Theology With A Spear

Nature, red in tooth and claw.

“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.” Bible, Isaiah 45:7

God created all things.

Ergo, God created evil.

There is no getting around this.

He who made the light also made the darkness. He who made the hot, also, the cold. Theologians and philosophers and little old grandmothers at Sunday service have spent ages trying to talk their way out of this most fundamental of conclusions. Why? Because it presents a circle we cannot square. Jesus cannot make evil… can he?

… Can he?

In much the same way and for almost identical reasons, men and women have tried for centuries to separate the God of the Old Testament from the God of the New. Yahweh, the God of the Israelites, seems somehow much too raw. He seems petty. Vengeful. Jealous and violent. Difficult to connect such a character to Christ, the one who told us to love our enemies. Who said to forgive each and every sin. On the one hand we have a God who refused to take up arms even to defend himself. On the other, a God who semi-routinely orders genocides. Brazenly, Christianity has insisted that these two characters are, in fact, the same.

“I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.”

Who made the Devil? Who created all his dark legions? Who saw to it that Hitler would be born? Which God is it that looks the other way and refuses to intervine when a child is abused or a wife beaten or a man stabbed somewhere in an alley? Who doesn’t save the stillborn child? Who decides not to untangle the cord knotted round its neck?

“I, the Lord, do all these things.”

Why?

For what reason?

And, of course, did God himself not strike dead the child of adultery. The innocent baby of David and Bathsheba?

He did.

He did.

“I’m being asked to drink the blood of Christ, and soon I’ll eat his flesh. I’m alone again before the altar. Shedding all my old regrets.” — The Wrote and the Writ, Johnny Flynn

Explain. Make it work if you can. Climb to the mountaintop and point your finger at the sky and demand that God give a reckoning of his actions. He is on the hook for all of this. He started this universe going, knowing full well where it would end up and all the pain that it would cause along the way. Before the foundation of the world he saw the leopard sink its teeth into some poor creature’s neck. He watched the venom of a snake coursing through the blood of its victim, slowly turning it to jelly in the veins. Before the foundation of the world he saw every mother cry.

Explain.

Explain!

Theologian! Theologize!

Make it work.

Enough with your games and your clever dodges. Face the question. Here, now, give a defense of your God for all his crimes. The problem of evil is the only problem. Everything else is cope. Silly distractions. A child lying dead in its mother’s arms is the only refutation of God that makes sense and in two thousand years none have risen to answered that corpse’s challenge.

And yet…

And yet we still feel that there is something. Something more. Something just out of sight that we do not understand. In our better moments we have all felt it. The rain on newly fallen grass. The dusting of snow on a cottage roof. The flapping wings of a butterfly sitting serenely on a flower and the embrace of an old friend. Does it not seem very much as though there are two forces, opposing, polar opposites. Two forces set against each other in every way, as though the cosmos were composed of two enemies vying for control over reality itself? Does it not feel as though there were a principle, or, if you like, a god, of light… and then one also of darkness? A yin and a yang?

Polytheists do not have this problem. The pagan world suffered no anxiety regarding the so called “problem of evil.” There were good gods and bad ones. Ones that wanted you to live and ones that wanted you to die. The heavens were full of opposing forces you could court and curry favor with if you so desired. No. It is only the monotheists who struggle. Those who say, “Yes, yes, I see your point but beyond all that apparent struggle is a whole. A unity. All is One.” Hear oh Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is One.

How?

Well, Christianity is deeper than you suppose.

White in the Black. Black in the White.

Both white and black are the same. Each is the summation of all the other colors. White contains within it red and blue and green and yellow, all the colors of the rainbow, as you see quite clearly when it is passed through a prism, or through the aftermath of a rainy day. Black, likewise, contains all the colors within itself too, as you will see quickly if you mix all the paints together upon the palette. How can this be so? How does the left hand of God commune with the right? The demons with the angels?

Has God not made them both?

When you put blue paint upon a canvas you are not putting down a substance that “gives off” blue light. You are rather putting down a substance that absorbs all light but blue. You are engaged in a subtractive process. White light strikes the paint and all the frequencies of light except for blue are destroyed. Add in enough such pigments and you will mix together something that absorbs all the frequencies. You will have created black paint. Black therefore is the summation of all colors through negation. White, the summation of all colors through addition. Blue red and green pixels, added together, emit their respective frequencies in unison, creating white light. These two processes are inseparable. If colors can be added logic dictates they must also be separable. Were it not so it would be impossible to ever see blue or purple or teal. To create is to destroy. Red only becomes a possibility when you destroy everything else in the spectrum. When you absorb it. When you make it go away.

And yet this is not enough. All the philosophizing about the nature of light and dark is no comfort to the grieving parent. Nor is such solace to the one in despair. God does not get off the hook so easily. When we watch a wolf tear a deer apart while it screams, yin-yang symbols are little comfort. Talk of the left and right hands does nothing to abate the horrors of war.

Why does evil exist? Why should God allow it? Or, at least, why should He allow it to such degree? Perhaps, maybe, we could be content with the idea that a certain amount of pain might be necessary for a greater good. The idea that we might need to occasionally destroy red and blue to experience a brilliant green. Sure. But why this much? Why cancer or Down Syndrome or bullets or car crashes? It is too much. Why?

WHY?

I don’t know.

I suggest however that part of the solution is to walk into it. To embrace it. To reject the other colors by painting yourself red with blood.

So, sometimes I spear fish.

I wade in shallow water with a long pointed stick and hurl it at creatures round my feet. I watch as the point of the spear enters their bodies and the waters turn red and they wriggle hopelessly upon the shaft for a few moments before falling still. In those moments I am a monster. A giant like Godzilla or King Kong, mercilessly taking life for my own pleasure and to feed my own stomach. I am the leopard with the animal in its teeth. I partake of Tennyson’s nature, red in tooth and claw. I kill.

And, somehow, doing so helps things make sense.

This man believes in God.

In a rational way? No. The problem of evil is a problem that is larger than Reason which is why philosophers have consistently failed to solve it. It can only be understood by entering into it. By feeling it. By, let us be honest, partaking of it.

Paul wrestled with this. People accused him of teaching that one ought do evil that good may come of it, in part, no doubt, because he was wrestling with such problems as these and the only solution is a kind of transcendence. What Paul called Grace.

I can’t solve the problem of evil for you. Nobody can. But I think you can begin to see the outlines of an answer if you stop pretending that you yourself are so above it. That you yourself are so pure. I think the answer starts to take shape once you admit to yourself that your existence, your life, requires the deaths of other creatures. If you admit that your need for space necessitates crowding out something else that might live where you do now. Yes, you do have to chop down trees to build your house and you do have to slaughter a cow to have your dinner. That’s life. Life is killing. You’re a killer. Perhaps one day you will even have to take the life of another human. We hope not but it happens. I’m only saying stop pretending you don’t have it in you. You do. Reach inside your mouth and feel your teeth. You my friend have fangs.

To my estimation much of the modern problem with God and religion stems from a refusal to see ourselves for what we are. The men of the Old Testament suffered no such delusions. They knew they were killers. That evil lurked within them. They killed often. Animals all the time, other men, occasionally. In a sense they did theology with a spear. They got down and dirty with the way things really are. The way things are at base. They did not have a sophisticated technological civilization to act as a buffer between themselves and their brutality. In some ways that was a blessing. Of course, I’m sure that when they felt an arrow passing through their stomach it did not much feel like one.

And yet even they looked forward to something different. Isaiah, the same prophet who wrote the passage at the beginning of this post, also wrote that one day, when all was accomplished, the wolf would lay down together with the lamb. That there would, one day, be Peace. Amen. One day.

That day is not today however.

Today we still live in a world where babies die.

For now God’s still on the hook for all that. He knows it.

That’s partly why he let us hang him on a cross.