amoral things

Is being cold evil? Is it evil when a glass of water tips over? Is growing old evil? Is it evil when I smash my finger with a hammer? There are numerous questions like these that can be answered in the negative. No, these aren't evil, despite the frustrations that they cause. Where do we draw the line between deeming things evil, that is, morally reprehensible, and simply saying that they are facts of life? What about tsunamis and natural disasters? Things just got significantly more complicated.

When we think of suffering in the world, I believe, like most sensible Christians, that God cannot be attributed as the author, cause, etc., of moral evil. This shouldn't be controversial. God can make bad things into good things, but God cannot make bad things, things that have an intrinsically evil nature. If evil is the privation of the good then evil technically is not a nature, it is a return to non-existence. Speaking of humanity's sinful proclivity, Henri Blocher calls this bent a "quasi-nature." We know it's there, we experience sinful tugs and pulls, and yet we also know that God called humanity "very good." Living licentiously is, according to Christian theology, "παρα φυσιν, contrary to nature. Living in sin is to live in an un-human way. This gives birth to a radically different concept of freedom, which we won't discuss now but is worth mentioning.

Where is all this going? Having had my nose in the "Alexandrian tradition" lately, I've come across a different interpretation of the biblical narrative that has in many ways made a good deal more sense (at least to me) of Scripture and our own experiences. Clement of Alexandria believed firmly in the divine oikonomia. God's oikonomia is often rendered "economy" in English, but it brings far too much baggage with it, so I will leave it transliterated. By oikonomia he means that the Logos, the mind of God that takes on flesh and becomes the Son of God, has carefully ordered the world according to his providence. Clement argued that prior to Christ, God gave the Law to the Jews and philosophy to the Greeks in order to prepare the way for Christ. This is the first covenant applied at a global level. In fact, he even argues that the Greek philosphers plagiarized the OT! Eventually the first covenant gives way to Christ where the enigmas in the OT are explained and fulfilled (often by appealing to the "spiritual" sense; the allegorical sense is the divine sense) for those who can understand. The point in this is that God deals with people gradually according to their corporeality which he has designed. This point was made especially by Gregory of Nazianzus in the fourth century. He believed that man was by God's design the odd mixture of soul and body, immaterial and material. Humans cannot know God's nature but his mediated and indirect revelation of himself is to inspire yearning and longing in us for the infinite, what we can never attain. Gregory of Nyssa says it this way:

When the soul is moved towards what is naturally lovely, it seems to me that this is the sort of passionate desire with which it is moved. Beginning with the loveliness it sees, it is drawn upwards to what is transcendent. The soul is forever inflaming its desire for what is hidden, by means of what it has already grasped. For this reason, the ardent lover of beauty understands what is seen as an image of what he desires, and yearns to be filled with the actual image of what he desires, and yearns to be filled with the actual substance of the archetype.
This is what underlies the bold and excessive desire of him who desires to see no longer 'through mirrors and reflections, but instead to enjoy beauty face to face (1 Cor 13.12).' The divine voice concedes what is demanded by actually refusing it, and in a few words displays the immeasureable depths of its ideas. On the one hand, the divine generosity grants the fulfilment of his desire; on the other hand, it promises no end to desire nor satiety of it.

God's concealment of himself is for our own spiritual growth. Life is pedagogical, and Christ, through the Spirit is our divine teacher.
So when I smash my finger with a hammer instead of cursing and saying nasty things, I am supposed to rule my lower, material part by the higher, rational part. Our minds participate in and share in the Logos, the wisdom of God. This should put an entirely new element to Paul's statement in 1 Cor 2.16 that "we have the mind of Christ." Gregory used this notion of God's oikonomia, his gradual and careful ordering of the world, to argue for the consubstantiality of the Spirit. Scripture is not entirely clear about the nature of the Spirit. Is it synonymous for the power of God or is it God's inspiring principle? The Trinity took time to get worked out (most people still have no idea how to speak about the Trinity), and Gregory argued that the realization of the Spirit's co-equality with Son and Father is due to God's progressive revelation. If God would have gone from first covenant to full revelation of God's Trinitarian self, we would have even more confused. Life in God's world is pedagogical. God deals with us like parents do with children. We are weak, which is not always an evil or bad thing. It was this way from the beginning. Adam and Eve, more often than not, were not assumed to be immortal. They needed to learn how to serve God within their environment with the goal of progressing towards God and being assimilated into the life of God. The implications of this narrative are far reaching. How does Jesus fit into this system? Why did he come? What is the atonement in this system? We'll leave these questions for another time.

If life on this bouncing ball is pedagogical then how do we speak of evil and God? We must maneuver between non-negotiables. God created a good world, he didn't create evil, humanity was created good with free-will, God is sovereign, the world has problems, etc. Part of our life-long-learning project is wrestling with these realities.