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Incomplete theses on God's will, providence, and evil
Last week, in my upper-level majors course on systematic theology, the topic was providence. We read classical accounts of divine and human agency and discussed the nature of God's will. I wrote up some provisional, incomplete theses to help guide them through the thicket. I'm sharing them below, partly as an aid to others, partly as an invitation to be corrected by my betters—this area is simply not my specialty. St. Thomas, pray for this theologian's poor soul!
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Affirmations- God, as the sole creator and author of creation ex nihilo, is solely responsible for the ongoing existence and well-being of the creation.
- God is sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient, and good.
- God is Lord of creation.
- God upholds creation as a whole and in all its parts at all times, without ceasing.
- God underlies, informs, and enables any and all activity in creation: nothing happens apart from God; no creature can act apart from God’s sovereign will.
- God conducts creatures and creation as a whole toward their proximate and final ends, in this world and the next.
- Nothing exists or happens outside the scope of God’s will.
- Sin and evil are contrary to God’s will; sinful deeds and evil events occur.
- God does not will sin, nor is God the author of evil.
- When and where sin and evil are found in creation, God permits it.
- God is able to bring good from evil and sin, including when they are intended by creatures to obstruct God’s purposes.
- In the end, God will triumph over all sin and evil, and they will be no more in the new creation.
- We do not know why God permits sin and evil.
- On its face, a sinful deed or evil happening is a surd: meaningless in itself; neither sin nor evil is ever (really, deeply, ultimately) good.
- The experience of suffering or loss is not itself necessarily sin or evil.
- God may therefore actively will (rather than permit) our suffering in this world.
- “Everything happens for a reason” is either true in an incomprehensible way (where that “reason” is Christ, who will reveal all to us only in glory) or false in a facile and pastorally disastrous way (where the starvation of children has a readily intelligible reason we can grasp in the moment).
- The relationship between God’s will (as primary cause) and my will (as secondary cause) when I engage in sin (say, lying) is mysterious and inscrutable: somehow my willing as a free agent in bondage to sin possesses some deficiency (or, rather, lacks something necessary) that keeps it from fully performing righteous activity in full in accordance with God’s will and command.
- So that:
- We may say that God wills in all my willing, but...
- ...we may not say that God wills the sin I invariably will.
Lewis's other virtue as a novelist
Last week I listed six virtues that make C. S. Lewis's novels, especially the Space Trilogy, so lovable. I forgot one, though: his ability to describe evil—evil persons and evil deeds—without ever making evil the least bit appealing or interesting.
This isn't because there's no evil in Lewis's world; there's plenty. In fact, it's often embodied not just in human beings but in devils, or in humans possessed by demons. The scale of evil in Lewis is cosmic. But it is also minute, even mundane. And that's what makes his depiction of evil so brilliant, so compelling, yet so unattractive. Evil is boring, ugly, deficient, and stupid. It's imbecilic, infantile, a shallow life-sucking self-sabotage of all that is—which is to say, of all that is good, beautiful, and true. It enlivens nothing and parasitically eats from the inside whatever gives it quarter.
Lewis is able to strike this philosophically informed macro/micro balance without glamorizing the good life (under fallen conditions) or idealizing the virtuous individual precisely because the drama of principalities and powers—of angels and demons in Deep Heaven—is played out every day in the ordinary dramas of neighbors and friends, husbands and wives, parents and children. The tiniest act of charity, unnoticed by a soul, even the soul that offers it, is a mighty moment in the triumph of Good over Evil; and yet the quotidian pettinesses of marriages and workplaces and churches are no less occasions for Satan and all his pomp to win a battle in their (ultimately unwinnable) war against the Lord and all his heavenly host.
All that to say, the characters and actions and ideas representing evil in Lewis's fiction are recognizably wicked, however great or small that wickedness may be, but never once do you, as the reader, find yourself drawn to the evil (notwithstanding your recognition of what might make it emotionally or psychologically tempting in situ). The evil is all too "real," but insubstantial, vaporous, nothing. Because that's what evil actually is, nothing at all, a lack of goodness and being, of what makes life worth living. Contemporary stories' protagonists, so full of "gritty" "moral grayness," are both unserious and unrealistic by comparison.
Because Lewis understood what so many have forgotten: truly to see evil, in story form, is finally to see right through it.
This isn't because there's no evil in Lewis's world; there's plenty. In fact, it's often embodied not just in human beings but in devils, or in humans possessed by demons. The scale of evil in Lewis is cosmic. But it is also minute, even mundane. And that's what makes his depiction of evil so brilliant, so compelling, yet so unattractive. Evil is boring, ugly, deficient, and stupid. It's imbecilic, infantile, a shallow life-sucking self-sabotage of all that is—which is to say, of all that is good, beautiful, and true. It enlivens nothing and parasitically eats from the inside whatever gives it quarter.
Lewis is able to strike this philosophically informed macro/micro balance without glamorizing the good life (under fallen conditions) or idealizing the virtuous individual precisely because the drama of principalities and powers—of angels and demons in Deep Heaven—is played out every day in the ordinary dramas of neighbors and friends, husbands and wives, parents and children. The tiniest act of charity, unnoticed by a soul, even the soul that offers it, is a mighty moment in the triumph of Good over Evil; and yet the quotidian pettinesses of marriages and workplaces and churches are no less occasions for Satan and all his pomp to win a battle in their (ultimately unwinnable) war against the Lord and all his heavenly host.
All that to say, the characters and actions and ideas representing evil in Lewis's fiction are recognizably wicked, however great or small that wickedness may be, but never once do you, as the reader, find yourself drawn to the evil (notwithstanding your recognition of what might make it emotionally or psychologically tempting in situ). The evil is all too "real," but insubstantial, vaporous, nothing. Because that's what evil actually is, nothing at all, a lack of goodness and being, of what makes life worth living. Contemporary stories' protagonists, so full of "gritty" "moral grayness," are both unserious and unrealistic by comparison.
Because Lewis understood what so many have forgotten: truly to see evil, in story form, is finally to see right through it.