Apologia Spring 2013

Apologia�e Dartmouth

A Journal of Christian �ought

Spring 2013, Volume 7, Issue 2

A Look into the Work of Mary Astell

Christianity and Feminism

featuring

also inside

Dr. Mark Harris on Christian Soul and Its Intelligibility

Postmodernism and the Nature of God’s Grace

Dostoevsky and the Book of Job

Front cover image by Melody Zhang ‘13

Spring 2013, Volume 7, Issue 2

Editor-in-ChiefChristopher Hauser ‘14

Managing EditorSteffi Ostrowski ‘14

Executive EditorHayden Kvamme ‘14

Editorial BoardSuiwen Liang ‘13

Brendan Woods ‘13Robert Smith ‘14

Business ManagerRobert Smith ‘14

Production ManagerMinae Seog ‘14

Production StaffMichael Choi ‘14

Janice Yip ‘15

PhotographyMelody Zhang ‘13

Jacob Kupferman ‘14Sarah Wang ‘14

ContributorsCaroline Suresh ‘14Macy Ferguson ‘16

David Truschel, Biola University

Faculty Advisory BoardGregg Fairbrothers, TuckRichard Denton, Physics

Eric Hansen, ThayerEric Johnson, Tuck

James Murphy, GovernmentLeo Zacharski, DMS

Special thanks toCouncil on Student Organizations

The Eleazar Wheelock Society

Christianity does not compete against physics, biology, literature, philosophy, or psychology; Christianity does not claim to be an alternative to the human inge-nuity of Tuck’s entrepreneurs, nor does it seek to replace the human creativity of

Thayer’s engineers. Christianity does not seek to stifle Tucker volunteers’ attempts to allevi-ate human suffering, nor does it ask Dartmouth athletes to abandon their quest for victory on the field. Even in the case of the Greek system, Christianity is not opposed. Instead, Christianity embraces all these things. There’s only one thing Christianity will not embrace: what is not real, what is not true, what is not good.

The Apologia exists to articulate Christian perspectives on Dartmouth’s campus: we ex-ist to unite all truth, whether presented in a painting or in a novel, whether expressed in a philosophical proposition or in a mathematical equation, as one in the One who is Truth. We search after all things good, whether found in the volunteer efforts of the Tucker Foundation or in the fraternal activities of the Greek system. At the center of this endeavor is our dedication to the hope that all truths, all good things, all that is real, is reconcilable in the end; that in the end, all things do make sense.

In this effort, Apologia stands in a long tradition of Christian forerunners. Saint Augustine dedicated his fifth century treatise, The City of God, to illustrating that Christian virtue didn’t compete with true civic virtue: in the final analysis, far from causing the fall of Rome, true Christians were actually the best of all Roman citizens by the Romans own standards. Saint Thomas Aquinas dedicated his thirteenth century treatise, The Summa Theologica, to illustrating that far from replacing Aristotelian philosophy, Christianity could embrace the best human philosophy of the time and even add to it, perfecting it on its own terms. And now the Apologia stands present at Dartmouth working in the same, if a lesser, spirit, not competing against our beloved college’s aims but rather seeking through Christ to realize and fulfill these aims. We have sought to integrate the life of the mind with our deepest values and convictions, bringing students and faculty from across Dartmouth’s academic departments and extra-curricular groups in an effort to discover and define a coherent intel-lectual worldview.

In the pages that follow, you will find two kinds of articles. One kind of article chal-lenges misconceptions about Christianity or seeks to rearticulate a Christian idea in light of seeming misunderstanding (e.g., Macy Ferguson’s article on Heaven, Hell, and Christian Freedom). Another kind of article seeks to think critically about a particular subject matter, seeking to shed further light on this research by applying the lens of Christianity to the sub-ject matter (e.g., Caroline Suresh’s article on Christianity and Postmodernism). I hope you discover such threads as that of grace, free will, suffering, and truth, which run throughout these seemingly disparate articles. Indeed, we invite all our readers, whether Christian or not, to join us in our quest to for a coherent, interdisciplinary worldview capable of uniting and deepening our understanding of all things real, true, and good.

A Letter from the Editor

Apologia OnlineSubscription information is available on our website at dart-mouthapologia.org. The Dartmouth Apologia also publishes a weekly blog called Tolle Lege on issues re-lated to faith and reason. Email us to subscribe, or access the blog at blog.dartmouthapologia.org.

The opinions expressed in The Dartmouth Apologia are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the journal, its editors, or Dartmouth College. Copyright © 2013 The Dartmouth Apologia.

SubmissionsWe welcome the submission of any article, essay, or artwork for publication in The Dartmouth Apologia. Submissions should seek to promote respectful, thoughtful discussion in the community. We will consider submissions from any member of the community but reserve the right to publish only those that align with our mission statement and quality rubric. Email: [email protected]

Letters to the EditorWe value your opinions and encourage thoughtful submissions expressing support, dissent, or other views. We will gladly consider any letter that is consistent with our mission statement’s focus on promoting intellectual discourse in the Dartmouth community.

Christopher HauserEditor-in-Chief

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A Journalof Christian

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�oughtThe Dartmouth Apologia exists to articulate Christian perspectives

in the academic community.

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interview The Idea of a Christian

Soul and Its IntelligibilityDoctor Mark Harris

University of Edinburgh

Becoming oneself: C.S. Lewis’ Allegory of the Afterlife

Macy Ferguson ‘16

Deconstruction anD the nature of goD’s grace

Caroline Suresh ‘14

christianity anD feminism:A Look into the Work of Mary Astell

Steffi Ostrowski ‘14

Divine attriButes:Why an Imperfect God

Just Won’t DoChris Hauser ‘14

salvific suffering anD the Dark night of the soul

Robert Smith ‘14

you have not spoken of me what is right:The Brothers Karamazov

and the Book of JobDavid Truschel ‘14

Biola University

Book review: Ronald Sider’s

Just PoliticsHayden Kvamme ‘14

Dr. Mark Harris is a professional physicist, ordained minister, and lecturer in the Religion and Science program of The University of Edinburgh’s Divinity School. As a physicist, Dr. Harris is known (along with Steve Bramwell) as the discoverer of “spin ice,” a model system that has had a dramatic influence on research in magnetism. As a theologian, Dr. Harris engages the overlap of the theological and scientific worldviews, particularly concerning issues such as creation, miracles, and the topic of this interview, the idea of the soul.

dr. mark harrisConducted by Christopher Hauser

An interview with

ChristianSoul

Intelligibility Its&

The Idea of a

2 • The Dartmouth Apologia • Spring 2013 ] [

but that is now largely disappearing, at least in popu-lar conception. Also, the way that modern science has developed in the field of psychology or neuroscience – we’ve started to realize that a lot of the things we might have once attributed to the soul or mind we can now understand in terms of biology, for instance: subjects can be given stimulus and made to think of things and brain scans can be done which suggest that we can pin-point what’s going on. And the same studies have been done for people who are praying. There is a sense in which the religious part of me can have a wholly bio-logical explanation. And this leads to all sorts of ques-tions and uncertainties about what exactly the soul is.

Do you see any problems with this notion of the soul from a philosophical point of view or from a Christian point of view?

I would say to that that it depends on your cos-mology. With the advent of modern science, we have developed over the past few hundred years a very mate-rialistic cosmology where everything is ultimately open to empirical verification or testing. There isn’t a single door in the universe that can’t be opened, that we can’t knock on it and find out what’s behind it. And so from a scientific point of view, we feel like the soul really ought to be in our grasp in scientific terms too. And

the fact that it really isn’t, that we are still talking about a concept that we can barely even define, suggests that there is something deeper here. Similar questions arise when we start to try to talk about even more funda-mental aspects of me that don’t have a religious conno-tation, things like mind and consciousness. The kinds of questions we’ve been asking about the soul turn out to be almost the same as people, including scientists, are currently asking about the mind: what is the mind and what is its relationship to the physical brain, or what is consciousness?

We are all aware that we are conscious beings – it is one of the most distinctive things about us. It seems to be the distinctive aspect that separates us from other animals. But what exactly is consciousness? There are as many answers are there are people working on it. It’s one of the great scientific mysteries of our day. The more we try to understand, the more problems arise, and the soul is right in the middle of this because it is effectively the religious dimension of our consciousness

What are the contemporary way(s) of under-standing the soul? Could you touch on the idea of “substance dualism,” as well as the layman’s understanding of the soul?

“Soul” is a very common word in English. We use it for all sorts of things generally to mean either the living essence of a person or whatever it is that contains the “real” them. We might talk about 100 souls lost at sea, meaning living human beings, or I might talk about my soul as being the deepest, most important part of me, where everything, my deepest values and feelings, reside. I do think we’ve become rather confused about it, though, lately. This is certainly the case for those of us in the West who are influenced by Christianity – we tend to understand it in very religious terms. And we often think of it in the terms you just mentioned – “substance dualism,” the idea that I am made up of two distinct entities, namely flesh and spirit or body and soul. And of course there is some toing and froing about whether spirit and soul are the same thing or dis-tinct. But if we were to use that understanding of soul, namely substance dualism, we would typically think of my soul as containing the essential me, particularly after my death, that is, as carrying an immortal qual-ity to it. It doesn’t need to be in close contact with the body, but it can live on. Many people might think of the afterlife as souls going to heaven.

Now this idea is often connected with Descartes – “I think therefore I am.” Here, the mind/soul contains the most important aspect of me, that which will live on after my body. But of course this idea goes as far back as Plato and perhaps earlier if we dig around in ancient myths. (Plato believed in the immortal soul and thought that physical reality was in some sense a lesser reality than the world of ideas and spirits). But in all of this there is great uncertainty about the soul, just as there is for the whole human condition when the mind is in consideration, thanks to things like evo-lutionary biology, for instance, which has taught us that we are animals like others (we might think about Desmond Morris and his famous study, “The Naked Ape”). Studies like this might lead us to questions like do animals have souls. Many people say they do, and there are religious traditions like Jainism which believe they do.

What separates us from animals? The traditional Christian belief was that we have souls and they don’t,

The Church has over the last two thousand years struggled with this: the Hebrew notion that the human is one living entity which

will hope for resurrection from God, but at the same time this more Greek idea that there is a spiritual reality which will always live on.

Spring 2013 • The Dartmouth Apologia • 3] [

(or that’s the way I’m explaining it at the moment). The philosophical problems of the soul arise from that fact that we’ve inherited this Christian tradition where the soul is my religious dimension, the quintessential me, and yet science has brought in at the same time a much more materialistic view of cosmology which seems contradictory. Again, the soul is effectively in the middle of this.

Now, from a Christian perspective, I know some people feel very threatened when you suggest some-thing like “the soul doesn’t exist.” It’s almost tanta-mount to saying something like “salvation doesn’t exist” or “God doesn’t exist.” You’re just made up of atoms, cells, and chemicals; there’s no part of you that can be saved. This is how some people read this. However, one of the things that theologians working on this have realized is that we are actually rediscover-ing the worldview of the Bible.

The ancient Hebrew anthropology, in which most of the Old Testament arose, didn’t really believe in the soul as a disembodied entity but instead saw the whole human being as a single material whole. If the Old Testament speaks of “soul,” it generally tends to mean “that being endowed with life, with God’s breath,” or it might sometimes mean “the essential me” but un-derstood as a physical me. So the idea that you want to split the human being up, into two different parts, a physical part and a soul part, is largely alien to the worldview of the Bible.

In many ways, what we’re doing in asking questions about the soul and raising the status of the physical through science is essentially getting back to what the people of the Bible knew. And that is why a lot of the theological writings around this will talk about the cir-cular historical narrative, whereby we are rediscovering what the people of the Bible always knew, that the hu-man being is a living whole. When dead, we are dead. We have to wait for resurrection. And there is a sense in which too strong a belief in substance dualism weakens the idea of resurrection at the heart of Christianity. The Church has over the last two thousand years struggled with this: the Hebrew notion that the human is one living entity which will hope for resurrection from God, but at the same time this more Greek idea that there is a spiritual reality which will always live on.

I think you’ve raised some of the important is-sues surrounding the topic. In particular, you’ve highlighted the importance of the doctrine of resurrection, a doctrine which figures centrally in many controversies in the history of the Church, for example, that of the Cathar heresy in the 12th century or the Gnostics in the early Church, where the goodness of the material world was chal-lenged. What about the Church Fathers? How do their views of the soul differ from these contempo-rary ones?

When I speak of the Church Fathers, I mean those Christian theologians from the time of what is often called the “Apostolic Fathers,” extending from the be-ginning of the 2nd century, after the New Testament was written, up to about the 5th century Council of Chalcedon, when the nature of Christ as having a human and divine nature was settled in at least one part of Christianity. This was the classical age when most of Christian theology was fought over and for-mulated. And of course, the idea of the soul is a very central idea. The historical narrative tends to see our idea of the soul as crystallizing during this time. At the beginning of this period, most Christians came from a Jewish background and tended to have a mo-nist understanding of the soul, meaning that the hu-man being is one physical entity and that we hope for resurrection from God. But by the end of this period the Church found itself in a state where it believed in the immortal soul, as well as the resurrection of the physical body, and therefore theologians had to try to reconcile this by talking about the soul existing apart from the body and being rejoined to the body at the resurrection, thereby introducing a sort of intermedi-ate state when the two are separated. This was a way of bridging the gap between the Hebrew anthropology and the Greek anthropology.

Now that’s the way that the historical narrative tends to work, but when you start to look at the writ-ings of individual Church Fathers, you realize that they were actually much more subtle and sophisticated than this historical narrative suggests. In the fourth century, quite a lot of theologians sprouted up asking questions about this topic in light of the condemnation of the teaching of Apollinarius, who had denied that Jesus had a human soul. It was mostly agreed that Jesus had


a soul (especially after the condemnation), but there was a need to explain just what that meant.

Gregory of Nyssa (c.329-389/90) wrote a whole treatise on the subject of the soul and resurrection, wherein he went into great depth about what it means to have a soul and to say that I will be raised from the dead. He tended to see the soul in metaphorical terms as a way of speaking about the human being in religious terms, but he is hard to pin down – at times, he seems like a substance dualist but at others times talks as if the soul is just the body talked about from a religious angle. One of the ideas he is best known for is (in Greek) epektasis, the ascent of the soul, and he wrote great mystical works about the ascent of the soul toward God. You can almost read this as if it is a kind of spiritual journey which has no bearing on my body at all, but when you look closely you realize that he is talking about an embodied journey, an ascent which happens in this life as much in the next. So, his idea of salvation is not being something that you just win, that you are suddenly granted so that one day you are not saved and the next you are, but is instead a state of becoming, a gradual process that we are always going through in this life and the next too.

His friend Gregory of Nazianzus (c.335-c.395) was very keen on the idea of the soul and said in response to Apollinarius that we must keep the soul because the soul is the battleground for salvation; it is where sin is effectively to be found in the human condition. If you take away the soul, there is nothing for Christ to save me through. Thus, he tended to see the soul as the interface between the human being and God, and the dividing wall which Christ needed to break down in order to solve the problem of sin and to bring salvation to humans.

As you mentioned earlier, it seems that many people today think of the soul as a kind of mystical reality or as just a kind of metaphor for their emo-tions or identity. Whether coming from an atheistic perspective or a theistic perspective, the soul is seen as this reality which we can’t really grasp in the same way that we grasp most of the other things we talk about. What do you think about this? Can the idea of the soul be built on more solid foundations than that? Is there an intellectual justification for the idea of a soul, or is it is really just this mystical, unseen reality? Or is there a way to reconcile these two answers?

I myself don’t believe in the soul. I don’t think it exists as a thing-in-itself. And I have come across many Christians who feel very threatened by this position. They can’t imagine how a Christian or a theologian could possibly say you don’t have a soul. Nonetheless, I still use the language of “soul” because I find it a very useful metaphor for talking about me from a religious angle, and this is how I read Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus. What I take away from them is their deeply spiritual theology about the human being searching for God, ascending towards God, being the battleground for salvation, while all still happening in the body. I like their use of the term “soul” as a way of describing this while not necessarily thinking of it as a thing-in-itself, that is, the kind of thing that can be pried away from my body. And so, I use the term as the best term we have to denote that mysterious inter-face between us and God. I’m not much of a dualist at all: I don’t tend to believe in the existence of a world of spirits, another dimension of reality I can perceive only “through the glass darkly.” I tend to think there is the physical world and there is God the Creator, and


we exist in relationship with that God. My soul is ef-fectively the bridge, what we call in the science of re-ligion, “the causal link” between God and the world, between Creator and creature.

But is there justification for using that word? Christians often seem to be afraid of science when it comes to things like the soul. Can science, for example neuroscience, prove that there’s no such thing as the soul? From the atheist perspec-tive, there seems to be a “case closed” mentality because we can supposedly explain all these things without appeal to a “soul” or at least will be able to do so in the future after more scientific discoveries. From the Christian perspective, there is a knee-jerk fear that science could disprove the existence of the soul. How should we view devel-opments in scientific inquiry about such matters, committed as they are to some idea of the soul?

Well, we have to consider how we define the term “soul.” Often times it is connected to a religious con-text, which is why atheists are suspicious of the term. On the one hand, if we understand the soul from a re-ligious angle as being a human person in supernatural or spiritual existence, then there’s nothing science can say one way or the other concerning it because science doesn’t have the tools to go into that dimension, if you like. And this is exactly the kind of argument that is often used against “New Atheism”: science may be able to explain a lot of what we see, touch, taste, etc., but that doesn’t mean that’s all there is. This same argu-ment can be applied to the question of the existence of the soul.

On the other hand, the fact that modern cognitive a biological research and neuroscience have done an aw-ful lot to understand the brain suggests that everything that once was attributed to the soul can be understood in physical terms, which suggests that the term soul or the idea of a soul as a separate thing is becoming redun-dant. But I personally think, hearkening back to the Church Fathers, that there is always a case for viewing the human person from a religious angle and then soul is a useful piece of terminology. Even setting this aside, one of the things that is particularly interesting is that whilst a non-believer might have great problems with the term soul because of its religious connotations, that same person is usually very comfortable talking about his or her own consciousness or own mind, and yet sci-ence can do little to prove that we have anything of the sort, apart from our neurons, synapses, cells, etc. that science can talk about it. So, consciousness is in effect a pseudoscientific concept that we cannot describe in scientific terms and perhaps, as some cognitive scien-tists argue, will never understand in scientific terms.

Thus, we have ideas of things like consciousness that look rather like the idea of the soul. And so to answer the specific question of whether science has disproved the idea of the soul, I think the answer is no, and I can’t see any reason why it ever should. On the other hand, science allows us to use language more carefully and I’d love it if we one day understood consciousness more completely and I’m sure that would allow us to define our terms more carefully. But at the moment it’s very mysterious, just like the soul.

So, in one way, then, there is room for encourage-ment, even from the religious perspective, since we are breaking away from a concept of the soul as an independent reality disconnected from the physical world. For it may be that by moving away from a concept of the soul that isn’t actually that useful, we can now talk about it in a way that doesn’t threaten Christians since they’ve always believed in the resurrection of the body.

One of the great weaknesses of the dualistic under-standing of the human being is that, taken too far, it ends in pure Gnosticism or Manichaeism. Essentially, this is the idea that physical reality is evil and that we must retreat to the ivory tower of the mind away from an evil material world and find salvation in an escape from the world. One of the things that I think we’ve discovered, rediscovered really, in recent years through this emphasis away from the immortal, immaterial soul and back on the full reality of the physical human condition, is the idea of incarnation, that God came to be a part of this reality that we feel and hear and touch and see, not as something ethereal locked in an ivory tower.

So in abandoning substance dualism, should Christians feel like they’ve found a desperate es-cape from modern critiques, or is this really rather a recovery of what Christianity has always taught?

Theology operates in a very different way from sci-ence. Science can make what appears to be objective progress, allowing us to understand more and more of the natural world over time. Theology, however, operates in a reflective mode, meaning that there is a certain body of data (Scripture, Church tradition, the writings of the Church Fathers, etc.) and one is con-stantly reinterpreting this in each successive genera-tion. One way of looking at this is to say that we have rediscovered an angle that was understood 2000 years ago, but in another way we have advanced, deepening our understanding of that ancient idea and science has helped us in this.


by Macy Ferguson

The relative importance of “the journey” to “the final destination” is a question that mani-fests itself in multiple contexts but arguably

most often when it comes to the afterlife. Christianity upholds the belief that after one dies one either ascends to Heaven or descends to Hell. Heaven, or “God’s Kingdom,”1 is the offer of eternal life for those who have given their life over to God and accepted His son Jesus Christ as their Savior. Within Heaven, “there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever.”2 Hell, on the other hand, is interpreted as a place of punishment and death. Hell is depicted in Revelation, the enigmatic final book of the Bible, as a “lake of fire” into which “death and the grave were thrown” or as “the second death.”3

Though the terms “Heaven” and “Hell” are widely used, the Christian understanding of how one ends up in either Heaven or Hell is often misunderstood as a reward or punishment administered by God. This is

incorrect because, contrary to popular belief, Heaven is not simply a reward bestowed by God at the end of one’s life. Heaven is the product of a spiritual and moral transformation humans undergo as they devel-op a close relationship with God. This transformation is a fulfillment of self; the goal is to become ourselves, to become what God designed us to be. Therefore, while Christians do believe that everyone has a Day of Judgment where one faces God alone with all of his or her earthly actions laid out before them, Christians also believe that each person’s final destination de-pends partially on how he or she has exercised her free will. The Christian belief is that our final destination is a reflection of how dedicated one has been to complet-ing the transformation of self and engaging with God throughout his or her life.

C.S. Lewis explores Christian eschatology (i.e., theology considering the Last Things: Heaven, Hell,

BecomingC.S. Lewis’

OneselfAllegory of the Afterlife


past choices, whether personal or observed, to be able to choose correctly in the present.

The Ghosts often fail to be present, which keeps them from realizing the opportunity in front of them. Consider the Episcopal Ghost, who is so caught up in the journey that he cannot see that the destination lies right in front of him if only he’d follow his guide. The Episcopal Ghost is called such because he has an affinity for discussing religious and spiritual matters. However, he lacks a desire to actually pursue spiritual significance. He is literally at the gates of Heaven and is still preoccupied by discourse on the fate of self and soul. He is told by his Spirit guide, “We know noth-ing of religion here: we think only of Christ. We know nothing of speculation. Come and see. I will bring you to Eternal Fact, the Father of all other facthood.”5

The “come and see” of this discourse is significant because it alludes to the fact that the Ghost is not seeing anything around him; he is blind to what sur-rounds him. He enjoys the search so much that he does not want to find what he began looking for. Therefore, because the Episcopal Ghost has forgotten that there is a destination, he is no longer on a journey. He is simply wandering.

Wandering aimlessly, the Ghost no longer looks for truths; he merely invents them. The Episcopal Ghost represents a broad and popular misconception in re-gards to free will within Christianity. This Ghost be-lieves that it is unquestionably acceptable for him to pick and choose what parts of the faith he wants to believe in. This type of thinking has led him to lose sight of the destination. For, the freedom of a relation-

ship with Christ comes not as freedom of thought but as the freedom to choose and discover the Truth—who Christ is, not who we make him to be.

Additionally, while Christianity does allow varia-tion in interpretation when it comes to personal con-duct and pursuit of the faith, the faith itself is the re-quired cornerstone. One can come to God by whatever means or progression of thought that one wishes, but before one can fully experience His blessings, one has to accept His truth. The Episcopal Ghost would rather trust in his own understanding, which he refuses to broaden, than accept an ultimate truth that would help him better understand himself and his destination.

While the Episcopal Ghost loses sight of the desti-nation altogether, another Ghost misunderstands the purpose of his final destination. The Ghost of an Artist

Purgatory and the Last Judgment) and the role of free will in his work The Great Divorce. The title is a reply to William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Lewis aims to dispute the idea that all roads lead to the same place. He wanted to point out the error in believ-ing that it is not necessary to pay heed to one’s path because it will work itself out along the way, which is the essence of Blake’s work.

This article aims to explain how The Great Divorce’s allegorical narrative, in the context of Christian es-chatology, reveals conscious choice and self awareness as being integral to one’s entrance into Heaven. For Heaven is not a struggle to obtain but rather a struggle to accept. Lewis’s emphasis on the role of choice in regards to one’s final destination in Heaven or Hell il-lustrates how conscious choice and free obedience are key components of Christian “faith.”

The Great Divorce opens with the narrator entering Grey Town. He gets in line at a bus stop because that’s what he sees others doing. The bus takes them to the Valley of the Shadow of Life where they can contem-plate entering Heaven. If one chooses to enter Heaven, Grey Town was a form of Purgatory where one could realize and renounce one’s sins, but if they choose to stay in Grey Town, then the town becomes their Hell. The residents of Grey Town are insubstantial Ghosts; the Valley is too real for their bodies so that the grass hurts their feet and rain has the capability to “make a hole in you, like a machine-gun bullet.”4 Substantial Spirits, allegorical figures representing the saved saints who dwell in Heaven, inhabit the Valley and each of the Ghosts who come to the Valley from the Grey

Town is paired with one of these Spirits, a personal guide whom they knew in some capacity in their earth-ly lives. The Great Divorce records the narrator’s obser-vations of various exchanges between the Ghosts and the Spirits in the Valley, as well as his confrontation with his own guide, George Macdonald. Macdonald, a nineteenth century Scottish author, minister, and theologian, inspired C.S. Lewis’ own allegorical fictive writing.

The structure of The Great Divorce is indicative of the work’s focus on free will. The narrator’s observa-tions while in the Valley of the Shadow of Life lack a structural connection in that each ghost’s struggle to accept Heaven is wholly individual. Like the narrator, we do not have to fully understand the implications of

For, the freedom of a relationship with Christ comes not as free-dom of thought, but as the freedom to choose and discover the Truth —who Christ is, not who we make him to be.


encounters his designated Spirit and wants to know, first and foremost, if he can still be a famous artist in Heaven. His guide answers,

‘But they aren’t distinguished – no more than anyone else. Don’t you understand? The Glory flows into everyone, and back from everyone: like light and mirrors. But the light’s the thing.’

‘Do you mean there are no famous men?’

‘They are all famous. They are all known, re-membered, recognized by the only Mind that can give a perfect judgment.’6

The Artist often replies “stiffly” and “without en-thusiasm” because the idea of a place where he cannot exert his talent and importance does not interest him.7 His concept of Heaven correlates to his interpretation of fame – instead of recognizing that his talents exist for the sake of Heaven, he thinks that Heaven exists for the sake of his talents and hence for the sake of his fame.

Although our personal talents, whether intellectual or artistic, are meant to be developed, used, and cel-ebrated, we can become obsessed with our own cre-ations, over and against the creation they are modeled and inspired by. Like the artist, one can be “drawn away from love of the thing [we] tell, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, [we] cannot be interested in God at all but only in what [we] can say about Him.”8 One’s choices on earth must be grounded in a pure awareness of the importance of God rather than using His message as a means to inflate one’s own individual image. Being “famous” in Heaven is not something one can create for oneself. Fame is not competitive as it is on Earth because there are no varying degrees of fame. No one wears the guise of fame in heaven, for

God sees all the inhabitants of Heaven according to their true dignity, as his adopted sons and daughters. Therefore, dignity takes place of earthly fame.

The Artist wants a Heaven that he can create for himself rather than the Heaven that God has created for him. He is not humble enough to find the idea of human dignity attractive, nor is he humble enough to accept the gift of God’s salvation, and thus, Heaven. The Artist reveals that freedom does not mean that we can make ourselves in a kind of self fashioning, but rather it is through freedom that we can be ourselves, which is something more wonderful and “solid” than anything we could create on our own.

In contrast to the Artist, another Ghost, the Lizard Ghost, comes on scene with the realization that the products of his own fashioning are not enough. By welcoming God’s touch on His soul, this Ghost strug-gling with lust is undeniably the premier example for readers in The Great Divorce. This Ghost is distinct from all the others because he is both aware of his sin and ashamed of it. When describing the lizard on his shoulder that represents his lust, the Ghost says, “‘Of course his stuff won’t do here: I realize that’” and “‘it’s so damned embarrassing.’”9 This expressed embarrass-ment displays the Lizard Ghost’s humility. Unlike the Artist Ghost, he recognizes that Heaven is something beyond his own making and that he cannot be a part of Heaven until he allows himself and seeks to be made better. By contrast, the other ghosts try to transform Heaven to fit themselves. Yet, for the Lizard Ghost, this transformation raises him to a greater freedom and dignity than he could ever achieve on his own.

The overwhelming realness of the Valley is a meta-phor for free will. Like the ghosts arriving in the Valley, humans encounter free will thinking that they can con-quer and control it on their own. But when we tread

Paradiseby Carlo Saraceni,

Oil on Copper,c.1579-1620


on our own, refusing guidance, we get ourselves hurt and fail to accomplish anything. “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.”10 The Ghosts must go through the process of substantiation so they can venture into the Valley on their own and experience true freedom. In addition, the Ghosts’ substantiation echoes the nar-rator’s process of observation and reflection that pro-duces better understanding of one’s self in relation to God, which, ideally, culminates in a spiritual conver-sion that makes one compatible with God’s guidance.

Therefore, the Lizard Ghost’s realization of his own inadequacy prepares him for God’s services because in granting humans free will, God does not expect us to make all the right choices, but he does expect us to own up to our mistakes. However, the admitting our sin is only the first step. Next, to assure God, and our-selves, that we sincerely want to part with our sin, we must explicitly ask for God’s help in removing it from our lives. The significance of such request is evident in this dialogue between the Ghost and the Spirit:

‘How can I let you tear me to pieces? If you wanted to help me, why didn’t you kill the damned thing without asking me – before I knew? It would be all over now if you had.’

‘I cannot kill it against your will. It is impos-sible. Have I your permission?’11

The Spirit’s point is that its assistance would be use-less if the Ghost does not desire it. The presence of dignity is akin to humans’ free will; God does not de-sire to defy our dignity by forcefully transforming us into better versions of ourselves. He honestly does love us the way we are, which is why He asks us to grow in ourselves and become who we really are, which is who He made us to be. This fullness of self can only be achieved through a true conversion of heart and mind, which includes the relinquishing of sin and the vices we love to hold onto.

Lewis elaborates on the freedom of obedience in his sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” when he says,

Apparently what I had mistaken for humility had, all these years, prevented me from under-standing what is in fact the humblest, the most childlike, the most creaturely of pleasure – nay, the specific pleasure of the inferior: the pleasure of a beast before men, a child before its father, a pupil before its teacher, a creature before its Creator. I am not forgetting how horribly this most innocent desire is parodied in our human ambitions, or how very quickly, in my own ex-perience, the lawful pleasure of praise from those whom it was my duty to please turns into the deadly poison of self-admiration. But I thought I could detect a moment – a very, very short

moment – before this happened, during which the satisfaction of having pleased those whom I rightly loved and rightly feared was pure.12

Being humble before God and accepting His guid-ance allows us to become better versions of ourselves. The liberation obtained through relinquishing our perceived superiority is displayed when a Spirit says, “That’s what we all find when we reach this country. We’ve all been wrong! That’s the great joke. There’s no need to go on pretending one was right! After that we begin living.”13

However, if obedience and humility leads to self-realization, the lack of obedience and prideful behavior leads to a destruction of self. The final Ghost, Frank, which attempts to use a persona to communicate with the Spirit, reveals how we destroy ourselves when we hide from God.

His Spirit guide, the “Lady,” is one who loved this Ghost dearly during their time on earth; perhaps she was his wife, perhaps his sister, perhaps a dear friend. Whatever their relationship, the encounter between these two responds to a worry that has troubled any earnest person who has thought about the Last Things: what happens if one that I love is damned but I am saved? How could I want to leave behind those whom I love more than anything?

The Lady continually addresses Frank, but he uses a persona, who is called the Tragedian, to communicate. The Tragedian tries to talk to the Spirit, but she refuses to acknowledge him, only addressing the Ghost, his real self. The Ghost does not understand why the Lady

The Last Judgmentby Joos van Cleve, Oil on Wood,c.1520-25


cares for him and not the false Tragedian he tries to present himself as. There is a chain linking the two, which the Tragedian seems to be in control of, and the Ghost becomes more enslaved the more he denies his true self. Additionally, the longer the Ghost hides be-hind the persona, the more he shrinks, literally losing himself to the Tragedian.

When the Tragedian finally consumes the Ghost Frank, the Spirit responds, “‘Where is Frank? And who are you, Sir? I never knew you. Perhaps you had better leave me…I cannot love a lie. I cannot love the thing that is not. I am in Love and out of it I will not go.’”14 The Ghost chose to forget himself and let his sin take over, and thus, suffered the consequences. The point of his experience is that the Spirit was willing to love him and show him the way, despite his faults, if he would only face her honestly. It was not the Ghost that the Spirit could not love, but his sin, which due to his obstinate choices, had become him. Like the Spirit, God strives to reach the real us, but if we do not want to be reached, there is nothing He can do about it and we have no one to blame but ourselves. Heaven is a struggle to accept rather than to obtain because it re-quires the realization that God does not need us; we need God.

That is the true difficulty for the Ghosts. With the exception of the Lizard Ghost, they cannot accept the fact that they are not needed by God or their earthly loved ones or for an elaborate journey or for their ar-tistic achievements. God is not going to force us to obey Him or abide with Him in Heaven. It must be a conscious choice. A Spirit puts it simply when it says, “Come to us. We will not go to you.”15 The teaching is hard, as Jesus tells his disciples in the Gospel, but its hardness is not that of a stony heart, one without mercy. No, the abundance of the Christian God lies precisely in his mercy, a mercy that will not love a lie, that will not hold our hand as we leap off the cliff, but instead who will tug and pull with all his might, and if we should fall, weep. The teaching is hard, yes, but also ironic, for Christ has come to us, descended for us, died for us: all that is missing is that we, in humility and freedom, take his outstretched hand.

How far God has come to us, and yet accepting God and Heaven is so hard for the Ghosts because it means accepting their personal failures and their inability to deserve Heaven. Lewis has God require the Ghosts to come to Him to illustrate God’s desire for us to achieve the perfection for which we were made, a perfection that involves our free and everlasting choice to love him. The Ghosts defy this plan by defining themselves by opportunities and relationships that they can create for themselves, situations in which they are needed. They had been provided with definition of self, given

by their loving creator, but choose to ignore it because they believe it will be the end of their purpose, the end of their fame.

Essentially, the Ghosts keep trying to bring up the past and are focused on the choices that brought them to where they are instead of fully considering the choice in front of them, which is whether or not they accept God’s offer of eternal life, love, and assistance. This offer is not a reward for a long series of choices but instead the ultimate conversion of self through free choice, the choice to become fit for a reality filled with faith, hope, and love in God, for now and forev-ermore. This conversion requires humility before God and a free and conscious obedience. After achieving humility and obedience, one is capable of accepting and fulfilling the dignity that God has designated for us all. Accepting dignity rather than attempting to cre-ate it requires faith, for we must trust that what God has designed us to be is greater than anything we could mold ourselves into.

Heaven is not merely a reward that we get in ex-change for our obedience but instead the natural fruit of our free obedience, an obedience that transforms us into our true, most dignified selves, the selves God made us out of nothing to be, selves that we do not deserve but nonetheless have been made to be as a gift.

1 Matthew 7:132 Revelation 21:43 Revelation 20:144 C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: MacMillan, 1946) 57.5 Ibid. 44.6 Ibid. 82-83.7 Ibid. 81,82.8 Ibid. 81.9 Ibid. 99.10 Galatians 5:111 The Great Divorce 100.12 C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” sermon preached originally Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, on June 8, 1942: published in THEOLOGY, November, 1941, and by the S.P.C.K, 1942.13 Lewis 95.14 Ibid. 118-119.15 Ibid. 118.

Macy Ferguson ‘16 is from Stoneville, NC. She is a Government major with a Native American Studies minor.


When the late Jacques Derrida penned the now-infamous term “deconstruction” in 1967, he introduced into Western civi-

lization a glaring skepticism of the truths it held to be self-evident: the autonomy of the spoken word (what he calls “logocentrism”), God, and other concepts es-pecially important in Western philosophies. His works mainly focus on revealing the inherent disunity he claims is pre-existent in all purportedly unified struc-tures or systems.1

As a result, the term “deconstruction” has been used to critique all “systems,” such as government (i.e. democracy, monarchy, etc.), education (private vs. public), and religion (Christianity, Buddhism, etc.).

This last critique, the critique of religion, has led to a rather divisive approach in combining postmodernist thought with Christianity. When theorizing about the interpretation of the Bible, some have begun to con-sider an entirely subjective, individualistic approach, while others believe Biblical interpretation is wholly

objective.2 Further, many academics have employed the term “deconstruction” to dismiss Christianity as merely a system of religion established by tradition and hence not actually based on eternal truth. This divisive conclusion, however, wherein “the system of tradition” is pitted against “true religion,” rests on a number of misunderstandings of “deconstruction” and its various aims. The purpose of this article is to reveal some of these misconceptions and, consequently, to show that postmodernist thought and Christianity are not neces-sarily antithetical to each other. Even further, decon-struction, in the Derridean sense, may actually have much to offer Christianity.

In considering the purported conflict between de-construction and Christianity, it makes sense to ask the question, “What is deconstruction?” Unfortunately, no simple answer exists because everything about decon-struction shies away from definitions, from statements of fact that establish themselves as undeniable truths. Therefore, first and foremost, deconstruction is not a

by Caroline Suresh

deconstructionthe Nature of God’s Grace&

deconstructiondeconstruction


philosophy but a project, a way of working within a given system in order to find its weaknesses. Essentially, deconstruction calls for close analysis by seeking not only to understand a given system but also to question the system. As Derrida himself says, “Deconstruction is not a method or some tool that you apply to some-thing from the outside. Deconstruction is something which happens and which happens inside.”3 In other words, one cannot simply “deconstruct” a system or mode of thought without first understanding how that system works.

When Derrida first wrote of deconstruction in Of Grammatology, he was working within the con-text of a system he calls “logocentrism,” a method of thought which elevates the spoken word over the written word.4 In order to make his point, Derrida cites how God, in Genesis 1, spoke the world into ex-istence. He then explains how this action profoundly and unconsciously impacted Western philosophy, trac-ing a pattern of “logocentrism” in the works of Plato, Heidegger, and especially Levi-Strauss, Saussure, and Rousseau. As Derrida writes, “The system of ‘hearing (understanding) – oneself speak’ through the phonic substance – which presents itself as the nonexterior, nonmundane, therefore nonempirical or noncontin-gent signifier – has necessarily dominated the history of the world during an entire epoch, and has even pro-duced the idea of the world.”5 Throughout the rest of the text, Derrida seeks to show that speech has enjoyed an unjustified place of power over writing. As he high-lights, speech “presents itself ” as more closely bridging the gap between intended meaning and interpretation.

Instead of getting bogged down with technicalities about Derrida’s argument, it is more helpful in this in-stance to see why Derrida feels the need to deconstruct logocentrism. First, he recognizes a pattern within Western philosophy that he considers dubious. In this case, the questionable claim is an almost imperceptible focus on speech over writing, but it could have been any other modus operandi that has entrenched itself as fact: the American government’s faith in the suprema-cy of democracy, the way one uses common items such as a fork,6 etc. The important point is that there is a common assumption shared by a group of people that the current mode of operating is The Way Things Are, not merely the way things have become due to cer-tain decisions made over time or based on one’s own interpretation.

In other words, Derrida’s critique of the alleged objective, indisputable truth of logocentrism is two-fold: he argues firstly that centuries of tradition have given logocentrism an aura of truth and secondly that subjective human interpretation has inappropriately enforced itself as undeniable fact. Yet, even though

he focuses specifically on logocentrism, he makes very clear in his introduction that his criticisms extend to all systems popularly regarded as containing objec-tive truth claims, including belief systems such as Christianity. The argument is this:

(1) Christianity makes certain absolute truth claims about the person of Christ as the Son of God.

(2) Derrida’s critique shows that any system claiming objective truth is a sham. All systems of allegedly “objec-tive” truth can be deconstructed.

(3) Therefore, either (a) Derrida’s critique is accurate and Christianity is a sham (or at least in need of significant revi-sion) or (b) Derrida’s critique is erro-neous and Christianity can still make legitimate claims to certain absolute truths.

Underlying this argument, however, is the assump-tion that objectivity and subjectivity cannot coexist within the concept of truth. In Christianity, however, one finds an unexpected marriage between objectiv-ity and subjectivity that defines how man can know God. In order to show this, we must examine the two arguments Derrida gives against objective truth and explore them in further detail.

First, Derrida’s concern that traditions obscure truth by masking themselves as objective reality echoes a common warning present throughout the Bible against the reduction of the Judeo-Christian faith to a mere system of established structures and traditions. For example, in Jeremiah 7, God speaks through the

Derrida by Pablo Secca, 2009


prophet Jeremiah to the country of Judah in order to inform the people that “truth has perished” because their burnt offerings and sacrifices have no credit. Even though the men of Judah are sacrificing to God and exalting with their lips the “temple of the Lord,” their hearts and lives do not align with their religious ac-tions. Jeremiah 7:24 says, “Instead, they followed the stubborn inclinations of their evil hearts.”7 Although the men were following and enacting the established traditions and rituals, these lacked substance because the men did not desire to know God. One can see this again in Isaiah: “‘The multitude of your sacrifices – what are they to me?’ says the Lord. ‘I have more than enough of burnt offerings, of rams and the fat of fat-tened animals…Stop bringing meaningless offerings! Your incense is detestable to me.’”8 In this instance, the Israelites committed the same mistake as the men of Judah; they believed that their material offerings would be sufficient to please God without remember-ing the reason why they were making sacrifices – to realize the extent of their sin and receive forgiveness in order that they could know God.

Derrida’s deconstruction warns against this tenden-cy of tradition to entrench itself as fact. Again, although Derrida specifically grapples with logocentrism, he ex-tends his ideas to structures at large. It is important to keep this wider scope in mind when considering his argument about logocentrism, for the same argu-ment underlies his broader critique of all structures. Without completely dismissing traditions as arbitrary, he states that these pre-established ways of thinking or acting do not always have the meanings or effects people intend them to have. For instance, Derrida shows that logocentric assumptions caused Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), commonly known as the

father of modern linguistics, to believe that speech al-lows one to better convey meaning than writing. As he says, people often consider speech as more intimate, more immediate, and, therefore, more real and “true.” Yet, Derrida points out that misconceptions occur in conversations all the time and that writing contains a level of permanence that speech does not. This decon-struction recalls the dissolution of the religious prac-tices of the people of Judah, who also operated under the belief that traditions and rituals would be sufficient in themselves to ensure a close relationship with God. In other words, they fixated on the traditions instead of recognizing that the acts by themselves were con-ventions, only gaining meaning when substantiated with a desire to know God. The Bible attests to this by showing that their material sacrifices did not have the effect intended (i.e., to bring the men closer to God) but actually separated them even further from Him by kindling God’s wrath.

Second, Derrida believed that both communal and personal interpretations play extraordinarily important roles in determining one’s understanding of the world. His most famous phrase in Of Grammatology, “There is nothing outside the text,”9 seeks to reiterate the im-portant nature of interpretation by claiming that all of experience is subject to interpretation. As James K.A. Smith, the author of a Christian response to post-modernist deconstructionism entitled Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?, points out: “[M]any Christians be-come nervous and assume that the claim that ‘every-thing is interpretation’ is antithetical to Christian faith. If everything is interpretation, then even the gospel is only an interpretation and not objectively true.”10

Yet, what Derrida and Smith both aim to show is that believing everything is interpretation does not

necessarily require one to deny the exis-tence of truth. As Derrida said in an in-terview at Villanova University, “What is called ‘deconstruction’ […] has never, never opposed institutions as such, philos-ophy as such, discipline as such.”11 In other words, the aim of deconstruction is not to completely annihilate the structures or sys-tems it calls into question.

Nevertheless, even if deconstruction is not a wholly negative project, Christians still often hesitate to accept the subjectivity advocated by postmodernism, for it seems to undermine the gospel’s claim to be the ultimate truth. More specifically, the post-modernist claim that everything is an inter-pretation is seen as antagonistic to the uni-versal truths claims of the gospel. However, what Smith elucidates in his book is that King Solomon Sacrificing to the Idols by Sébastien Bourdon, c. 1650


the Christian understanding of the life and death of Jesus Christ as the Son of God is an interpretation. He points out the crucifixion account in Matthew 27 and states that, even though many people had come to see Jesus die, only some of these people (this chapter specifically mentions the Roman centurion and those with him) read the events that occurred as illustrating Jesus’s identity as the Son of God.12 The others, de-spite having witnessed the same sights, saw the events of that day – Jesus’ death upon a cross, the wailing women, the broken curtain, and the earthquake – as isolated events, events not adding up to the conclusion that Jesus is the Messiah.13 In other words, it was possi-ble for two different people to stand in front of Christ on the same day, watch the same events unfold, and come to two different conclusions about who Christ is.

Even further, however, this realization that Jesus Christ cannot be understood as the Son of God through mere objective facts is not only reconcilable with Christian doctrine but actually reinforces the Christian belief that one is saved by God’s grace. In Ephesians 2:8, Paul writes in a letter to the Church in Ephesus, “For it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith – and this is not from yourself, it is the gift of God.” In other words, Paul informs us that Christians are able to know God only through grace that is manifested in faith in Jesus Christ. This becomes even more profound when taken in light of Paul’s own testimony. In Acts 26, Paul is speaking to King Agrippa about his conversion to Christianity. He first mentions his long history and learning of Judaism; indeed, he “lived as a Pharisee.”14 Paul also mentions his own zeal against the Christians and his ceaseless persecution of them, which is exemplified by

his witness and approval of the stoning of Stephen in Acts 8:1, the scene of the first Christian martyrdom. However, Paul says that when he heard the voice of Jesus he was “not disobedient to the vision from heav-en” but instead “preached that they should repent and turn to God.”15 From this account, one can see that Paul’s conversion from a life of persecuting Christians to Christianity occurred unexpectedly. Later, Paul writes in a letter to the Corinthians: “For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am.”16 In Paul’s case, God’s grace is more evident due to his previous

lifestyle, but he makes clear in Ephesians 2:8 that ev-ery Christian’s testimony exemplifies the same grace of God. In other words, when a person encounters God’s grace, it changes their beliefs, mindset, and lifestyle: Paul changed from a man persecuting Christians to one preaching Christ crucified. To put it simply, grace alters the way one interprets the world.

Moreover, the continuous presence of this grace demonstrates how a Christian’s worldview is not ob-jective but subjective. When Paul begins his epistles, he always writes some version of the phrase, ‘Grace and peace to you from God our father and the Lord Jesus Christ.’ Yet, the people and churches Paul addresses are already Christians who believe in Jesus. What Paul shows, therefore, is that grace does not end at the point of becoming a Christian but indeed is necessary throughout a Christian’s life. In other words, grace plays an important role in bringing one to salvation, but it does not end there. Instead, grace constantly works within a person to elevate his internal nature.

What Derrida and Smith both aim to show is that believing everything is interpretation does not

necessarily require one to deny the existence of truth.

Saint Thomas Aquinas by Carlo Crivelli, c. 1450


As Thomas Aquinas says, grace does not destroy na-ture but perfects it.17 This, therefore, suggests that the Christian life is one led by grace, a grace that transforms and elevates human nature to the very nature of God; this process occurs not in a single moment but through the course of one’s lifetime. Thus, the Christian should not conflate his understanding of his beliefs, which is subjective, with the objects of these beliefs, which are absolute truths; otherwise, he would pretend to have perfect knowledge of God and His creation. Instead, the Christian trusts that, as she places faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God whom the Bible claims is the Truth,18 God will mold, through His abundant grace, the way she views the world into His very own, giving her the eyes to see and ears to hear what no merely human eye has ever seen nor merely human ear heard. The objective truth has not changed, but her subjective understanding has.

As a result, when Derrida points out that humans have subjective interpretations of the world and that we tend to objectify these, he speaks wisely and in ac-cordance with Christian doctrine. However, we must not extend his ideas beyond what is warranted so as to think they disprove the existence of objective truth. It appears that objective truth can exist insofar as God ex-ists, but there is room to argue that our fallible human understanding keeps us from knowing these truths, particularly in light of Original Sin. Therefore, once one gets past the doubt that inevitably comes with real-izing all human understanding is interpretation, it be-comes even clearer that God’s grace stands at the core of Christianity. As Smith says, “Acknowledging the interpreted status of the gospel should translate into a certain humility in our public theology.”19 It makes one realize that the Christian gospel has nothing to do with a person’s own intelligence or righteousness but rather with the knowledge of God which comes through grace.

Deconstruction, in other words, by recognizing the importance of interpretation, coincides with the Christian understanding of God’s saving and transfor-mative grace. This grace works powerfully within each Christian’s life not only to forgive sins but also to con-form one’s mindset to God’s. When it comes to find-ing or knowing truth, postmodernist thought forces us to realize that we do not have this objective, omni-scient worldview. Instead of despairing about this lack of knowledge, Christians can instead hold onto this hope: that God’s grace is working daily to shape his subjective worldview into God’s objectively true vision of the world. Consequently, they can rest assured that, despite not having all the answers, they are growing each day in greater knowledge of truth by growing in greater knowledge of God through grace.

1. Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Of grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) p.161-162. Derrida speaks about logocentrism as an unraveling orb. This passage talks about a certain “historical necessity” for logocentrism, but nonetheless questions whether speech actually has greater importance than other modes of communication. Specifically in Chapter 1, Derrida contests this historical emphasis on speech by describing the recent use of the term “writing” in unexpected domains like biological DNA and computer coding.2. The Christian Church often either exuberantly embraces postmodernism or rejects it fully. Both of these extremist views show a willingness to put too much hope in human philosophies, a willingness which Saint Paul warns against in Colossians 2:8. 3. Jacques Derrida and John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a nutshell: a conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997) p.9. 4. Christopher Johnson, Derrida (New York: Routledge, 1999) p.4. 5. Of grammatology p.8. 6. In Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), James K.A. Smith recalls the instance in The Little Mermaid when Ariel recognizes a fork as a “dinglehopper” and uses it to comb her hair, much to the confusion of the prince. 7. Jer. 7:24 (NIV)8. Is. 1:11,13 (NIV)9. Of grammatology 158. 10. Who’s afraid of postmodernism? 42.11. Deconstruction in a nutshell: a conversation with Jacques Derrida 5. 12. Who’s afraid of postmodernism? 44-47.13. Matt. 27 (NIV)14. Acts 27:5 (NIV)15. Acts 8:19-20 (NIV) 16. 1 Cor. 15:9-10 (NIV) 17. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q.1, a.8, ad. 2.18. John 14:6 (NIV)19. Who’s afraid of postmodernism? 51.

Caroline Suresh ‘14 is from Cumberland Center, ME. She is a Biology and English double major.


by Steffi Ostrowski

To many, approaching the Bible through a feminist lens involves a contradiction of ide-ologies and hence results in incoherencies. The

seeming inner conflict of holding both worldviews has been described in the following way:

The Bible reinforced ancient notions of women’s inferiority, yet gave them permis-sion to operate in an expanding sphere of philanthropy, humanitarian campaign-ing, and missionary endeavor. It exhorted women to silence and submission, but also gave them role models of activators and leaders. Religion provided an opportunity for self-fulfillment and self-expression … It empowered and liberated at the same time as it constrained and oppressed.1

Such an argument implies that Christians who ad-vocate for women’s rights do so (and have done so) despite their faith. At the heart of this line of reasoning lies the widely held assumption that the Bible is, at its

core, fundamentally sexist. Such a belief is not only misinformed but also discredits some of the extraor-dinary women who founded and advanced feminism throughout history. Mary Astell, a feminist thinker and Christian from the 17th century, dedicated her life to fighting for gender equality. Contrary to the above cri-tique, Astell’s life illustrates a fight for women’s rights that existed through her faith, not despite it. The life of one Christian feminist alone cannot prove that no tension exists between the ideologies; however, Astell’s work presents an interesting model for responding to oppressive arguments founded on erroneous interpre-tations of the Bible, a model that is still relevant and radical today.

Mary Astell, born in 1666 to an upper middle class Anglican family, is often credited as being the first English feminist. From an early age she was frustrated by the subordination of her sex, lamenting in a poem about her situation: “How shall I be a Peter or a Paul / … / But ah my Sex denies me this.”2 Nonetheless, at age 22 she moved to London with the intention of

&ChristianityFeminismA Look into the Work of Mary Astell


becoming a writer. While this was a very lofty goal for a woman at the time, Astell’s readable, witty prose and innovative arguments gained her favor in the eyes of many influential women who assisted in her initial publication. Her first work, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest, was published in 1694 and proved to be incred-ibly successful, as did its successor, A Serious Proposal

to the Ladies Part II Wherein a Method is Offered for the Improvement of their Minds.3

The ideas presented in both of these works, as well as in her highly influential work Some Reflections Upon Marriage published in 1700, rest on her commitment to the intersection of faith and reason. Astell held that reason was a God-given faculty that could, and should,

be used to “test” the commonly held Christian teach-ings of the day. As she put it, reason is “the Candle of the Lord set up in everyone’s heart” and “the light which GOD himself has set up in my mind to lead me to him.”4 It was through this faculty that she argued for the equality of men and women. Inspired by Luther’s sola scriptura, the concept that the Bible alone is the source of religious truth, Biblical scholarship was on the rise in Western Europe. Astell joined the conversa-tion as a lone female voice, using both her faith and reason to guide her contributions. The foundation of her argument was the concept that it was men, not God, nor women themselves, who made women in-ferior. In a world that was constantly arguing for the natural inferiority of women, this was a radical idea.

She began by arguing that the dignity of women, rational creatures created by God, was associated with the dignity of God himself. Saying women were inher-ently subordinate was an insult to God: “we pity their mistake, and can calmly bear their scoffs, for they do not express so much contempt of us as they do of our Maker.”5 Because of her commitment to reason, Astell had no problem rejecting the traditional Biblical inter-pretations of her time that fought against this notion. As Sarah Apetrei states in her insightful analysis of Astell’s ideas, “Because Scripture could not be shown to be repugnant to rational reflection, it was legitimate to dispense with classical interpretations if they did not conform to Reason, and, for Astell, [gender] equality was self evidently rational.”6 Furthermore, Astell was not disheartened by the fact that most Biblical inter-pretations were against her, arguing that, as women were uneducated and unable to offer alternative in-terpretations, it was only natural that men (perhaps subconsciously) would continue promoting the status quo of gender rights in their Biblical interpretations. Similarly, she writes, “Women without their own Fault, are kept in Ignorance of the Original, wanting Languages and other helps to Criticise on the Sacred Text, of which they know no more, than Men are pleas’d to impart in their translations.”7

In Some Reflections Upon Marriage, Astell takes the arguments commonly presented against gender equal-ity head on. She felt that this was her duty because before her no woman had “approached Scripture with a critical eye, ready to reject those customs and teach-ings which were absent from the text [of the Bible].”8 Interestingly, and contrary to the assumption made in

The dignity of women, rational creatures of God, was associated with the dignity of God himself. Saying women were inherently subordinate was an insult to God.

A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Mary Astell, 1694


the passage presented at the start of this essay, Astell responded to sexist arguments based on Scripture by turning to Scripture itself and applying rational analy-sis to her exegesis of it.

There were many passages that were commonly used to “prove” the inferiority of women. One such passage was the story of the Fall, the event described in Genesis where Eve eats the forbidden fruit and of-fers it to Adam, introducing sin into the world. Many Biblical scholars at the time used the fault of Eve to justify a subordinate role of women, arguing “her

Subjection to the Man is an Effect of the Fall, and the Punishment of her Sin.”9 Astell actually agreed with the first part of this argument. To her, the subjection of women to men was in fact a result of the Fall; how-ever, it was a result of the consequence of the Fall, the corruption of one’s Reason, rather than a direct divine imposition laid upon women. “If Mankind had never sinn’d [i.e. if the Fall had never taken place] Reason wou’d always have been obey’d, there wou’d have been no struggle for Dominion, and Brutal Power wou’d not have prevail’d.”10 Contrary to popular interpretation, the inferiority of women was not a divinely mandat-ed punishment but instead a result of the corrupted Reason of humankind, a corruption inflicted upon humankind by its own sin. She expounded upon this idea, referring once again to the dignity of a Rational Mind and the purpose of women: “This be ‘tis cer-tainly no Arrogance in a Woman to conclude, that she was made for the Service of GOD, and that this is her End. Because GOD made all Things for Himself, and a Rational Mind is too noble a Being to be Made for the Sake and Service of any Creature.”11

Another key set of passages often used to defend the gender inequality of her time were Paul’s instructions about the roles of men and women in 1 Corinthians 11. Verses such as “The head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God” and “For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man cre-ated for woman, but woman for man” were used as descriptions of how a household should be run, with the husband completely in charge. Astell presents sev-eral arguments against the interpretation of these pas-sages as instructions about the proper role of women as inferior. Looking at 1 Cor. 11:3, “the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man,

and the head of Christ is God,” Astell argues that “no inequality can be inferr’d from hence,” because “there is no natural Inferiority among the Divine Persons, but that they are in all things Coequal.”12 In other words, “the head of Christ is God” is not a description of God as superior to Christ, because, as implicitly articulated elsewhere in the Bible, all three members of the Trinity are equal. Indeed, this is a central aspect of the most common Christian Creed, the Nicene Creed, and fun-damental to Christianity’s unique understanding of God as a trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Since

the passage from 1st Corinthians is written as an anal-ogy, it is likewise incorrect to infer that “the head of the woman is man” means man is superior to woman.

Astell also points to the context in which this pas-sage is presented. The conclusion that Paul draws from the above statement is that women ought to cover their heads when they pray while men should not.13 In her exegesis, Astell remarks (undoubtedly with a smile), “Whatever the Apostle’s Argument proves in this place, nothing can be planer, than that there is much more said against the present Fashion of Men’s wearing long Hair, than for that Supremacy they lay claim to.”14 She continues, “For by all that appears in the Text, it is not

The subjection of women to men was in fact a result of the Fall; however, it was a result of the consequence of the Fall, the corruption of

one’s Reason, rather than a direct divine imposition laid upon women.

The Temptation of Adam and Eve by Mariotto Albertinelli, c. 1509


so much a Law of Nature, that Women shou’d Obey Men, as that Men shou’d not wear long Hair.”15 Hence, Astell is arguing that Paul’s statements about women in this passage should be interpreted in the same way as his statements about hair: as describing the proper customs of the time and not as dictating Natural Laws. Most importantly, Astell turns to the end of this sec-tion of Paul’s letter and emphasizes his statement that, “In the Lord, however, woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman. … But

everything comes from God.”16 Ultimately, Paul con-cludes that, as Astell describes in her witty way, “The Relation between the two Sexes is mutual, … both of them Depending intirely upon GOD, and upon Him only; which one wou’d think is no great Argument of the natural Inferiority of either Sex.”17

Finally, Astell presents a tongue-in-cheek response to other passages throughout Paul’s letters that refer to the place of women as inferior, such as a later sec-tion in 1 Corinthians.18 She begins by saying that just as the Bible speaks of women in a state of sub-jection, it talks about Jews and Christians under the

rule of the Chaldeans and Romans, instructing them to live in quiet submission under the power of secular authorities. This opens the way for her attack: “But will any one say that these [Romans and Chaldeans] had a Natural Superiority? That they had a superior Understanding? … Or that the other were subjected to their Adversaries for … the Punishment of their sins? … Or for the Exercise of their Vertue?”19 Astell held that the descriptions of women under men were just that: descriptions. When applied to the role of Jews

and Christians under the Romans, the arguments for the inferiority of women look comical.

In presenting these arguments, I have just skimmed the surface of Astell’s work. She continues this line of reasoning in Some Reflections Upon Marriage, systemat-ically breaking down interpretation after interpretation of Scripture with Scripture, fighting for the equality of women through a Christian lens. Still, there are those who attempt to discredit her. Those who approach Astell and other Christian feminists with an attitude that insists the Bible hinders gender equality often ac-cuse Astell of not truly being a feminist because of the

“In the Lord, however, woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman. But everything comes from God.”

Altarpiece of the Trinity (upper panel), Siena, Italy, 1397


primarily theoretical nature of her work, arguing that her faith held her back from bringing about practical improvements in the lives of women. As discussed in this article, the accusation that she was hindered by her faith simply is not true; it was her faith that led her to her starting point that men and women are all created for the same purpose, and her faith that gave her the boldness to reject interpretations she found rationally incoherent. Further, as described by Dale Spender, the judgment that Astell was too theoretical is unfair be-cause of the time in which she was writing: “Looking for a legal solution to the problem is very much a nine-teenth-century strategy, and, I would argue, depends greatly on knowing what the problem is. Mary Astell was a pioneer when it came to formulating that prob-lem, with all its complexities.”20

One certainly does not have to agree with all of her theology to find Astell inspirational. We can praise and remember her courageous refusal to accept injustice, despite its overwhelming social acceptance, and her methodology for doing so, a methodology founded in reason rather than emotion and which defeats op-posing arguments on their own terms (e.g., she argues against arguments from Scripture with her own argu-ments from Scripture) is certainly one to be emulated today. When faced with arguments that seemed detri-mental to her faith, Astell neither repudiated her be-liefs nor ignored the challenges facing them. Instead, she responded to these issues directly, delving deeper into Scripture to find the intersection of faith and reason that provided a coherent description of the world. The Bible has been used to defend injustice many times in the past, and unfortunately probably will continue to do so in the future. By looking to fig-ures such as Mary Astell, however, we are reminded that we should not concede these erroneous interpreta-tions. None can say it better than she: “Whatever other Great and Wise Reasons Men may have for despising Women … it can’t be from their having learnt to do so in Holy Scripture. The Bible is for, and not against us, and cannot without great violence done to it, be urg’d to our Prejudice.”21

1. Sarah Apetrei, Women, Feminism, and Religion in Early Enlightenment England (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 27.2. Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1986) 61. 3. Ibid. 82.4. Apetrei 127. 5. Ibid. 112.6. Ibid. 131.7. Ibid. 126.

8. Ibid. 133.9. Mary Astell, Political Writings, edited by Patricia Springborg (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 72. 10. Ibid. 75.11. Ibid. 72.12. Ibid. 73. 13. 1 Cor 11:4-7.14. Astell 73. 15. Ibid. 16. 1 Cor 11:11-12.17. Astell 74. 18. 1 Cor 14:34-35.19. Astell 75.20. Dale Spender, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them (London, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1982) 42. 21. Astell 28.

The Trinity in an Initial B by Master of the Codex Rossiano, c. 1387

Steffi Ostrowski ‘14 is from Oakmont, PA. She is a Computer Science and Philosophy double major.


In this past winter, the New York Times Opinion Pages released a popular blog post entitled “An Imperfect God”. Traditionally, theists, especially

Judeo-Christian theists, believe in and defend a belief in a God who is perfect, that is, omniscient, omnipo-tent, perfectly good, immutable, etc. The NY Times article, however, written by philosopher and biblical scholar Yoram Hazony, currently the president of the Institute for Advance Studies at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, argues that theists, in the face of the recent onslaught of “New Atheism,” ought to reconsider this traditional position:

Philosophers have spent many centuries trying to get God’s supposed perfections to fit together in a coherent conception, and then trying to get that to fit with the Bible. By now it’s reasonably clear that this can’t be done. In fact, part of the reason God-bashers like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are so influential (apart from the fact they write so well) is their insistence that the doctrine of God’s perfections makes no sense, and that the idealized “being” it tells us about doesn’t resemble the biblical God at all. 1

by Chris Hauser

The Divine AttributesWhy an Imperfect God Just Won’t Do

Hazony’s solution: abandon claims about a “Perfect God” in favor of a much more defensible and sup-posedly biblical “Imperfect God.” Nonetheless, such a solution betrays a thorough misunderstanding of the perfection attributed to God by traditional, par-ticularly Christian, theists. Instead of presenting God’s perfection as a dynamic, infinite, unbounded mystery, a reality who eternally discloses himself to us through Creation and Revelation, Hazony represents the tradi-tional perfect God as a static, finite, and bounded ide-ality, doomed to self-contradiction and inconsistency. In fact, not only is a “Perfect God” philosophically and biblically consistent, but actually God’s perfection, when properly understood, is inalienably essential to traditional Judeo-Christian theology. Quite simply, an “Imperfect God” is no God at all, at least not the Judeo-Christian one.

Hazony provides two examples of supposed incon-sistencies in the traditional view of God. First, he gives a general formulation of the classic Problem of Evil: if God is omnipotent (all-powerful) and yet also om-nibenevolent (perfectly good), how can it be that we experience and recognize so much injustice and evil in the world which he created? Let us consider this first


accusation, for a moment, in order to illustrate how a misconception of these perfections arises. One might easily give Hazony the Christian apologist’s stock reply to this common criticism: the fact that God permits evil in the world does not entail that he causes it. For example, just because a parent might permit her mis-creant child to go out to a party does not mean that she caused her child get in a drunk-driving accident. Nevertheless, neither Hazony, nor any other critic for that matter, is likely to be impressed with this response: after all, isn’t our answer just a weak rationalization? Sure, one can give this stock Christian response, but it does not give any comfort or provide any assurance: we still haven’t really answered the question, the question of why God permits it.

But likewise, we ought not let Hazony get away with his own weak rationalization: it is not enough for him to say, “There is evil and injustice in the world. Therefore, if God is real, He can’t be both omnipo-tent and omnibenevolent.” After all, there is no logical necessity here: what is needed is a deeper exploration of the meaning of omnipotent and omnibenevolent, an exploration that makes evident their logical incon-sistency with the existence of evil and injustice in the world. For the theist, the same exploration is needed: an exploration of omnipotence and omnibenevolence that illuminates why God permits injustice.

It is precisely here that we stumble into something very odd about the traditional theistic conception of God: divine simplicity. God is said to be perfectly simple: his justice, benevolence, power, immutability, etc. are inextricably bound in one, perfectly simple be-ing. But what’s more, God is not even understood as “a” being but rather as Being Himself, as Act itself. In Thomistic terms (i.e., theology in the tradition of the great 13th century Christian theologian-philosopher, Thomas Aquinas), God’s essence (essentia) is identical to his existence, for he is unconditional activity, the ul-timate to be itself (esse). God, in traditional theology, is unbounded in a radical way. He is infinitely active. Eternal. And yet all these perfections, all these divine characteristics, converge in one absolute simplicity. All this is to say that traditional Christian philosophy turns-the-tables on critics like Hazony: the difficultly is not, as Hazony suggests, illustrating that God’s om-nipotence is compatible with his omnibenevolence but rather showing that God could be omnipotent without being omnibenevolent, for to be omnipotent is also to be omnibenevolent in traditional theology. If God were all-powerful but not all-good, he would be lack-ing some power, the power of the perfectly good; like-wise, if God were perfectly good but not all-powerful, he could be even more good if he were more powerful and hence is not perfectly good after all.

Satan Before the Lord,

by Corrado Giaquinto,

c. 1750


The result is that God’s perfections (e.g. omnipo-tence, omnibenevolence, etc.) cannot be treated like mere tokens, like representations standing in for prop-erties that we can comprehend, as if God were just a bigger, stronger, and more moral human being, like a titan or superhero to whom philosophers have given a list of superpowers. Indeed, that we cannot grasp or fully comprehend what it means to be omnipotent or omnibenevolent should not be surprising. If we could, it would not be omnipotence or omnibenevolence. Instead, these properties, these words, guide our theol-ogy like shafts of light illuminating, only partially, the mystery that is God: they themselves are not God but rather point us toward He Who Is (Exodus 3:13-14). Yes we have names for them (e.g. omnipotence, om-nibenevolence, immutability, etc.), but the names are necessarily incomplete articulations, for they indicate something beyond articulation: God, the voice from the whirlwind that silences Job’s mutterings; Yahweh, the one whose name cannot be spoken.

Let us apply this to Hazony’s second “inconsis-tency.” He wonders how God, relying on his omnipo-tence, can interact with his creation if He himself is unequivocally immutable. If immutable means abso-lutely static, as if God were a kind of ethereal rock hid-den in the heavens, then, of course, Hazony is right: we should worry about an inconsistency. But God, in ad-dition to being immutable, is also said to be absolutely

dynamic, that is, Act Itself. What is required, then, is a deeper penetration of the meaning of immutability. Indeed, rather than designating inactivity, the perfec-tion of “immutability” indicates just the opposite, that is, it indicates God’s total lack of potentiality: if God were to change, then he was not All that Is, for he has become something new and hence was lacking in whatever was added. There is nothing for God to change into, for he lacks nothing and is complete in himself: He is the fullness of reality.

Here, we can use an analogy, which, whilst not giv-ing the fullness of God’s immutability, may perhaps allow us to better understand what we mean by im-mutability and thus understand its consistency with God’s involvement in his mutable creation. Here is the analogy: Aristotle speaks of stability or immutabil-ity character, associating it with virtue. The virtuous man has a stable character in that he is dependable and trustworthy, for he can be counted upon to be himself, as who he is is the best that he can be and hence there is no reason for him to act otherwise. He is faithful. His actions are indeed diverse, changing according to the particular factors involved in each given situa-tion, whilst nevertheless all proceeding from one stable character. It is in this sense that we can analogically understand God’s immutability.

This brings us to Hazony’s accusation that a “Perfect God” is inconsistent with biblical revelation:

The Adoration of the Golden Calf, by Nicolas Poussin, c. 1634


The God of Hebrew Scripture is not depict-ed as immutable, but repeatedly changes his mind about things (for example, he regrets having made man). He is not all-knowing, since he’s repeatedly surprised by things (like the Israelites abandoning him for a statue of a cow). He is not perfectly powerful either, in that he famously cannot control Israel and get its people to do what he wants.2

Such cherry-picking of biblical passages, although all too common amongst critics of Christianity, is frankly surprising in a professional biblical scholar. It’s worth noting that all Hazony’s passages come from the Old Testament, that his comments are actually inter-pretations of those passages, and that he ignores the quite obvious references to God’s perfection in the New Testament (e.g., “Be you perfect as your Father is perfect”).3 Moreover, Hazony’s claim that “it’s hard to find any evidence that the prophets and scholars who wrote the Hebrew Bible (or “Old Testament”) thought of God in this way at all” is rather puzzling.4 Perhaps he did not search very long, as critics often do, for, whilst no passage may explicitly use the terms “im-mutable,” “omnipotent,” etc., these divine attributes are implicitly prevalent throughout, especially in the Psalms.

Though Hazony is right to point out that these philosophical terms are not used explicitly, that does not make their attribution to God false. On the con-trary, they capture (admittedly in a less full sense) through a philosophical concept what the Bible ac-complishes through the narrative of salvation history: God’s immutable love for his people, God’s power over all creation, God’s protection of all that is just and good, God’s transcendent majesty, God’s covenant

with his people, and God’s merciful faithfulness to that Covenant, despite the frequent unfaithfulness of His people. Nevertheless, this still leaves us with some passages that seem antithetical to God’s supposed per-fection, such as those cherry-picked by Hazony. Here again, we must move beyond a mere rationalization to the question of why, penetrating deeper into the mean-ing of these perfections imputed to God.

In defending his “Imperfect God,” Hazony tries to unpack the meaning of “perfect”: “Normally, when

we say that something is “perfect,” we mean it has at-tained the best possible balance among the principles involved in making it the kind of thing it is.” He con-tinues, “You can’t perfect something by maximizing all its constituent principles simultaneously. All this will get you is contradictions and absurdities. This is not less true of God than it is of anything else.”5 Ironically, then, Hazony does want to defend a “Perfect God” after all, just a God whose perfection is more after Hazony’s own heart, namely wherein perfection con-sists in balance rather than maximization.

But Hazony once again overlooks something so ob-vious yet so critically important: God, at least in tradi-tional Judeo-Christian theology, is not a “thing” at all. Indeed, God is the Personal Reality whom we discover through rational reflection on Creation and through the divine inspiration of faith, that is, the Reality who discloses Himself to us through His Creation and Revelation. Hazony, however, speaks of “God” as if it is a human invention, a concept we have constructed ourselves: we already understand all its parts and need only discover the proper proportions in order to maxi-mize its perfection.

Opposed to this is the traditional theological un-derstanding of God as pure, simple, spontaneous, unlimited Act – all these apophatic qualifiers point to One who is beyond the circumscribing limits of con-ceptualization. This is not to say that God transcends logic and that beliefs about God can be contradictory – such an irrational stance is antithetical to traditional Christian theology, despite the best effort of atheistic propagandists to say otherwise. Rather, it is to say that the terms involved in theological reasoning exceed a circumcising, definitional human comprehension: in-deed, we cannot pretend to know the essence of God, to know what it means to be omnipotent, omniscient, or any such thing, except by analogy from the traits we

do know in his Creation. At most, we know of God that it is so: for example, we know of God that he is omnipotent, though we do not understand fully the meaning of omnipotence.

Now, there is certain sense in which Hazony rec-ognizes and establishes this transcendent character of the divine. Adding to previously mentioned criticisms, Hazony expresses disdain for what he sees as a pre-sumptuous pretense of knowledge that exceed mortal bounds: “…the biblical accounts of our encounters

God, in traditional theology, is unbounded in a radical way. He is infinitely active. Eternal. And yet all these perfections, all these

divine characteristiscs, converge in one absolute simplicity.


with God emphasize that all human views of God are partial and fragmentary in just this way. Even Moses, the greatest of the prophets, is told that he can’t see God’s face, but can only catch a glimpse of God’s back as he passes by.”6 However, Hazony erroneously concludes from this that attributing perfections such as omnipotence or immutability to God is a kind of “pagan conceit.” For this reason, we must distinguish between two kinds of apophaticism, that is, two ways of understanding the limits of our knowledge of the transcendent. The 20th century Christian philosopher Josef Pieper writes of this distinction,

The term “unknowable” is literally capable of several or at least of two meanings. It can in-dicate something that “in itself ” is capable of being known, but which a particular know-ing faculty is unable to grasp because it lacks a sufficient power of penetration…But this term “unknowable” can have another signifi-cance, namely that no such possibility of be-ing known is given, that there is nothing to be known…Unknowability in the latter sense, namely that something real should in itself be unknowable, would be for St. Thomas simply preposterous… Accordingly, for St. Thomas, the unknowable can never denote something in itself dark and impenetrable, but only something that has so much light that a par-ticular finite faculty of knowledge cannot ab-sorb it all. It is too rich to be assimilated com-pletely; it eludes the effort to comprehend it.7

For St. Thomas Aquinas, although they fail to dis-close the fullness of their referent, philosophical divine attributes such as omnipotence, immutability, etc., truly belong to God and illuminate, albeit slightly and incompletely, the divine. Reason and philosophy can play a supporting role to faith and dogmatic the-ology, providing the praeambula fidei (“preambles of

faith”). On the other hand, Hazony’s version of apo-phaticism restricts theists to a kind of fideism, wherein our rational concept “God,” a human construct, is radically divorced from the subject of our faith, the non-conceptual, personal God. The result is confused, even contradictory: Hazony quotes Donald Harman Akenson, saying that “The God of Hebrew Scripture is meant to be an ‘embodiment of what is, of reality’ as we experience it,” seemingly making God an abstract

conceptualization of the deepest yearnings of our hu-man hearts. Hence, he writes,

God’s abrupt shifts from action to seeming indifference and back, his changing demands from the human beings standing before him, his at-times devastating responses to mankind’s deeds and misdeeds — all these reflect the hardship so often present in the lives of most human beings. To be sure, the biblical God can appear with sudden and stunning gener-osity as well, as he did to Israel at the Red Sea. And he is portrayed, ultimately, as faithful and just. But these are not the “perfections” of a God known to be a perfect being. They don’t exist in his character “necessarily,” or anything remotely similar to this. On the contrary, it is the hope that God is faithful and just that is the subject of ancient Israel’s faith…8

Based on this, Hazony argues that the God of the ancient Israelites is “more realistic” than the God “de-scended from the tradition of Greek thought.” Here, the author does reveal something important: the an-cient Judeo-Christian God is more realistic than that of the Idealistic traditions of Greek thought, such as that found in Plato and in later European Rationalists such as Descartes, wherein a radical dualism separates the intellectual-spiritual from the physical-material. However, this greater realism is not, as Hazony sug-gests, the result of lowering one’s standards of perfec-tion for the sake of a defensible, believable, albeit in a certain sense “imperfect” God. Indeed, Hazony has conflated epistemic and metaphysical issues: though God is epistemically indeterminate as a result of the finitude of our minds, this need not mean that meta-physically God is unknowable in himself. Using St. Thomas’ distinction between two kinds of unknow-ability, we can characterize our epistemic limitations with respect to God as the blindness not of one lost in

a cave of impenetrable darkness but rather of one daz-zled by the brilliance of pure light, Light Himself. This in turn allows for a harmonious relationship between faith and reason, whereby, instead of a blind hope, faith becomes a divine gift whereby we can penetrate more deeply the inexhaustible brilliance of the same being known by reason: our own being, the being of Creation, and Being Himself.

Hazony makes the same mistake as the New Atheists: they think of God as an invented human

Indeed, we cannot pretend to know the essence of God, to know what it means to be omnipotent, omniscient, or any such thing...


construct and his attributes as names we immediately assign to him, as if theists were like children imagin-ing terrific superheroes with a list of spectacular super-powers. In traditional theology, however, God is not immediately known but reasoned to. Theological phi-losophers relying on natural reason do not start with God and his divine attributes but instead describe the perfect God by reasoning analogically from created perfections in world around them; similarly, the theo-logians relying on Revelation describe the God of Bible not based on a superficial patching of Biblical passages as Hazony suggests but through deep reflection on the mysteries revealed through this Revelation. Hazony is right to point out that nowhere in the Bible is God said to be “omniscient” or “omnipotent” or “simple” or etc. Instead, these attributes, attributes which are fundamentally circumscribed and unlimited, are ex-pressed through metaphors of God’s royal majesty, of his plumbing depths of the world’s waters, of his heroic courage, etc. Both philosophers and theologians reflect upon and contemplate the things before them, seek-ing a deeper comprehension through open terms like omnipotent or omniscient, terms which are not limit-ing but instead invite a continuous search for fuller understanding. If contemplation were put to a quick end by the name “omnipotent,” as if one need only say “God is omnipotent” and that is the end of it, then Hazony’s critique would merit further attention. But, thankfully, words point to a reality beyond themselves. God is God, not omnipotence, even though omnipo-tent might be one of his attributes.

Thus, the realism of the Judeo-Christian God lies precisely in His transcendent perfection, in his inex-haustible, complete knowability and yet endless un-knowability to finite intelligences like our own. For God is He whom we discover (invenio) by the natural light of reason and the supernatural light of faith; he is Reality, not a concept we invent, even though the Latin word invenio, meaning “discover,” has gradually given way to the English word invent, meaning “con-struct.” Never must one leave the land of intelligibility and rationality in order to make an irrational crossing, however brief, into a new land of a supposed second type of intelligibility: there can only be one intelligi-bility, open to both natural reason and supernatural faith. Indeed, Aquinas famously explains that faith takes up where reason leaves off, guiding the human subject deeper into one and the same reality whose spontaneous fullness can never be exhausted by human thought, no matter how deeply it penetrates. A theist must never be satisfied with the mere apophatic state-ments of divine perfection, wherein we affirm God’s transcendence through unconditioned names such as omnipotent, immutable, etc. Indeed, the theist, with

heart and mind open to the fullness of reality, must al-ways respond further to the reality disclosed to him by nature and grace, penetrating deeper into the mystery of God’s omnipotence, omniscience, immutability, and omnibenevolence, thereby becoming transformed not only in mind but in heart.

1. Yoram Hazony, “An Imperfect God,” The Opinion Pages, The New York Times, 25 Nov. 2012, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/an-imperfect-god/?emc=eta1. 2. Ibid. 3. Mt 5:48. 4. Hazony. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Josef Pieper, The Silence of St. Thomas, trans. by John Murray and Daniel O’Connor, 3rd edition (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine Press, 1999) 59-60. 8. Hazony.

The Creation of Light, by Gustave Doré, c. 1866

Chris Hauser ‘14 is from Barrington, IL. He is a Philosophy and History modified double major.


&

By Robert Smith

Oh, night that guided me,Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover,Lover transformed in the Beloved! 1

Viennese psychiatrist Viktor Frankl sur-vived nearly three years in Nazi concentration camps from 1942 to 1945. At Auschwitz and

Dachau, he witnessed both the barbarity of his cap-tors and the moral degeneration of inmates who fell into despair. “The prisoner who had lost faith in the future,” Frankl wrote, “also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.”2 In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl would find hope by looking beyond himself: “It did not really matter what we had expected from life, but rather what life expected from us,”3 he concluded. In this way, his memoir introduced logotherapy, a theory founded on the belief that man’s primary motivational source is his search for meaning in life. Frankl believed that suffering becomes tolerable, valuable even, when endowed with an external purpose. It begins to subside at the moment it transforms into sacrifice.

Sadly, this view is at odds with the conventional wisdom of our day. We live in a hedonistic culture that sees personal comfort as an end in itself and considers “human well-being” to be the ultimate moral value. For many, suffering is the worst of all evils, the harsh reflection of a world without purpose. Any pain, whether physical or emotional, is to be avoided. It is thus unsurprising that some doctors now exult physician-assisted suicide as a compassionate alternative to palliative care and routinely prescribe drugs for even the smallest of medical problems. We have begun to “anaesthetize our existence,”4 writes biblical scholar Luke Timothy Johnson. Our public discourse often assumes that the most difficult lives are simply not worth living.

Yet suicide and medication cannot cure the spiritual poverty that afflicts us all. Suffering itself does not cause one to lose hope but merely tests one’s resolve. Our hedonistic culture, however, often fails to recognize this. If we allow pleasure or personal well-being to determine our happiness and dignity, it will naturally seem impossible to endure times of hardship. Viktor Frankl’s experience, like those of all who endured and

the Dark Night of the Soul Salvific Suffering


survived Nazi persecution, undermines this narrow-minded view of human dignity and human suffering; he challenges us to search for a deeper understanding of suffering, a deeper understanding of the human person. The psychiatrist appropriately echoed Nietzsche when he wrote that "he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”5 Nevertheless, it is not enough to suggest that each man individually determine what drives him. For suffering to really have purpose, it must be rooted in the objective truth of sacrificial love. And this is precisely what Christianity, the religion of Christ the Crucified, offers.

For Christians, the fullest expression of this sacrificial love is found in the passion and death of Jesus Christ. By dying for our sins, Jesus changed his anguish into an act of self-giving love. He voluntarily chose to suffer

so that we, who are completely incapable of bridging the gap between God and man, could experience the joys of eternal life. As the prophet Isaiah wrote, “it was our infirmities that he bore, our sufferings that he endured…upon him was the chastisement that makes

us whole, by his stripes we were healed.”6 Christ’s death thus provided the perfect model of charity (the Christian virtue of love; agape in Greek). It transformed mere suffering, which appears inseparable from human existence, into a loving sacrifice. As he himself said, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”7

In attacking Christians, agnostics and atheists often raise what is known as The Problem of Pain: why would an all-powerful and good God let innocent people suffer so much? But such an attack overlooks a central truth of Christ’s religion: Christianity does not try to explain away the evil of suffering. It does not run from hardship but embraces it for the sake of love. In his apostolic letter Salvafici Doloris, Pope John Paul II reiterates that our Savior’s love for us is the fullest

answer to the mystery of suffering: “Human suffering has reached its culmination in the Passion of Christ. And at the same time it has entered into a completely new dimension and a new order: it has been linked to love.”8 The risen Christ purposely retains his wounds

The Incredulity of St. Thomas,

by Caravaggio, c. 1601-2

For suffering to really have purpose, it must be rooted in the objective truth of sacrificial love. And this is precisely what

Christianity, the religion of Christ the Crucified, offers.


(his pierced hands and feet from the nails, and his pierced side from the lance) as a testament to this sacrificial love. If we are to follow his example, we must be willing to likewise suffer, to earn our own wounds. Indeed, the real value of our personal sufferings lies in their ability to unite us more fully with Christ’s own passion and death on the cross. By looking beyond ourselves, we also build compassion for others. Suffering, John Paul II explains, can then “unleash love in the human person.”9

By opening himself up to human suffering, Christ thus elevated it to something purposeful as an expression of love. John Paul II explains that, “In the Cross of Christ not only is the Redemption accomplished through suffering, but also human suffering itself has been redeemed.”10 We can offer up our pain as a sacrifice for the redemption of others. It is for this reason that Saint Paul in his letter to the Romans entreats Christians to offer their bodies as

living sacrifices to God, just as Jesus offered himself for the sins of mankind. To be clear, Christ’s sacrifice was all encompassing and final.11 However, as members of his body, we can, in a sense, become co-redemptors in the work of salvation. Although Christians differ as to the precise soteriological method by which this is achieved, it is enough to say that in so far as Christ lives within us, his perpetual sacrifice is made present through us. Contrary to popular criticism, Christian salvation is not a fairy tale promise of everlasting life

in exchange for a vow of obedience; it is unequivocally, unabashedly realistic. It faces head on the worst realities of human existence and discovers, through the historical action of God in the person and life of Christ, meaning.

Every affliction is thus a type of opportunity from God, a chance to become a martyr in the present by baring pain silently for the sake of other souls. We cannot add to Christ’s salvific work by our own effort, but we can become instruments for him. It is through the daily sacrifices of normal Christians guided by the Holy Spirit that Jesus draws souls to himself. This explains the Christian practice of self-denial, which is often misunderstood and criticized. Christians do not sadistically embrace suffering for its own sake nor do they malign the material world as evil. We fast and mortify our bodies in order to offer ourselves as reparation for sin and the redemption of the world. We suffer for the sake of love, a love through which we become united to the God who so loved the world that he gave up his only Son to be crucified.

Paul expresses this profoundly in his epistle to the Galatians: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me, and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me."12 Faith in Christ gives the believer a share in his very life and love, and most poignantly in the sufferings by which he showed it. At the same time, the Christian humbles himself by fully submitting to the will of God. It is only by suffering, by dying to self, that one can become united to Christ. What then does this portend for modern man? Is it even possible to develop spiritually in our age of egocentrism?

Though some still espouse the importance of delayed gratification, many today adhere to a pleasure-

Contrary to popular criticism, Christian salvation...is unequivocally, unabashedly realistic. It faces head on the worst realities of human existence and discovers, through the historical action of God in the person and life of Christ, meaning.

Christ Crucifixion by Léon Bonnat, c. 1880


St. John of the Cross by Francisco de Zurbarán,

c. 1656

pain ethic based on their own contentedness. Sadly, this epicurean philosophy can become a real impediment to those seeking truth in a world filled with suffering. If goodness and pleasure are the same, sacrificial actions appear nonsensical, almost immoral. As the popular atheist polemicist Christopher Hitchens so frequently pointed out, Christ’s teachings and death on the cross could be perceived as sadistic. That is why Hitchens harshly criticized Mother Teresa when her posthumously published letters revealed that she had suffered a lifelong period of spiritual aridity. He was unable to understand that Mother Teresa’s unflinching faith amid such personal suffering stood as a testament to love, not as proof that she was living a lie.

To fully understand the redemptive power of suffering, we must turn directly to this great mystery of Christian mysticism: spiritual dryness or “the dark night of the soul.” This phenomenon, experienced and discussed by such famous mystics as John of the Cross (1542-1591), Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897), and Mother Teresa (1910-1997), is considered a type of “passive purification” that draws a soul ever closer to Christ. Though it is by no means essential for salvation, or at all common for that matter, the dark night is deeply grounded in the Christian tradition and its unique understanding of suffering. Most profoundly, the dark night of the soul shows us that Christianity presents a stark countercultural worldview and makes philosophical assumptions that distinguish it from other world religions. Whereas a Buddhist quenches desire in order to end suffering, the Christian embraces

the suffering of a dark night in order to draw closer to the person of Jesus Christ.

In his exegesis Dark Night of the Soul, John of the Cross describes two periods of spiritual purgation or “nights,” so named because the soul is said to walk in darkness.13 These nights are a time of increasing spiritual asceticism. In order to achieve a state of perfection, the soul must first be purged of its desire for all things of this world so that it can learn to be content with God alone.14 Importantly, John explains that things do not harm the soul per se, but our desire for them can prevent us from loving Christ, from loving what is higher. This first dark night of sense and desire is surely difficult, but it pails in comparison to the subsequent dark night, the passive night of the soul in which the believer completely loses his or her experiential awareness of God.

During this second period, prayer and spiritual devotions lose their taste. As John explains, believers are trapped “in such total darkness that they do not know where to turn with their imagination and their thoughts. They are no longer able to advance another step in meditation, since…everything seems to have turned into its opposite.”15 Believers will feel as if they have been completely abandoned by God but must nevertheless strip themselves of all apprehension. They can only mitigate the overwhelming feeling of absence by recalling previous experiences of Christ’s love.

Though the soul will likely feel that God has abandoned it, a purer light is in fact replacing sensual experience. The relationship is no longer a means to an end but an end in itself. The soul then recognizes its lowliness in comparison to the divine majesty, realizing that its misery is not caused by God but rather by its seeming need for sensual satisfaction. John writes that, “The darkness and the other adversities which the soul experiences when this divine light first strikes it, are not inherent in or caused by this light, but are darknesses and faults of the soul itself; and this light illumines the soul so that it may see them.”16 The dark night thus provides a nourishing light that enables the soul to love God in all things.

This blissful night darkens the spirit, but only in order to illuminate it afterwards with re-spect to all things; it humbles the spirit and makes it miserable, but only in order to raise it up and exalt it; it impoverishes the spirit and deprives it of every natural possession and affection, but only to enable it to rise, divinely, in unfettered spiritual freedom, to a perfec-tion of all things in Heaven and on earth.17

The dark night is like a fire; we are the wood. Fire initially can make wood seem black and ugly, but this


occurs for the sake of a transformation. The two can then become one. So too, the dark night leads to a union with the Godhead. Christians would, however, reject comparisons to Buddhist nirvana. We do not practice self-abnegation in order to achieve the extinction of self. “The Buddhist mystic seeks absorption into an impersonal whole, looking to rid himself of desire and suffering,” writes apologist Carl Olsen. “The Christian mystic, on the other hand, desires neither the loss of personality nor an impersonal oneness with all but a deep and abiding communion with the Triune and personal God.”18 Christian asceticism and mysticism is not a self-abandonment but a self-discovery, a discovery of oneself and the others with whom one is called into communion. Christians are meant to embrace suffering, yes, but not a meaningless suffering: like Christ, their suffering is instead a sacrifice of love.

Still, this is a subtle distinction. In John’s time, many well-intentioned Christian mystics fell prey to a spurious theology known as Quietism. Quietists argued that by emptying oneself sensually and

spiritually to the will of God, a soul rightfully loses its identity in union with its maker. In order to be fully self-giving and altruistic, the quietist taught, the soul had to be even willing to sacrifice its own desire for salvation. This led many quietists to dispose of all virtue, believing that a passive state of indifference

was nobler than any fervent effort. This was a clear distortion of the Gospel message. According to French historian Henri Daniel-Rops, Christ advocated for “Total abandonment and abnegation, indeed, but of our self-centeredness, and not of the very faculties and activities of the soul itself.”19

But if this is true, then isn’t our love of God through suffering always marred by love of self? Thomas Aquinas firmly answers no. Christ himself asked us to love our neighbor as ourselves. As charity is the friendship of man for God, self-love is charitable when it is for the sake of God and in God.20 "It is one thing to desire this for myself, and another to desire it because of myself," explained Thomas Cajetan, a Reformation era cardinal known for his commentary on Aquinas’ Summa Theologica.21 Indeed, the proper object of hope is our own eternal happiness because this infinite good is the very enjoyment of God’s Essence, the result of our subordination to Him. Aquinas speaks of our natural desire for the beatific vision. Whether this desire is innate or somehow elicited remains the subject of

much debate. However, it is clear that by sacrificing beatitude, the quietists were in fact sacrificing a supreme expression of charity, the desire to perpetually glorify God. They no longer wanted to love at all! “We must die daily,” CS Lewis reminds us, “but it is better to love the self than to love nothing, and to pity the self

Christians are meant to embrace suffering, yes, but not a meaningless suffering; like Christ, their suffering is instead a sacrifice of love.

The Resurrection of Christ, by Hendrick van den Broeck, c. 1572


than to pity no one.”22 By conflating love with egoism, ironically sharing in the same mistake as hedonists, the quietists were in reality exhibiting a false humility.

In Christianity, our own happiness is directly linked to our subordination to Christ, for it truly is our happiness and we cannot be but who we are, human beings, subordinated and yet also made in the image and likeness of God. Our willingness to suffer with Christ, to love him, is what makes us most fully ourselves. Few of us sympathize with the extreme self-denial of the quietists, but considering their error is nonetheless illuminating for all of us. Indeed, we are mostly selfish, worried that Christ may ask too much of us. In reality, this fear is laughable. For, contrary to Quietism or Buddhism’s eagerness for the obliteration of self, Christianity teaches that we lose nothing by following Christ and serving God; it is only through the cross that one learns the way of love and becomes most truly free. In fact, we are most ourselves when we are subservient to Christ. All that we love, we do not lose. Once again, Lewis says it well: “Our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and natural desires…It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.”23 Christianity is the religion of Christ Crucified, yes, but even more it is the religion of Christ Resurrected.

In order to perceive the true answer to the “why” of suffering, we must look to the revelation of divine love, the ultimate source of meaning for everything that exists. Pope Paul VI says that man cannot "fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself."24 Those who experience the dark night are asked to give the utmost gift, the relinquishing of all personal desires to the will of Christ, yet not as if a recruit before the recruitment officer but rather like a husband before his wife. It is only by embracing suffering, not for its own sake but the sake of God and others, that we can bring an end to our modern expressions of nihilism, whether quietist or hedonist, and truly create a culture of love, of self-gift, of the communion of persons

1. John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul, ed. Kurt F. Reinhardt (New York: F. Ungar Publishing Co., 1957) 2.2. Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, revised updated edition (New York: Pocket Books, 1997) 95.3. Ibid. 98.4. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Living Gospel, (New York: Contiuum, 2004)5. Frankl 97.

6. Isaiah 53:4-5.7. John 15:138. John Paul II, Salvafici Doloris, On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering, Vatican Web site, February 11, 1984, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_11021984_salvifici-doloris_en.html, sec. 18, accessed August 14, 2012.9. Ibid. sec. 29.10. Ibid. sec. 19.11. Cf. Hebrews 10:1412. Galatians 2:19-2013. Cf. Psalm 23:414. John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul, 27: “For if you desire to possess anything at all, you cannot have your treasure in God alone.”15. Ibid. 171.16. Ibid. 204.17. Ibid. 196.18. Carl Olsen and Anthony E. Clark, “Are Jesus and Buddha Brothers?” This Rock, May-June 2005, 8-13.19. Henri Daniel-Rops, “The Quietist Affair,” Thought 32 (1957-1958): 485-515, accessed August 14, 2012, http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=7775.20. Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, IIa IIae, q.19, a.6.21. Cajetan, In IIam IIae, q. 17, a.5, no.6, quoted in Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, “The Errors of the Quietists on Contemplation and Pure love” in The Three Ages of the Interior Life, trans. by Timothea Doyle (Charlotte, NC: TAN Books and Publishers, 1999), accessed August 14, 2012, http://www.christianperfection.info/tta78.php#bk3.22. C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1970, 195.23. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1960) 189.24. Paul VI, Gaudium et Spes, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Vatican Web site, December 7, 1965, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html, sec. 24, accessed August 14, 2012.

Robert Smith ‘14 is from North Wales, PA. He is a Government major with minors in Music and Anthropology.

“Salvific Suffering and the Dark Night of the Soul” has been awarded the Fletcher Prize for Christian Apologetics for 2012-2013 by the Tucker Foundation.


The Bible,” according to Marilynne Robinson, “is the model for and subject of more art and thought than those of us who

live without its influence, consciously or unconscious-ly, will ever know.”1

This is true even of writers who deny the basic te-nets of the Bible—Robert Alter has recently published an examination of the influence of the King James Version on such authors as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Cormac McCarthy.2 How much more, then, it is of those who stand consciously in the stream of Christian thought! The language, stories, and themes of Christianity’s canonical literature, the literature commonly called the Bible, have profoundly influ-enced the western literary tradition.

Of all the Scriptural texts, the Book of Job enjoys perhaps the most prestigious literary legacy: it is in the bones of the greatest tragedies of Shakespeare, Lear and Hamlet; it casts its shadow over Moby-Dick; and it is the essential backdrop of Milton’s Paradise Regained. Chesterton considered it the single highest creative achievement of ancient Jewish culture, a “colossal cor-nerstone of the world,”3 and Milton identified it as the chief example of the “brief epic.”4 With due def-erence to Milton’s genius, however, Job is probably not best classified as an epic—rather, it bears closest resemblance to the verse-dramas of classical Greece.

Like them, Job is principally a conversation, in which (unlike the epics) the core events of the plot are heard of second-hand rather than narrated (only think of Oedipus’s self-mutilation in Oedipus Rex!), and of which the artistic merit lies more in the elegance and profundity of the characters’ speech than in the narra-tive sweep.

It is no wonder, then, that Job figures large in the imaginative world of Dostoevsky, “one of the major dramatic tempers after Shakespeare.”5 He told his wife that Job was one of the earliest books to make a “deep impression in [his] life,”6 and its influence on his work is far-reaching. Its influence on his work is indeed far-reaching but felt most keenly in his crowning achieve-ment, The Brothers Karamazov.

Much has been made, in Dostoevsky scholarship, of the “polyphonic form of the novel,” a concept in-troduced by the Soviet-era critic Mikhail Bakhtin. Polyphony, in Bakhtin’s theory, entails that rather than “a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial con-sciousness… a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event.”7 Stated more simply, the polyphonic novel is the novel animated by the spirit of drama: characters speak for themselves and represent their own ideas and ideals without the

The Brothers Karamazov and the Book of JobBy David Truschel

“

what is rightYou Have Not Spoken of Me


support or censure of a narratorial voice. Far from sim-ply being a formal model, however, the polyphonic nature of Dostoevsky’s novels is intimately bound up with his ideology:

What unfolds in Dostoevsky is not a world of objects, illuminated and ordered by his monologic thought, but a world of con-sciousnesses mutually illuminating one another… Dostoevsky seeks the highest and most authoritative orientation, and he perceives it not in his own thought, but as another authentic human being and his dis-course. The image of the ideal human being or the image of Christ represents for him the resolution of ideological quests. This image or this highest voice must crown the world of voices, must organize and subdue it.8

The search for a definitive voice, a divine voice that will answer—and perhaps silence— the futile thoughts of human beings is central to much of Dostoevsky’s work, The Brothers Karamazov especially.

Such a search is central also to the Book of Job. The enduring image of the book is that of Job bus-ily protesting his innocence to his friends, who insist that he suffers because of some misdeed. It is all too easy, therefore, to overlook another recurrent theme: Job’s desire to enter into a dispute with God and to hear God explain his misfortune. In part, Job’s de-mands for such a trial are bitter, expressive of his sense of injustice and wronged innocence. In part, however, they are earnest, the product of a genuine desire to un-derstand the ways of God:

Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his seat! I would lay my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments. I would know what he would answer me and understand what he would say to me.9

It is as though Job stands divided against himself—on the one hand, he longs to protest his own rightness and find fault with God; on the other, he seems to believe implicitly that God is just and that there is an answer to his questions, if he could only hear it. For this reason, he is impatient with the answers offered by his “mis-erable comforters,”10 Eliphaz and Bildad and Zophar: their answers are facile and small-minded, even if they are true in a limited sense. They are human, though correct, answers and therefore unsatisfying for Job, who asks divine questions needing divine answers.

Ivan Karamazov is in this regard Job’s fellow, anoth-er asker of hard questions and despiser of trite answers. He, together with his brothers, plays the part of Job in Dostoevsky’s theodicy. More particularly, he stands for Job’s doubt, his bitterness, his rejection of pious wisdom. Like Job, he is convinced that the innocent suffer, being fixated on the seeming meaninglessness of the mistreatment of children—“for the human heart here on earth it is incomprehensible.”11 And, like Job, he believes that evil goes unpunished. (It is for this reason that he—half-ironically, half-sincerely—posits that “the Church should contain in itself the whole state,” not out of pious enthusiasm, but so that the criminal will not have the Church as a refuge. Rather, “by his crime he would have rebelled not only against men but also against Christ’s Church”).12 Indeed, he is convinced that evil cannot be adequately punished, that the logic of redemption is in itself nonsensical—in his terms, it is not “Euclidean,” and he is possessed of “a Euclidean mind,”13 which cannot understand how the parallel lines of evil and forgiveness can ever meet. Ultimately, he will refuse even to acquiesce when shown to be wrong:

I don’t want harmony, for love of mankind I don’t want it. I’d rather remain with my un-requited suffering and my unquenched in-dignation, even if I am wrong. Besides, they have put too high a price on harmony; we can’t afford to pay so much for admission. And therefore I hasten to return my ticket.14

Ivan, like Job in certain moments, entertains the no-tion that God might not be just, might not be righ-teous. He differs only in that, where Job hinted, he asserts.

But if Ivan is Job in his doubt—Dostoevsky’s theomachy, the challenge to God’s righteousness that every theodicy must assume and answer—Alyosha Karamazov is Job in his faith and resignation. His faith is shaken by the death of his mentor, Elder Zosima, but he remains committed to Zosima’s vision of the world, a vibrantly and intensely Christocentric one, charac-terized by an emphasis on solidarity and redemption

Job Covered With Boils by Anonymous, c. 1525


in suffering. His philosophy of life corresponds to Job’s initial response to his misfortunes: “Shall we receive good from God and not receive evil?”15 In the closing pages of the novel, having seen the death and humili-ation of his spiritual father, the murder of his true fa-ther, the illness of one brother and the sentencing of the other to exile for a crime of which he is innocent, and the death of a very young friend, Alyosha never-theless remains convinced of the goodness of God and the possibility of redeemed suffering: “Certainly we shall rise, certainly we shall see and gladly, joyfully tell one another all that has been.”16

Finally, Dmitri Karamazov, the eldest brother and the brother who suffers most, represents Job in his per-plexed fidelity to God—neither despairing of God’s goodness nor understanding the things that befall him, he simply endures, and, like Job, refuses to “curse God and die.”17 He flirts with the nihilistic worldview

espoused by Ivan as well as the redemptive vision of Alyosha—“I want to suffer and be purified by suffering! And perhaps I will be purified, eh, gentlemen?” 18—but ultimately favors the latter. Though he doubts whether he is able to endure it, Dmitri attains his highest point of moral vision and spiritual aspiration in submitting to wrongful exile:

It’s impossible for a convict to be without God, even more impossible than for a non-convict! And then from the depths of the earth, we, the men underground, will start singing a tragic hymn to God, in whom there is joy! Hail to God and his joy! I love him!19

Here is Job’s own determination, his submission to God, his acquiescence to the inscrutable divine even in the face of overwhelming grief. “Though he slay me, yet I will hope in him.”20

It bears remembering, however, that though Job himself may be the protagonist of his namesake book, he is not its “hero of ideas,” to borrow a phrase from Vladislav Krasnov.21 To the extent that the Book of Job has a human hero at all, as distinct from a pro-tagonist, it is Elihu, the son of Barachel, who neither doubts God’s goodness as Job does nor offers facile ex-planations like Eliphaz and his companions. Likewise, though the titular brothers are the protagonists of The Brothers Karamazov, and though Alyosha is designated by the narrator as its “hero,”22 none of them is the hero of ideas, the ideological champion of the novel. While the external events do indeed revolve around the three brothers, the battle of ideas is fought by others.

In the role of Elihu is Zosima, the elder of Alyosha’s monastery; in that of Eliphaz—blended, however, with the worse moments of Job—is the figure of the Grand Inquisitor. The Inquisitor, it is true, is a fictitious cre-ation of Ivan; nevertheless, he is a remarkably realized character in his own right, being, in fact, the logical extrapolation of a particular thread of Ivan’s thought. (Alyosha correctly notes that the Inquisitor’s “whole se-cret” is that he “doesn’t believe in God”23—he is Ivan’s nihilism given flesh, but without those humanizing el-ements in Ivan’s own personality.)

For the Inquisitor, God—more particularly, Christ—is not the “lover of mankind”24 but a hard and lonely voice in the desert, summoning human beings to the impossible and the inhuman. (Bonhoeffer calls the Inquisitor’s Christ “a radical Jesus,”25 a misconcep-tion of him as an irreconcilable enemy to the world and an absolute revolutionary). He is not on the side of

the lowly and the broken but on the side of a few thou-sand “gods,” superior human beings who can endure the destroying of the law and live autonomously.26 He has, therefore, no grace, no mercy, no pity for the weak and the wicked. Thus, the Inquisitor and his church believe themselves to be serving mankind by opposing God. They aspire to end suffering by ending human moral freedom, such that “There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand suf-ferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil.”27 The Inquisitor believes that human beings must be sheltered from suffer-ing, that suffering is beyond human capacity to bear. Zosima, by contrast, expresses confidence in the ordi-nary Christian: “Whoever does not believe in God will not believe in the people of God. But he who believes in the people of God will also see their holiness.”28 For him, human suffering, far from an irreconcilable ob-jection to God, is an opportunity to be an instrument of divine grace, to be “guilty on behalf of all and for all.”29 Those who are willing to accept suffering, ac-cording to Zosima, may preserve others from it, as all creatures stand in solidarity with one another:

My young brother asked forgiveness of the birds: it seems senseless, yet it is right, for all is like an ocean, all flows and con-nects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world. Let it be mad-ness to ask forgiveness of the birds, still it would be easier for the birds, and for a child, and for any animal near you, if you yourself were more gracious than you are

His philosophy of life corresponds to Job’s initial response to his misfortunes: “Shall we receive good from God and not receive evil?”


now, if only by a drop, still it would be easier. All is like an ocean, I say to you.30

Where Ivan cannot see the possibility of redemptive suffering at all, even on the part of Christ, Zosima sees all suffering, great and small, as a chance to imitate Christ in bearing guilt and evil.

It is in keeping with Dostoevsky’s polyphonic form that Zosima and the Inquisitor never speak to each other, never directly answer each other’s objections. However close Zosima’s vision may be to Dostoevsky’s own, and however far from it the Inquisitor’s may be— Dostoevsky elsewhere portrays the Grand Inquisitor’s arrogant nihilism in an unflattering light, for instance in Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment and in Stavrogin in Demons—they are human voices, noth-ing more. As in the Book of Job, Elihu’s voice is not the voice of God, so, in The Brothers Karamazov, Zosima’s is not the voice of Christ. Jesus does appear in the story of the Inquisitor, but he remains silent. While on the one hand this is indicative of Ivan’s inability to conceive of Christ and his lack of regard for him, it is also an intentional decision on Dostoevsky’s part not to speak for God. He does not presume, like Milton in Paradise Lost, to put words in the divine mouth but allows the discourse to remain at the human level, consciously in the presence but nevertheless also under the judgment of God. In Zosima, Elihu has his say, but Dostoevsky, like Job, will wait for God to speak, not from the lips of a man, but out of the whirlwind.

1. Marilynne Robinson, “The Book of Books,” New York Times, December 25, 2011, Sunday Book Review.2. Robert Alter, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010).3. G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993) 98.4. C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961) 4.5. George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1996) 347.6. Vladimir Kantor, “The Problem of Temptation,” in Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition, ed. George Pattinson and Diane Oenning Thompson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 196. 7. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) 6.8. Ibid. 96-97.9. Job 23:3-7.10. Job 16:2.11. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov,

trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002) 237.12. Ibid. 60, 63.13. Ibid. 235.14. Ibid. 245, emphasis original. 15. Job 2:10.16. Dostoevsky 776.17. Job 2:9.18. Dostoevsky 509.19. Ibid. 591-2.20. Job 13:15.21. Vladislav Krasnov, Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky: A Study in the Polyphonic Novel (Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1980) 17.22. Dostoevsky 3.23. Ibid. 261.24. Ibid. 743.25. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009) 155.26. Dostoevsky 256.27. Ibid. 259.28. Ibid. 294.29. Ibid. 320.30. Ibid. 321.

Portrait of the Writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1872

David Truschel is a senior at Biola University from Beverly, MA. He is a Biblical Studies and Theology major.


Ronald Sider’sBy Hayden Kvamme

A R e s p o n s e to

Book Review

Ronald Sider is an evangelical Christian speaker, writer, and professor of theology and politics. In his recent book, Just Politics: A

Guide for Christian Engagement, he argues that in the past twenty years or so evangelical Christian engage-ment in American politics has been either non-existent or else very poor.1

Some evangelicals have decided that “saving souls” is more important than any political issue and thus have resolved not to enter the political arena at all. Other evangelicals have chosen to enter the political arena but have done so with little systematic reflection, taking what Sider calls a “ready, fire, aim” approach.2

This latter option is clearly undesirable, but Sider argues that the former is no better, especially within a democratic society:

If Christ is my Lord, if Christ desires the well-being of all, and if my vote has the po-tential to encourage political decisions that will promote the well-being of my neigh-bors, then the obligation to vote responsibly

follows necessarily from my confession that Christ my Lord calls me to love my neighbor.3

Sider thus sets as the main task of his book putting Christians, particularly evangelical Christians, in a position to vote responsibly and act well politically.

To do this, Sider attempts to develop a biblical political philosophy. This is best done, Sider argues, not by proof texting from the Bible on every political issue but instead by developing a biblical view of both persons and the world as a whole and applying this view to politics. Sider does not start from scratch in arriving at these views but uses the political ideas of historical Christian thinkers to guide him (e.g. Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin). Sider recognizes as well that it would be insufficient to simply provide a set of theoretical principles and thus also applies these theoretical principles of his Christian political philosophy to the specific issues facing the contemporary world. In all of this, Sider primarily addresses an evangelical Christian audience, that is, those who view the Bible as the primary authority for

Just Politics


moral questions, and thus takes the authority of the Bible as a foundational assumption throughout his book.

While assuming this authority throughout his book slightly weakens Sider’s ability to engage non-Christian political thinkers, it also strengthens his ability to address his primary audience and thus accomplish his main goal: facilitating better evangelical Christian engagement in politics. Furthermore, he also notes that even non-Christian members of our “pluralistic

society” should still not be able to easily dismiss his conclusions or even find them all that surprising, in part because these claims should be “written on the hearts” of all people, and in part because he thinks his arguments for these conclusions can be modified in order to be made appealing to others coming from different starting points. For these reasons I do not find his decision to work within an evangelical framework, rather than argue up to it, to be detrimental to his book’s success.

As alluded to above, Sider’s systematic approach allows him to challenge what he considers to be over-simplified notions of which political actions are right and wrong, notions that he understands to result from non-systematic Christian engagement in politics. On this front I find Sider to be very successful. By starting with the biblical story and a general political framework instead of a particular political party or a particular political issue, Sider avoids any hint of immediate partisanship while also gaining the respect of the diverse readers from within the evangelical tradition through his patience and thoughtfulness, characteristics so often lacking on the surface of any political engagement today. Consider, for instance, his treatment of distributive justice: he argues that, “from a biblical perspective, distributive justice demands adequate access to productive resources for those able to earn their own way…”4 Sider identifies land as one of the most important, if not the most important, productive resources in ancient Israel. By tracing the treatment of land in various Biblical texts (e.g., Ezekiel, Leviticus, Deuteronomy), Sider makes a compelling case that God’s vision for ancient Israel was for every family to enjoy a decent, dignified life in the community if they acted responsibly. He identifies two main structural checks to help ensure this was possible: the year of the jubilee and the sabbatical

year.5 Sider’s approach to ownership of productive resources clearly cuts across party lines, as he advocates for occasional dramatic structural measures while also placing responsibility on individual families to use their resources well and bear the consequences of using them poorly. Beginning to apply this approach to life in America today, Sider identifies knowledge as one of the main productive resources.6 Thus, he identifies the institution of education as one in need of deep reform at the national and local levels in order to ensure that

every child can receive a quality education and thus have access to one of the main resources, knowledge, crucial to success in our society today.

By recognizing the importance of a systematic framework in answering difficult political questions, Sider lays a foundation for more thoughtful Christian engagement in the American political sphere. Leaving much of the application of the principles he lays out to his readers, however, Sider places a tall burden on the public to carry out the task he has here only begun. While I found myself disagreeing with Sider on particular issues throughout the book, I nevertheless felt Sider giving me the space to do so. In this way Sider was able to cultivate in his readers the sort of care and thoughtfulness he sought to exemplify, thus enabling them to be active in the political sphere while remaining thoughtful, reflective, and Christian.

1. Ronald J. Sider, Just Politics: A Guide for Christian Engagement (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2012) 3-10.2. Ibid. 11.3. Ibid. 9.4. Ibid. 90.5. Ibid. 91-93. The year of the jubilee came once every 50 years mandating that land be returned to its original owner (92; see also Lev. 25). Similarly, the sabbatical year came once every seven years, at which time debts would be cancelled and slaves released (93; see also Deut. 15).6. Ibid. 94.

Sider thus sets as the main task of his book putting Christians, particularly evangelical Christians, in a

position to vote responsibly and act well politically.

Hayden Kvamme ‘14 is from Excelsior, MN. He is a Mathematics and Philosophy double major.


The Nicene Creed

This prayer by professor of religion Lucius Waterman appears on a plaque hanging outside Parkhurst Hall.

O Lord God Almighty, well-spring of wisdom, master of power, guide of all growth, giver of all gain. We make our prayer to thee, this day, for Dartmouth College. Earnestly entreating thy favour for its people. For its work, and for all its life. Let thy hand be upon its officers of administration to make them strong and wise, and let thy word make known to them the hiding-place of power. Give to its teachers the gift of teaching, and make them to be men right-minded and high-hearted. Give to its students the spirit of vision, and fill them with a just ambition to be strong and well-furnished, and to have understanding of the times in which they live. Save the men of Dartmouth from the allurements of self-indulgence, from the assaults of evil foes, from pride of success, from false ambitions, from hardness, from shallowness, from laziness, from heedlessness, from carelessness of opportunity, and from ingratitude for sacrifices out of which their opportunity has grown. Make, we beseech thee, this society of scholars to be a fountain of true knowledge, a temple of sacred service, a fortress for the defense of things just and right, and fill the Dartmouth spirit with thy spirit, to make it a name and a praise that shall not fail, but stand before thee forever. We ask in the name in which alone is salvation, even through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen.

The Reverend Lucius Waterman, D.D.

We, the members of The Dartmouth Apologia, affirm that the Bible is inspired by God, that faith in Jesus

Christ is necessary for salvation, and that God has called us to live by the moral principles of the New

Testament. We also affirm the Nicene Creed, with the understanding that views may differ on baptism and

the meaning of the word “catholic.”

We [I] believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.

We [I] believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

We [I] believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father [and the Son]. With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets. We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

A Prayer for Dartmouth

42 • The Dartmouth Apologia • Spring 2013 ]


A Journal of Christian �oughtPhoto by Jacob Kupferman ‘14

42 • The Dartmouth Apologia • Spring 2013


A Journal of Christian �ought

Documents

Apologia Spring 2013