This is an article in a series: Please see: Christ vs. the Hermeneutical Death Spiral, part 1
My problem is essentially a theodical one as I have alluded, and before what you might think this is yet another vain attempt to suggest that everyone is wrong and I am right by my exegesis of particular parts of Romans, I should start by taking a stab at a system of Christian hermeneutical theology in general from where any such attempt will be informed.
I don’t think we can’t argue too much against J.R.Daniel Kirk in his Unlocking Romans: Resurrection and the Justification of God, that Romans is essentially a theodicy, arguing that Paul uses the resurrection as an interpretative key for explaining the vindication of God in an evil world. Paul does not use the traditional focus of the “union with Christ” and “justification” as those keys, ideas that, as I have said, have become our demons rather than our light-bearers. I disagree with Kirk on his working conceptualization of the resurrection, but he has us dead to rights in suggesting whether we understand theodicy and Romans at all if we shift the grounding of our hermeneutic from prophetic phenomena to its conceptual consequences. This is his major point, where and how we are getting our means of meaning to the whole thing, not just what Paul seems to be saying directly about theodicy.
I’ll get to Paul’s particular example shortly, but for now, let me detour onto describing the outlines of the theological complaint here. It’s all about hermeneutical assumptions gone wrong. It’s not about propositions, theological statements, conclusions or creeds. It comes from why we expect transcendent meaning, the preeminence of propositions as the carriers of vital meaning, and what the propositions and implications coming out of those expectations should look like if transcendence is a fact, not just some statement or feeling. If you don’t get this right, hermeneutics is a death spiral into fideistic madness, not an ascending stair toward something real, as it should be.
Theodicy, a word that means literally “justifying God,” is “an attempt to answer the question of why a good God permits the manifestation of evil.” “The vindication of divine providence in view of the existence of evil.” “An attempt to justify or defend God in the face of evil.” “An explanation of why a perfectly good, almighty, and all-knowing God permits evil.”
And so here is our interface with “the Problem of Evil.” I want to use this and the following to make an analogy.
If you are in seminary, the Theodicy course goes something like this:
There is nothing wrong with this, and I use it for that very reason. On the surface, both the questions and the assignments are innocuous, a description of a process, a shell for content. What I want to do is attempt to show you that our corrupt hermeneutics is equal to this shell, not anything palpably and demonstrably real.
In this statement of the problem and the following course to address it, one question comes to mind that is ignored as perhaps fundamental to the whole course on the problem of evil: is not the first problem of evil perhaps why God allows us to be helpless and dominated by the thought of a transcendent being and what is antithetical to him that is not informed exclusively through transcendent phenomena that is not equally manifest in its category as is any other sensory phenomena in its? If God is real, if he has given a revelation as the one and only local means to Him that is not wholly dependent upon anything that man can make or do for himself, isn’t the real evil one of a numbness, apathy or satisfaction to a world where a dominating kind of theodicy exists as inarguable that makes evil something that has to do only with the failure or absence of faith, will, morality, action, reaction, reason, experience, feeling, creed, proposition or paganism? Isn’t evil really the active and practiced eschewing of, if it exists, the only information that could possibly stand provably of a divine origin for anything else that can originate entirely within the mind and without the inspiration from this divine fact?
The hermeneutical death spiral and evil by which truly “good” people are subject is the result of the relegation of messianic prophecy, the only transcendent reality, and its evidence, by which loss its regulators own “Christianity” and force all who would come into it to make obeisance to its this revelation’s replacement.
There is an unambiguous exposition if ever there was one.
Look, the devil is really not in the details unless that detail is exactly what and who the devil is, over which most of Christendom is convinced they are not deceived.
I use the term “divine phenomena” or “messianic phenomena” a lot in this discussion as the non-conceptual locus of meaning from which it all is supposed to come. I am not using “Phenomena” here in the sense of what comes to the physical senses. I mean the phenomena of the record of the divine acting in history, which is recorded, and spiritually (mentally) it means the divinely influenced mind that is phenomenology remade through the contemplation of those events and forced conceptual objects. Our mental, spiritual, divine phenomena, that which goes on in our spirit in a meeting with God through the appearance of this phenomena, is supposed to be an experience internally that is transformative to its alignment with transcendence to the same extent that the phenomena from which it is influenced are objectively transcendent. We “see” documented supernatural phenomena and in turn, we become the phenomena. But if the basis for our “God” and “evil,” the concepts which are to be informed by exposure to this phenomena, are evil, and not transcendently founded in a perspicuous way as I describe, and we carry on talking about them as if they were, it would seem to me that the real evil in the real theodicy is a question about the spiritual machine code of our culturally and personally influenced and paradigmatic linguistic habits that run an evil faith inside a knowledge container of our own chosen phenomena, not God’s. Upon what kind of knowledge do we really depend for informing our working conception of God, good and evil and our sequitur in faith, and can it be said that this knowledge is itself transcendent by its own power, not ours?
Perhaps you have never considered this before because these words “knowledge,” “faith,” and “transcendent” are just so culturally loaded or personal that the idea of constructing a powerful thought with them is just too daunting. We are not grounded any more by them, we are lost in them, but they still rule us. But that is exactly my point. If there is such a biblical knowledge that exits which was introduced for the very purpose of circumventing such struggle, our evil is not a person, or something in the newspapers, or any idea. The evil is certainly “spiritual,” “knowledge,” “faith,” “God,” and “transcendent,” whichever pleads with us out of our accepted theology books “you shall not surely die,” when they are in themselves powerless to stand as transcendent artifacts. Evil is the insular concept and evil is the insular experience, and the only thing Holy is that which is neither a concept or an experience but which is a divine promise and its historical fulfillment which alone is capable of predicting a divine meeting of a spiritually moral being of nature and a spiritual-moral being of desire.
Did you ever stop and think that we are under the impression that we should be able to come to the truth about an alternate reality and being through any contemplation of and through any religious concept we wish as long as it is found in the Bible, without specificying what in the Bible? Perhaps the real theodicy is about why God allows “the vindication of divine providence in view of the existence of evil” to be our interface with the theodical question. This is correctly rephrased as “the vindication of divine providence in view of the existence of formulations of the great questions about theism exclusively through ideas that need have no dependence on a demonstrably divine inheritance.” That, if God exists, I ask not why evil “exists,” I ask why the evil we are conceptually working with must be an evil that looks a lot more like Aristotle’s version than that of Jesus? I ask why both a conception of “God” and “evil” still exists, entertained exclusively in our “theodicy,” which the gospel was presumably given to replace. I ask not first why God allows “evil.” The real question of theodicy is why he allows a faux theodicy that frames the great questions with a language so ancient and universal that the real subject of evil that was revealed to replace the false one seems locked out without notice.
Have we all this time seen the virtue in Faust’s transformation, and his insight into what constitutes man’s real place of insight, by a deadly error?
“Yes – this I hold to with devout insistence,
Wisdom’s last verdict goes to say:
He only earns both freedom and existence
Who must reconquer them each day.”
Goethe’s final view of Christianity was certainly thorough the theodical implications of such horrors as the 7 years’ war and the Libson earthquake in 1755, ending for him in something more akin to pantheism than Paul. You can look at Faust as autobiographical in this respect. The perfect world Faust envisioned through his heart transformation and later was disillusioned by what he thought was throught the fool’s errand of scholarship became an imperfect world, one that gave up the hope of redemption, where his “freedom” and “existence” is now to be fought for and won each day through intellectual work. The struggle continues, but this new kind, which is “freedom,” is the freedom that, as we like to say, is in the clueless yet blissful journey, not the destination. Through toil, vagueness, and earned virtue, through slogging undaunted through the dark swamp of the fallen mind to find the light. This is also what we in our theology like to also put as insight and virtue, our ultimate example of Christian redemption through divine knowledge: it starts in a personal revelation or it starts at the end of a long struggle of slowly cracking, by reason, by study of the divines and philosophy, by “reading” the Bible, by “obedience,” the initial inflow of light into stream that finally illuminates everything we encounter.
Through Care’s spell, the man who wanted to see everything was made blind, and through his blindness he now sees everything, yet, in my opinion, he sees nothing but what he saw before. But this is not Paul’s blindness from the appearance, the divine phenomena, of the risen Christ on the Road to Damascus. Neither his previous sight nor then his redemptive blindness showed him anything but another angle to an opaque “freedom” and “existence,” which is no change at all. “Truth” used to be “absolute” and never seen, and now it’s a social construct and never seen, where both the scholar who sought an absolute and the blind man’s construct are together nothing but something like “the absolute truth of the social construct” on their way down into the real and unending darkness.
Look above at the formal definitions of theodicy again, both in the definition of theodicy and its culturally approved paradigm for working with it. We can replace theodicy here with systematic theology, apologetics, soteriology, church history, or any of our studies in the seminary since all of them share one thing in common: they begin with propositional or descriptive knowledge. Propositional knowledge is the knowledge of belief or declarative statements of belief. This is contrasted with the knowledge of acquaintance, or procedure or, most perfectly, some kind of practice. The knowledge of what we conceptualize or experience inside of us, and then the knowledge of what we face.
Our scholars, mostly the conservative ones, go to great pains making sure we understand that faith is grounded in propositions. Statements. Creedal bullets. Ideas. The alternative is feeling, emotion, intuition and a mind lost in his own imaginations. Is this true? I will deal with this crucial topic later, but for now, let me say that neither Christian propositions nor romantic wish-casting is the basis for faith. Reality, phenomena, fact, leads, or else reality will be subject to an emotionally driven whim in time. The Christian world we have today, and the whole search for meaning, is a battle between the affection for man-generated things and divinely made things proven so and open for inspection. It’s not about statements of truth or feelings that come from truth.
Everyone agrees that, in the case of theology, it’s all going to be inferential to some degree because we are not seeing divine phenomena directly, God directly, but only its effects. Science does not have this problem because it is not in the business of lensing any alternate reality, but whatever vision of truth it seeks to obtain is the same kind that it used to obtain it. A telescope sees planets, and the telescope and the planet are both material objects. Quantum theory and quantum phenomena, “black holes bend space/time” and its descriptive formula are also both aligned to the physical universe. However, the theological lensing which reveals “God” is not through a theological telescope unless that theology, a true and sincere metaphysical expectation of revelation, is as transcendent as God. The theological telescope, if capable of such resolution, should have the same transcendent establishment and palpability as what it brings into view. There is no man-made thing that can do this. “Theology” can’t do this. That is, “theology” as a general study of God. It does not start with the man. It has to come from that divine world, and theology, the study of God, begins when he shows up.
Symbols, of which hermenutics is rightly obsessed, are cursory representations truth, demanded, if you will, by truth so that it can be seen in the world of matter and mind and handled systematically. The ding an sich, as Kant called it, the “thing in itself,” is not reached by inferential reality, or the full access to and display of the scope of a reality which needs no mediatory symbolic device to interpret it for it to be true, but requires it in order to be believed true. This is the assumption of both the idealist and realist sides to some degree, and it is the right assumption. But you will never hear either side talk about “symbol,” which is language, as something the God gives, only something socially constructed, that man makes, and essentially something either unreal or destined to be so.
[i] FredyTheodicy FredyTheodicy. (2018). Www3.dbu.edu. Retrieved 12 March 2018, from http://www3.dbu.edu/mitchell/fredythe.html
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