There were some heavy accusations made against God in the last exchange of letters but this is something that needs to be looked at and clarified, if possible. After all, the Church is the place of confession where we face up to our deepest and darkest thoughts. In fact, one way to see things is to see atheism and other anti-Church activities as confessions of human souls before the Church. Atheists are people who have been hurt because they have lost their Father – they are orphans and we should reflect on how we treat orphans: with loving kindness and patience.

It is highly unfortunate that the Church has come to be seen as the rigid arbiter of what can and cannot be said but thoughts and views that are buried deep within us have a habit of percolating out and causing even more damage. These feelings must be heard out and the people making them must be embraced by the Church, as a form of “confession”, since she is the Mother of us all.

By raising the points that you do, we can now dig a little deeper and try to cast some light on them. There are people within the Church who are open and charitable enough to hear out our troubling thoughts. Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, when parishioners would come to him for confession, would ask them if they forgave those whom they met and shared their lives with and who had wronged them. Interestingly, he would also ask of them if they were ready to forgive God. He realized that within each human being there is an ambivalence towards God. Having said this by way of a preamble, let us now get to the substance of what you wrote.

I think that the first point that has to be kept in mind is that it is humans who have at least partially enabled evil to enter into creation and to wreak havoc and misery. Evil did not originate with God. God could not create an alternate immortal god (this would be nonsensical) and He was going to solve this issue, originally, through the Incarnation sans the crucifixion. Man was going to be offered freedom from death by having a relationship with God, a relationship through which man would bring creation back to God as a gift for blessing. This is a life-bearing relationship without which we wither and die.

This relationship was interrupted through sin which arose through idolatry. Idolatry, as I mentioned earlier, is basing our relationship on the created order alone which does not have life within it. Death, and the subsequent suffering and evil, come to man not as a punishment in a juridical sense, but as a direct consequence of man putting the fate of his being into the hands of what is created and which cannot give eternal life.

It was Adam’s fall that necessitated a change in strategy. In a sense, as I stated above, what already anticipated the Incarnation was man’s mortality which man tried to deal with through selfishness and greed. The question before God, as a result of Adam’s action, was how to redeem His good, but corrupted, creation and the whole story of Israel is how God went about saving not just humanity, but the whole of creation. But, as we have seen earlier, even this plan faltered and the hoped for a solution, became part of the problem and it was through Christ’s sacrificial death that creation was rescued and restored to its proper status.

Another important point is that redemption is a cosmic event. It is too often forgotten that salvation is not only about man but about the whole of creation. There is a universal component to redemption, a component which is often forgotten or omitted. Note that in the last sentence of the book of Jonah, God specifically refers to His concern for all, even “the livestock”.

Just a few thoughts about some common misconceptions about Christ which we need to correct if we are to try to understand creation and God’s relationship to creation. It is sometimes claimed that Christ is simply a good human being who gives us the best example of how we are to behave. He is not divine because it makes no sense to talk about God somehow descending into creation to become one of the creatures (I will talk about the ‘mechanics’ of this event a little later on.) However, there does seem to be a consensus that Jesus was indeed a good and loving human being who suffered and forgave and taught us about how humans should behave. This is fine and good, but where does this leave God? If Jesus is not God, then in a sense, Jesus is greater than God, he is more noble than God, he is more loving than God because it is Christ who exhibits love and suffering and forgiveness and not God. There is no merit here to be ascribed to God because, if Jesus is not divine, then God had nothing to do with what Jesus underwent. It is under those circumstances where Christ is not divine, that we see it is Jesus who inspires us and not God. And what is also extremely important, we could not even say that God loves. So you see, saying that Jesus is not divine leads us into a meaningless and confusing dead end. So, let’s just put that thought aside. We must carry out our discussion with the full realization that God is not just justice but, more importantly, God is suffering love for all of creation as is so strikingly shown in Christ.

Now, let us unpack the story from Dostoyevsky in the person of Ivan. It all sounds very noble but it really does not stand up to scrutiny and the reason for this is a faulty understanding of forgiveness which comes from an incomplete and faulty understanding of time. We should continually keep in mind that we are operating from a fallen world which, although not totally corrupted, neither is it untainted with the effects of the fall.

Dostoyevsky’s challenge is that injustices have been committed and nothing can be done about them now. They are locked in the vaults of times past and therefore they are there untouchable, and condemning God for creating this cosmos. This displays a major assumption about what God can and cannot do and we have indications within our liturgical tradition that God can in effect act throughout time, whether it is past, present or future.

What Dostoyevsky is claiming, through the words of Ivan, is that it would be better for Ivan not to have been created at all. It is not worth it. This is a highly speculative position and I really don’t know how anyone could claim it and on what basis they could come to this conclusion. Dostoyevsky writes about an incident, one day before the enslaved peasants were liberated by the Tsar, where a ‘nobleman set his dogs on a little child, the son of his peasants, and the dogs tore the child to death. Horrific as this is, it is not God who is responsible for this atrocity – it is the so-called nobleman who is totally responsible. But the question that arises from this is: can God, and should He, forgive the person who committed this act?

We seem to be here at an impasse. Someone, who has been wronged, can refuse to forgive and this would seem to put a block on God’s project of creation. People who have been wronged would have the capacity, through unforgiveness, to thwart God’s creation project. It would be akin to the situation that they have the power to veto the happiness and joy of so many other people. This obviously cannot be because God will succeed in His bringing of creation to fruition and completion.

Where Dostoyevsky’s argument fails very strongly is in holding the view, a faulty view, that somehow, incremental improvements in the world, will finally bring about the total disappearance of evil and suffering through developmental progress or through evolution. (The gospel of the modern world and enlightenment.) The problem with this view is that it seeks to achieve the disappearance of evil on the back of all the evil that has already transpired. This utopian hope has no answer to past evils, it cannot assign a purpose or reason to all the wrongdoing in history, and from this we can see that this is what Dostoyevsky’s position really argues against.

God through Christ has defeated evil and evil no longer has the power to blackmail or challenge creation and God’s goodness. God’s victory over evil has been total and complete. It is through this victory that God has given His final answer to the existence of evil within the creation that was created good. This is why, within the Church, there is such joy in the Incarnation and Resurrection. They address the terrible confrontation with evil and answer it definitively and completely, and central to that answer is forgiveness. A new world order has been initiated and its currency is forgiveness which is the means whereby we all are enabled to enter this New Creation. And those who refuse to forgive are really saying that they refuse to enter the Kingdom of God. They still cling to the corrosive hatred and vengeful thinking that bars them from participating in the joy of New Creation. And being free creatures, they have a full right to refuse entering the New Creation. What they are really doing is placing themselves and not the rest of creation outside the bounds of the Kingdom.

But, I am sure you will ask: if evil has been defeated what has really, empirically changed in our world? With this thought, I must leave you.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas