Friday, April 07, 2006

Creator, Created and Providence

A long term irritant for me has been my inability to make sense of providence. At the heart of this struggle has been, and I dare say still is, a struggle with the problem of evil and an anxiety about the confidence we can have in interpreting events as divinely caused.

An example might be the man who thinks he hears God speak to him of his vocation, but later discovers that he misheard and that he was deluded.

Another example might be the family who go hill walking and find themselves in a sudden storm which is driving them to a precipice. They pray and the wind subsides. They thank God for an answer to prayer. But, what if the wind hadn't subsided and half the family had plummeted to their death? Would the survivors have thanked God in that situation? Oh, we could say that they're all sinners and should be grateful for every ray of sun light they undeservedly get. But surely, this is too difficult to live with and I don't think it is wishful thinking to argue that the Incarnation and Redemption demand that we think of God as taking a more compassionate stance.

Perhaps I'm just ungrateful and miserable but I struggle to always interpret life positively and fear that Romans 8:28 - at least in one interpretation - demands that we do so.

Enter Barth and his Romans commentary.

I'm going to try and sketch the following idea as briefly as I can. Whether it can be sustained or built upon I'll leave to comments and other posts.

We should accept the qualitatively absolute divide between Creator and Creation. The relationship between the two is one way in the sense that the finite, temporal human has no access to the infinite and eternal ... except insofar as the Creator establishes the basis of such a relationship.

With such a divide, the Creation has no hope of establishing any relationship with the Creator, except the one of utter dependence which already exists insofar as the Creation is created. Humans, therefore, have no means of pointing to anything in the world around them or inside them and correctly saying 'there is God', except insofar as they point at everything and exclaim 'God is cause, and I can say no more'. The Creation echos its finitude. The Creation is a shadow which we know demands a source of light, but the light itself is forever behind us.

Asserting God as cause, primal noise, light source, does not allow us to say anything of more of God from observation of Creation. [Here, I wonder if Barth needs to do more work. I'm circling around the ideas of Natural Theology and the use of Biblical ideas of Wisdom - admitted qualified radically within the canon itself - Job vs Proverbs.] All attempts to do so are revealed to be futile and result in talking as much about ourselves and our own wishes and fears as anything else. Is this because of a Fall, that our ability to interpret creation is so corrupted or that the Wise order of Creation itself is corrupted to distort the divine blueprint? Possibly. This too needs to be investigated. However, whatever the cause of this situation this would appear still to be the situation - ambiguity, finitude, helplessness.

The Incarnation and the Resurrection are miraculous. Here I take the miraculous to be utterly sui generis. There is no analogy to the miraculous. It is unrepeatable. It cannot be demonstrated using the tools of history or science. It establishes reality rather than requiring to be established by analysis using our finite tools of analysis. We should be glad of this. We require help from outside. An answer from within this world is no answer.

It is here in the Incarnation and Resurrection that we encounter the invisible, impossible God. This is what establishes God's character for us. Here we are reminded of the transcendent nature of God as Creator and of finitude and helplessness and the divine answer to this unbridgeable gap.

The Incarnation and the Resurrection are impossible using the tools of science and history. They cannot be accounted for and nor can they be recounted ...

... which is precisely the situation we are asked to face with regard to providence and prayer - an impossibility with regard to all that we know or can think.

The Incarnation and Resurrection remind us of a God we have forgotten, who is beyond description, beyond imagination in power and knowledge and wisdom. They remind us that our temporal sphere of cause and effect is a mere blink of an eye. They remind us that our very freedom and subjecthood, which we fear are imperilled by divine sovereignty, are actually established by it.

Where does this lead me? I'm not sure about the practicalities (which are essential to be addressed) but it leads me to assert both a greater sovereignty and a greater freedom. It leads me to assert that Romans 8:28 is true, but impossibly so. We cannot see it. But it is true. We may catch glimpses but only that. Hope that is seen is not hope.