While I will now limit myself to speaking in terms of the one God rather than to the Trinity in order to simplify the grammar and syntax, what is said could equally be applied to the Trinity. Now, because God is fully actualized in his love and goodness, he cannot be deprived of that love and goodness which would cause him to suffer, for to suffer such loss would make him less than perfectly loving and good. Moreover, and here we touch the heart of the issue, it must be remembered, in accordance with the biblical notion of God, that while God is intimately related to creation as its Creator, he exists in his own distinct ontological order as the Creator. Therefore, the sin and evil that deprive human beings of some good and so cause them to suffer is contained wholly within the created ontological order and cannot reverberate or wash back into the uncreated order where God alone exists as absolutely good. If the sin and evil of the created order caused God to suffer, it would demand that God and all else would exist in the same ontological order, for only if he existed in the same ontological order in which the evil was enacted could he then suffer. This is why most of the theologians who espouse a suffering God intentionally advocate a panentheistic notion of God, that is, that while God is potentially more than the cosmos, yet the cosmos is constitutive of his very being. (Those theologians who espouse a suffering God, but not panentheism fail to grasp the logic of their own position.) Being ensconced within the cosmic order God must necessarily assume all that pertains to that order including sin and the suffering it causes. However, if his very nature is constituted by his being a member of the cosmic order, then he can no longer be its all loving Creator. He becomes merely the one who attempts to bring order to the cosmic process after the manner of the Platonic Demiurge. Equally, since evil, which causes suffering, is the privation of some good, it would mean that a suffering God was deprived of some good and thus he would no longer be perfectly good. Moreover, if God, having lost his singular transcendence, is now infected by evil and suffering, then he too is immanently enmeshed in an evil cosmic process from which he, like all else, cannot escape. God may now suffer in union with all who suffer, and those who espouse a suffering God boast this to be of singular value, but in so suffering humankind, and even God himself, are deprived of any hope of ever being freed from evil and so the suffering that it causes. There is no hope of divine justice ever setting things aright nor is there any hope of love and goodness vanquishing evil. The transcendent One All-Holy God of the Bible who, as Creator, is present to all creation, and who, as Savior, acts immanently within that creation, vanishes. Thus, a suffering God is not only philosophically and theologically untenable, but also religiously devastating, for it is at least emotionally disheartening if not actually abhorrent. However, the truly biblical God does offer hope.
Posted on: Fri, 15 Nov 2013 21:07:51 +0000
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