When I arrived at Messiah 13 years ago, I did not really know what an
Anabaptist was, except in an historical sense (I had studied the Reformation
in graduate school and was aware of the "radical Reformation", but not
really in a personal way). Since coming here -- we're an evangelical
college with strong Anabaptist connections -- I have learned much about the
theology of suffering and the cross, much that I never learned from my
Calvinist background. (Please note my choice of verb: "learned," which is
not the same as "heard of" or "encountered.") With their belief that the NT
takes priority over the OT and the gospels take priority over the rest of
the NT, Anabaptists focus more than other Christians on the life and work of
Christ as divine revelation. Hence, theodicy for them starts there and
moves elsewhere only as a supplementary move. I think this is correct.
What are we to learn from the cross, relative to theodicy? I'll quote (from
memory, so it might be not quite exact) the flyleaf quotation from CS Lewis,
The Problem of Pain, where he quotes George Macdonald: "The son of God
suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their
sufferings might be like his." So, whatever view we might hold of the fall
and its historicity, or of infra/supralapsarianism, the cross appears (to
me) to be telling us that suffering is part and parcel of God's
self-revelation. We should be surprised not that we suffer, but that we
don't.
Now I'll "go ballistic" and propose another theological point for
consideration. I have become convinced in the past few years that the cross
has many correct interpretations that are true as something like
"complementary descriptions" of one reality. One of these is the
substitutionary atonement theory, developed by Anselm and others in the
middle ages. Another is the "God loves you and died for you" popular
version of this. Another, I am convinced, is the view that the cross
represents a divine "peace offering" to a suffering world: God is telling us
that God knows all about suffering, not "intellectually" (if that is a
proper term to apply to God) only, but more substantially, existentially.
God suffered. God died. God knows. If I might be forgiven for the
suggestion, we might even view this as a form of divine apology for not
making heaven now: which I believe to have been within God's ability, though
apparently not in God's plans for the moment.
As for the orthodox picture of God, which I heartily accept, there has
always been a tension between God's power and God's goodness/love on the
matter of evil, as readers surely know. It was Lactantius or Tertullian, I
think, who posed the problem of evil so starkly in those terms, not a modern
theologian. This is hardly the place to undertake a wholesale defense of
God, but it seems to be the case that one can either accept the conundrum as
is -- the conundrum taken for a contradiction by atheists -- or one can try
to reduce the cognitive dissonance in one way or another. The latter path
can involve non-traditional understandings of God's power or God's love --
or, of God's knowledge (what could omniscience actually know?). The last
route is in my opinion the most attractive, for those who want to get past
the conundrum. The resurrection rules out the first route, for a God with
the power to raise Christ has plenty of power to remake the world and get
rid of suffering (or so it appears to me). And God loves me: that's not
negotiable for Christians. So we need to look at the extent of divine
foreknowledge. The principle difficulties will probably involve biblical
references to God's knowledge of the future, which I do not question but am
trying to understand more fully.
Ted Davis