three beasts in the parallel vision of 7:11)? This is just a suggestion, yet Ezekiel himself announces without equivocation that after the coming of the prince-King David, sole shepherd of the sole flock, and after the covenant of peace and the fulfilment of the promises of restoration and security (37:24, 26; 38:8, 11 f., 14), the innumerable horde of Gog will manifest itself against the people of God! In its first phase, in Spiritu Sancto, the kingdom of God is not instituted in the form awaited by most people-it does not suppress evil all at once, but deploys its liberating re-conquest over a period of time; thus for this period of time, evil will persist.

The viralence of the riposte The temporal structure of the establishment of the reign soothes the keenly felt tension between the two affirmations-'the kingdom has come' and 'evil has not disappeared'. But how is one to explain the growing virulence of evil? If only we could see the enemies of Christ gradually being beaten back and rendered harmless as a footstool! Yet what we have is the spreading out and intensification of evil's enterprises as other prophecies indeed predict!

The de facto question is not so easily decided. Has evil, since Christ, actually progressed in the world? This is what we commonly preach, but one ought not to overlook the strong psychological pressure at work in this sense of pessimism--one naturally suspects optimism of indulgence, for evils it denies are becoming worse and it thinks it better to mobilize the energies by sounding the alarm. Among Christians, one is afraid of looking less spiritual, of being suspected of sympathizing with the world if one does not blacken the picture (the true prophet must condemn ... ). It is not only the farmers who never affirm that it has been a fine year! In such conditions one needs the courage of the Reformed theologian Loraine Boettner to affirm the 'marvellous progress' made in the material and spiritual realms during the last nineteen centuries.71 One tends to forget the abominable tares found in the old pagan world and to minimize the advantages, in all areas, which our generation enjoys. There are not many detractors of our society who would not ask to be returned as quickly as possible if they were in a machine which shipped them back in time! But to conclude from this some 'positive global balance' ... one only need recall the extent of the horrors of this century! On the scale of universal history who can measure the quantity and quality of additional evils? One would need a competency of infinite proportion!

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The sole judge having this infinite competency leaves us to figure out, in his revelation, a nuanced verdict. After the Son of Man's sowing, the tares come up along with the wheat (Mt. 13:24-30, 36-43), evil and good grow alongside each other, the reign of God advances and the edification of the Church also profits the world while simultaneously the rebellion heads towards its paroxysm, gaining in virulence and malignancy. The riposte of the enemy (Mt. 13:28)! It struggles on despite defeat and limitation-in order to make a retort to this defeat and limitation (Rev. 12: 12). This thought might aid us in interpreting the augmentation of iniquity and suffering in the 'present age' after Jesus Christ.

In the book of Revelation the secret of this riposte is uncovered. It resides in a diabolical monkey-cage-a false trinity, Dragon, Beast, and False Prophet, comes to be worshipped on earth. It is associated with Babylon, the prostitute, odious caricature of the Bride, Jerusalem. The Beast, synthesis of the beasts of Daniel, apes Christ-it establishes its reign through a quasi-immolation and substitute resurrection (Rev. 13:3); it also receives an imitation of the divine Name (it was, and is not, and is to come-Rev. 17:8), which implies a sort of parousia (parestai). This Beast, the Messiah of Satan, is identified for us with the Antichrist of whom the first Epistle of John speaks and with the 'son of perdition' announced by Paul to the Thessalonians. One sees, in effect, in the three passages the same schema-a present influence and a future paroxysm or outburst. 72

For the paradox of the Beast is that it 'is' the eighth of its own heads (to come) and also one of the seven (Rev. 17: 11). 73 The Antichrist of I John 2:18, at once the one opposed to Christ and the one wanting to substitute for Christ (according to the two senses of the preposition anti), the one represented by the apostate doctors of ProtoGnosticism, seems nevertheless a personage to come. 74 Likewise, the present activity of the mystery of iniquity and its future unleashing will be followed by the 'parousia' of the man of anomia (II Thess. 2:9). This man brings the Adamic pretension of being equal with God to its culmination by imitating Christ-man become god, he apes the God become man, not simply a sinner but an apostate, not simply pagan but Antichrist! These teachings draw out Jesus' warning against the false christs and false prophets (Mk. 13:22)--a duality maintained in Revelation and also traceable in the mention of the spirit of the antichrist in I John 4:3 (v. 1-false prophets) and of the power of Satan, who will be associated with the parousia of the Lawless One (II Thess. 2:9). Such is evil after Christ.

In the mimetic subtlety of the satanic riposte lies the virus of its virulence. We ought not to be too surprised by evil's becoming more wicked in the 'post-Christian' world. As in the adage we have already cited: corruptio optimi pessimal The Devil, incapable of creating himself, produces instead the most beautiful model, the most

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seductive and thus most poisonous imitation. This understanding aids us in discerning the evil of our age. We are

present, of course, at the return of Dionysus, as Jean Brun has brilliantly shown75-for the eighth king is already the sixth; it is the Beast of paganism who is resuscitated at the end; and the Antichrist realizes the project of original sin. But the specific trait of contemporary evil is that it is post-Christian. Humanism secularizes the biblical privilege of man; historicism secularizes the biblical accent on history; and 'politism' secularizes the message of the kingdom of God. Secularization itself imitates Christianity's work of 'un-deifying' the world. The arrogance of man in making himself god and so destroying the earth (Rev. II: 18) would not have been possible without the awakening (outside of the pagan engulfing by the world, outside of the servitude of the stoicheia) provoked by the biblical vision of the world. Paul Schutz passionately demonstrates this by insisting on two types of man-the savant and the politician. He develops from several perspectives the paradox formulated by C. F. von Weizsacker: 'Christus ermoglicht den Anti-Christ'. 76 He explains how the subject-object model characteristic of humanist thought is rooted in the consciousness of sin introduced by Christianity-the confession of sin radicalizes the duality implied by reflection; man destabilizes himself and takes himself for an object. The theme of the new creation is secularized in the revolutionary thought that it is man who will make 'all things new'. Even the theology of the Wholly-Other is a disguised form of anti-Christian thought.77

This last remark can be generalized. Post-Christian evil, in its most pernicious form, is apostasy. The evil of evil, after Jesus Christ, is this false Christianity, what Karl Barth called Mimikri-Kirche,7~:~ an evil which begins with the adulteration of Christian truth in the Church. This is just what John's Epistles would have us understand by qualifying the antichrists as false doctors. When one is scandalized by the many evils imputed to 'Christianity' in history, has one closely examined what lies beneath those titles claiming to be Christian? Has one truly identified the 'little flock' to whom it has pleased the Father to give the kingdom (Luke 12:32)? In the field of the world, while awaiting the Son of Man to expel all scandals from his intermediately conquered kingdom (Mt. 13:41), the tares and the wheat are difficult to distinguish. Only the existential directive is easy to draw: 'Be on your guard; I have told you all things beforehand'; 'And what I say to you I say to all: Watch' (Mk. 13:23, 37).

The necessity of faith There remains one final, obscure question: why did God choose to delay the manifestation of his reign? Why did he institute it only in a concealed form and in the Spirit? How is it possible that the future

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which became a present then did not invade the entire world like a tidal wave? ... 79 Why did God not remove evil from the world in one shot? Why did he leave the Devil time to riposte with all the seductions of a false Christianity? We are not party to God's counsel enough to explain all of his ways. If the answer is part of the concealed things he reserves for himself (Dt. 29:29), we will peacefully bow to his wisdom. But if the things he has revealed throw some glimmer of light on the question, it is incumbent on us to take this into account.

Karl Barth, preacher of the 'all-accomplished', takes the difficulty by the throat. After having taken into account other correct but insufficient responses (the invisible nature of the transformation, the 'not yet' aspect, the importance of the progress of the Church), Barth comes to the essential response: God wanted to give time to his creatures 'so that they might not be merely spectators at the harvest following the sowing of reconciliation, but might actively participate in it. •liD It is necessary that we not be 'merely objects for him, but rather responsible, active, free subjects ... ''" He did not want to bring things about 'by passing ... over our heads'. 1!

2 Without our response of faith, the reconciliation would have been 'dictatorial', 'a majestic constraint imposed on humanity'. ~"~3 Without the suspension willed by God, 'his grace would have been an act of brutality';l!4 the decision 'would have been a favour imposed by force', like those the Europeans brought to the colonialized peoples. 85 This implies that 'power and freedom are still left to the attacked [the sinner] to entrap himself in his own fateful resistance', 86 from whence comes the persistence of evil-Jesus Christ 'is the first one to be surprised and frightened that he be not yet set apart'. !!7 Despite this last strange (isolated enough) affirmation, Barth goes to great pains to show that everything comes from Christ, who does not undergo this combat, but allows it to proceed from his plenitude, of the perfection of the reconciliation.88

Otherwise, he explains:

God would have had to reserve himself for himself, depriving us of his presence and action in the form of his last promise but one, the one valid for the time in which we live. He would have had to renounce demonstrating his power precisely in our present time, under its conditions, limits and problems, in the fragility of our existence at the heart of this imperfect world. He would have had to save himself the pain of being our God and of wanting us to be his people in the situation which isourown.89

There we have the response: freedom has been left to evil that man might respond freely-the glory of the God of grace demands it.

How ought one to take this Barthian conception? Berkouwer, hardly an amateur when it comes to rational transparency, concludes that the explanation fails. 90 Barth's last reason, in any case, has an air of theological indiscretion about it-it seems presumptuous to say

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what God would have 'had' to do and painful to suppose the concession of a suspension for evil ('Abhor what is evil!') to the sole end that it serve as a foil or backdrop for grace. With the reference to man's free response we seem to be on firmer ground, for it is clear that God demands this response from us in our time and that the immediate manifestation of the kingdom would have precluded the possibility of this. One can then appreciate Barth's not falling into the Arminian or Pelagian errors concerning freedom and his not making of freedom some factor independent of God. But other objections spring out of a reading of other Barthian passages. Isn't it Barth who resolutely includes all of the subjective in the objective? Isn't he the one who reduces the role of faith to the awareness of the fact which already encompasses all humans? Didn't he qualify it as an epiphenomenon?91 If every man is in Christ without faith, justified and sanctified, isn't grace nonetheless 'dictatorial'. a 'majestic constraint', indeed (horribile dictu) a 'brutality'? In the same discussion, Barth excludes the possibility of the dyke of incredulity holding against the 'much too powerful' tide of grace and can only envisage an 'irresistible invasion'. 92 The image makes one think of some physical constraint, and it is not by chance that Barth has a sort of predilection for such language: 'the event ... exercises a physical power'. 93 That which in another would be stylistic licence in his work corresponds to propositions of ontology. What then is the weight of freedom, swept away like a straw by the rising tide?

If the doctrine of faith is modified, could the Barthian effort bear fruit? Scripture seems to support this. To martyrs who would like to shorten the delay, it responds that the number of their co-workers must first be complete (Rev. 6:11). God consents, in his patience, to appear a bit negligent in keeping his promises, to endure the raillery over the postponement of the Parousia in order that all might have access to salvation (II Pet. 3:9). Before the end comes, the Good News must first be proclaimed to all nations (Mk. 13:10).94 This economy is the proper (idios) time for testimony (I Tim. 2:6), established by the God who desires all people to be saved. We can understand that God wishes no other entry into his kingdom than that of faith-not some automatic incorporation, but by the faith which responds to the Word and receives the Spirit, the faith born of the Word and raised up by the Spirit. Time is necessary for faith, and thus there is this suspension of the old world during which the Word will be diffused, that power of God ridiculously weak in the eyes of the world: 'Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says YHWH Tsebaot' (Zech. 4:6).

The way of the killgdom It does not seem we can proceed any further with our explanation. We maintain simply that the times of the kingdom, the mode of its

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establishment, and its nature cannot be dissociated. The way of faith-way of love and not of constraint (John 14:23}--is the same one followed by God in establishing his reign. Does the kingdom come in a fashion concealed from man's view? It is concealed in the Cross. It is essential to it that it come via the Cross; it was necessary that it come via the Cross, not simply to fulfil the Scriptures, but that evil might truly be conquered.

Only in this way is evil as evil vanquished. Herein lies the mysterious and hidden wisdom, revealed by the Spirit, of the words taught by the Spirit (I Cor. 2:7; 12f. ). The power of the Evil One over us is the power of accusation (as his name Satan indicates) and only the shedding of blood wiping away sin can disarm him (Rev. 12:10ff., Col. 2:14f.). If evil had been conquered through superior power, it would have been conquered as if it were some created might. But evil as evil is not some created might; it is, rather, only corruption. If evil had been countered by an opposite form of behaviour, a simple example of perfect love perhaps, it would not have been conquered, but simply driven back. In turning the supreme crime, the assassination of the Righteous One, into the voluntary expiation of sin, God triumphs over evil as evil. God turns evil back against itself and destroys it, both as negative and as positive: God refutes every optimistic theodicy and every tragic philosophy. God establishes his victorious reign over evil. The way of the kingdom has been marked ever since, the way of the Cross which obliges us to be patient in hope until that moment when all the elect will have entered into the kingdom through faith and the victory will be manifested-the victory, the Conqueror!

* ** Those who have a part in the kingdom hate evil, the enemy. They know its reality and can no longer sink into idealism and dreams of Utopia. They see through its strategy and attack the cleverly refined evil of the end times (that is, the adulteration of Christianity). They have already tasted its defeat in Spiritu Sancto and the imminence of God's reign gives them wings, renewing in them the energy of grace. The law of combat, however, remains the wa~ of the kingdom: 'We must do battle under the banner of the Cross'. 5

BENlU BLOCBER lectures in systematic theology at the Faculte Libre de Theologie Evangelique, VaWt-sur-Seine, France.

Concluded

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NOTES

Parts of this study have been published in German, inK. Runia and J. Stott edd, Das Himmelreich hat schon begonnen (Wuppertall977), pp.96-114.

2 The Kingdom is both the exercise and the extent of power, as many exegetes have insisted, cf. D. Guthrie, New Testament Theology (Leicester 1981), p.409.

3 In C. Armerding and W.W. Gasque edd., Dreams, Visions and Oracles (Grand Rapids 1977), p.135.

4 V.20 does not mean that death, sin and the curse will continue in spite of everything! Its purpose is to remind us, in the context of prophecy, how different the coming age will be from our own.

5 D.H. Odendaal, The Eschatological Expectation of Isaiah 40-66 with Special Reference to Israel and the Nations (Philadelphia 1970), p.61 et passim.

6 Ibid., p.92. 7 Cf. P. Lamarche, Zacharie IX-XIV, Structure litteraire et messianisme (Paris 1961),

p.l68. 8 See C. Brown, Parousia and Eschatology in the New Testament, in The New

International Dictionary of New Testament Theology (Grand Rapids 1982). 9 Dogmatics, II, 2.

10 Ibid., IV, 3. 11 Ibid., II, 3. 12 On Dodd, see F.F. Bruce's article in P. Hughes ed., Creative Minds in

Contemporary Theology (Grand Rapids 1969), p.247. 13 Jesus said: entos humon, which most translate as 'among you'. It conveys the idea

of something present in the situation, but concealed. 14 Thus the NIV. 15 Dogmatics, IV, 3. 16 Ibid. 17 L.S. Chafer, Systematic Theology (Dallas 1947), p.340. 18 Ibid., p.347. 19 H.A. Hoyt, Dispensational Premillenialism, in R.G. Clouse ed., The Meaning of

the Millenium. Four Views (Leicester 1977). 20 C. C. Ryrie, Dispensationalism Today (Chicago 1965), pp.86-109. 21 L. Chafer, op. cit., p.xix. 22 H. Hoyt, op. cit., p.78. 23 L. Chafer, op. cit., passim. 24 C. Ryrie, op. cit., p.45. 25 Ibid., p.l63. 26 Hermeneutical literalism is untenable because it goes against the universal

interpretation of the OT in the NT. In particular, the separation which occurred between Israel and the Church is against the literal meaning of any number of texts.

27 L. Chafer, op. cit. IV, p.26. 28 Cf. O.T. Allis, Prophecy and the Church (Philadelphia 1945), pp.300ff. 29 Cf. C. Ryrie, op. cit., p.l72. 30 These unbiblical expressions can be found all the way from Chafer (1, p.45) to Hoyt

op.cit., (p.86). See Allis' critique (pp.84ff.). 32 Theology of the New Testament, p.419. 33 Hoyt, op. cit., pp.85-6. 34 Jesus points out the difference (Mt. 11:2ff.; Luke 17:20-1). In Jn. 6:14f. he actually

rejects the kind of kingdom described by the dispensationalists! 35 In the light of this passage we can understand the meaning of Acts 1:6, which must

be speaking about the kingdom of God. 36 See C. Brown, op. cit., pp.901-31; D. Guthrie, op. cit., pp.409-31, 790-818,

868-74. 37 G.C. Berkouwer, The Return of Christ (Grand Rapids 1972), p.83.

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38 Dictionnaire de Ia Bible VI, col.l411. 39 Cf. C. Brown, op. cit., pp.917ff. 40 Cf. I. H. Marshall, Eschatology and the Parables (London 1983). 41 Dogmatics, IV, 3. 42 Eschatologie: Versuch eines dogmatischen Grundrisses (Zollikon 1958), p.24. 43 Cf. P. Maury, L'eschatologie(Geneve 1959), p.62. 44 J.S. Wright, Times and Seasons, in Dreams, Visions and Oracles, op. cit., p.168. 45 Dictiannaire de Ia Bible VI, col.l341. 46 D. Guthrie, op. cit., p.797. 47 Dogmatics, III, 2. 48 Op. cit., p.797. 49 Dogmatics, III, 2. 50 R.T. France, Jesus and the Old Testament (London 1971), pp.139ff. 51 Ibid .. pp.l45, 235. 52 Ibid., pp.227-39. 53 La ruine du temple et Ia fin des temps dans le discourse de Marc 13, in Apocalypses

et TMologie de /'Esperance (Paris 1977), p.257. 54 C. Brown, op. cit., p.912. 55 Dogmatics. IV. 3. 56 A.L. Moore, The Delay of the Parousia in the New Testament, TSF Bulletin 52,

1968,p.l5. 57 See Dictionnaire de Ia Bible VI. coL 1397. 58 Quoted with approval by F.F. Bruce, Dreams, Visions and Oracles, op. cit., p.9. 59 Ibid., p.l45. 60 F.F. Bruce on C.H. Dodd,loc. cit., pp.248ff. 61 C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge 1953), p.447. 62 Ibid. 63 Offenbarungals Geschichte (Gottingen 1961), pp.98, 105. 64 Cf. Theologie de /'Esperance II: Debats (Paris 1973), pp.26'):..74. 65 If the meaning, and God's self-revelation, are the totality of history, how will it be

anticipated? The statement makes no sense as it stands. 66 The arguments hinges on the future as something which exists in reality-which is

not true. 67 Moltmann rejects the idea of a fulfilment of the promise. and speaks instead of its

confirmation and 'validation'. 68 In this picture, creation is like a shadow thrust forward, and the second coming is

like a subsequent reverberation. 69 Le Royaume de Dieu et sa venue (Neuchiitei-Paris 1959), p.48. 70 J. Barr, Old and New in Interpretation (London 1966), p.52. 71 Postmillenialism, in R. Clouse, op. cit., p.l25. 72 Cf. Rev. 20:1-3,7-10. 73 The Beast is obviously Rome, but the rest is open to conjecture! 74 J. Stott, The Epistles of John (London 1964). pp.l03-9. 75 Le retour de Dionysos (Paris 1976). 76 Parusia: Hoffnung und Prophetie (Heidelberg 1960), p.601. 77 Ibid., p.602. 78 Dogmatics, IV, 2. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid, IV. 1. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid., IV, 3. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid.

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88 Ibid. 89 Ibid. 90 The Return of Christ, p.137. 91 Dogmatics, IV, 1. 92 Ibid., IV, 3. 93 Ibid., IV, 1. 94 0. Cullmann, Christ and Time (London 1951 ), p.ll6ff. 95 J. Calvin, lnst. chr., II, 15, 4.

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