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August 1, 2007
Hello everyone,
C.S. Lewis caused quite an uproar in his day by writing intelligently about Christianity to a popular audience. His peers in particular thought that this form of writing was a sort of condescension and even now his spiritual writings enjoy much more popularity and acclaim with a general audience than within the academic community. At the end of Mere Christianity, he reveals at least one of the reasons behind this dual reception when he states: “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.” Lewis never claimed to be original and that is one of the reasons why his colleagues at the university were critical of his contributions and also the reason he continues to enjoy such a great reception within the general readership of believers. Regarding the former in particular, once we learn something, particularly if we have truly mastered it, it is unconsciously relegated to the stuff of “common-sense” and we forget that there was a time in which we did not know. Additionally, given that life has its seasons, the same concepts can apply much differently in one period than another, as a telescope reveals much different views depending on the end through which we peer. Thus, the same truth we thought we had mastered often takes on different hues or perspectives, just as the same tree appears in different guises depending on whether it is winter, spring, summer, or fall.
C.S. Lewis also became the subject matter of a screenplay by William Nicholson, who earlier had developed the story for television and the stage. This screenplay, better known as Shadowlands, was first released as a television movie in 1985, as a Broadway act after 1990, and as a film in 1993 starring Anthony Hopkins as Lewis and Debra Winger as his wife Joy Davidman Gresham. Like most such works, it has been criticized for its romanticization of the storyline and selectivity of detail: in a word, the work now fictionalizes the historical reality, taking, as all such works do, an identity of its own. The storyline, briefly summarized, is of a backward British bachelor and somewhat stuffy academic who finally discovers romance, only to soon lose his bride to cancer. This same bachelor is also something of a self-styled Christian writer who pens popular books for a believing audience—particularly on the problem of evil and suffering—but who has had comparatively little real-life experience with adversity: it is through these books that he meets the cheeky American lady known as Joy who always speaks her mind in complete contrast to English decorum. Her death leaves him struggling with his faith and the man who glibly declared that “pain is God’s megaphone to a deaf world,” now must face the inadequacy of that declaration in helping him struggle through his own grief. Those familiar with Lewis’ writing will recognize the obvious allusion to his earlier work The Problem of Pain (from which the former quotation is derived) and his later work The Great Divorce in which he honestly works out his grief. At the end of the film, he has not really come into an answer, but he has come into an acceptance and that seems to be the main theological thrust of the movie: the problem of pain cannot be answered—it is beyond our comprehension—but it can be accepted: God is still the great hope found in the midst of it all, even if answers remain elusive.
At one point in the film, Hopkins’ character is particularly overwhelmed with his grief and makes the statement: “Prayer doesn’t change God, it changes us.” I have thought of that statement often: it could easily be taken as a quasi-profound phrase that adds enigma to a film but in the end says nothing. In this instance, however, I think there is much to be said for that particular statement and it is that topic in particular which interests us today.
Two issues ago we said that God, by definition, is utterly perfect and lacks nothing. By the very word “God” and all that the designation implies, we have in mind that which is utterly transcendent, lacking in nothing, the greatest of all things that has ever entered into the mind of humanity. We said that if God lacks nothing, he has nothing to gain, or, at the least, he has no lack that needs first to be filled before he can offer us everything. Whereas even the most beautiful human relationships in part serve to fill the needs of the respective participants, God has no needs to be filled. (If you are particularly interested in a formal treatment of such considerations as they play out in philosophic inquiry, see the February 22, 2006 issue Innate Knowledge: God as Man’s Beatitude where we took a detailed and analytic look at the arguments of St. Anselm and the criticism they received in his own day, later by Enlightment/post-Englightenment thinkers such as Kant, and still later by contemporary philosophers and theologians.)
We might say here as a matter of philosophic speculation that such an admission does not rule out the real possibility, even probability, that God delights in his creatures. In fact, if God lacks nothing, there would be no other explanation as to why he offers himself freely to his fragile and broken creations than simply that, being utterly good, he positively delights in giving himself away. Another premise we did not explore as closely (though we have in many issues in the past) is that evil itself is a lack of some good: a lie is the absence of truth, a murder is the taking of life: all sins, all forms of evil, are a lack of some good. It is to this end that Thomas Weinandy cites Aquinas in a footnote on page 152 of Does God Suffer?: “being and perfection of any nature is good. Hence it cannot be that evil signifies being, or any form or nature. Therefore it must be that by the name of evil is signified the absence of good.” Acquinas’ point is that while evil is real, it does not point to an ontological reality but rather to a moral deficit; evil is a reality, not by what it names but by what it excludes, much like “cold” is a designation we assign to the absence of heat. Weinandy continues with a citation from Pope John Paul II’s Salvific Doloris (available online from EWTN): “Man suffers on account of evil, which is a certain lack, limitation or distortion of good. We could say that man suffers because of a good in which he does not share, from which in a certain sense he is cut off, or of which he has deprived himself. He particularly suffers when he ‘ought’ in the normal order of things to have a share in this good, and does not have it.” This latter idea reflects how humanity experiences suffering and deprivation.
These ideas are familiar ones to anyone versed in theodicies: like all such arguments, they can quickly grow trite from overuse. Yet we need this foundation in place in order to finally get around to our idea of prayer not changing God, but changing us. As with Lewis, we are not interested in originality here (and what does it suggest about our culture and its mentality that ever-new and exotic stimuli is sought after and exalted as a preeminent virtue? one could say much of a bored culture in which sophistication has become anathematic).
It follows from our thoughts here that if evil is the lack of a good, then God cannot be evil because that would mean that he was lacking in some way and thus would not be “that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-conceived.” A common definition of sin, then, is “a willful transgression against God”—intentional disobedience—and by definition, transgressing against God is one in the same with transgressing against goodness, for God is the very source of goodness. Sin thus becomes a vehicle for evil, always pretending to offer us some good as we suggested in the previous issue. The one lie sin always tells is so predictable yet so subtle we fall for it time and again: in one form or another, sin always says that God is holding out on us and that we ultimately know better than he what would make us happy. The pleasure we will gain becomes foremost in our thoughts: we do not sin to be evil: rather, we sin because lacking some good (or believing that we do), we suppose that by sinning we will gain that good: we believe by sinning we will gain more pleasure than we will if we abstain from sin. Thus, the one thing sin always entails is a lie: from the onset, it promises what it can never deliver, for it is itself a lack of some good (truth, in this case) and cannot fill in that which it itself lacks.
Goodness and evil are not true opposites, namely because evil is a parasite of the good. Put another way, by definition, evil is the corruption of some good: there is no such thing as a self-existing evil that exists independently and apart from goodness. Goodness can exist independently of all evil because goodness is an ontological reality just as light can exist even if there is no darkness and heat can exist even if there is no cold. However, evil cannot exist independently of goodness, because it is predicated on its very existence: evil is by definition an absence of goodness, just as dark is an absence of light and cold an absence of heat. It is a bit like our discussion of justice and injustice some time ago in What is Justice? A Socratic Dialog: the sophistry Socrates confronts in Plato’s Republic falls apart in that it treats injustice as an ontological reality. Yet even the very name—injustice—shows clearly that it is predicated on justice: we could not speak of injustice if there was not such a thing as justice: apart from the reality of justice, the very concept of injustice loses its meaning. And for Aristotle in particular in the The Nicomachean Ethics, the greatest virtue of all is justice: one could say that justice is the form of the good personified. And what is justice for Aristotle if not seeking the right and good not only for oneself, but also for one’s neighbor: what is justice if not like “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” a concept that necessarily involves equity and fairness? As we noted in Seven Virtues: Grecian Four and Three Triune, for Aristotle in his Politics, a civilized human person learned fortitude, justice, temperance, and prudence, yet while Aristotle there appears to exalt prudence, or wisdom, as the fourth and final cardinal virtue, at the end of part I, Book V, of The Nicomachean Ethics, he champions justice for a different reason:
While then the worst man is he who displays vice both in his own affairs and in his dealings with his friends, the best man is not he who displays virtue in his own affairs merely, but he who displays virtue towards others; for this is the hard thing to do. Justice, then, in this sense of the word, is not a part of virtue, but the whole of it; and the injustice which is opposed to it is not a part of vice, but the whole of it.
Injustice cannot exist apart from justice but is merely the negation of justice, just as evil cannot exist apart from good but is the negation of goodness. But let us return to the idea of prayer. Prayer does not change God, precisely because God lacks nothing in himself. Yet, given that God is love and all that is good, prayer is important for our own sakes and paradoxically produces results in the material world. God ultimately gains nothing from our prayer except the satisfaction of freely giving away the goodness that he is: being the very property of goodness personified, giving himself away is his delight and joy—we could say that being the essence of good, giving himself away is one of his many infallible properties. We gain immensely from prayer, and, anthropomorphically speaking at least, God gains pleasure from our prayer as well in that it opens us up to be receptive to his love and goodness. Prayer is the channel through which God operates, for it opens the door through which he has chosen to enter. Lacking nothing, God has everything to give. We are asked to pray, then, not because it changes God, but because prayer changes us: prayer is God’s invitation and God’s gift to us, his method of giving himself away. Prayer, then, is God’s gift of the doorway, that, just as soon as we grasp hold and turn the knob, we find him standing on the other side waiting to enter and commune with us; prayer is a portal that connects two worlds separated by time and space: prayer connects the timeless and eternal God with the temporal and finite creature. Love delights in giving itself away; the lover delights in fulfilling the beloved. But the lover does not force himself on his beloved: that is not love, for love is grounded in volunteerism, and volunteerism means both having real freedom and granting real freedom. It is precisely here that we often find a theological impasse: precisely here that tensions get heated at times when detached dogma triumphs over experiential reality.
You may recall that in Two of God’s Many Creatures we spoke of our friend’s talk of the stupidity of other persons, in part predicated on the so-called law of non-contradiction. The law of non-contradiction certainly seems logical enough in our observation of material reality. How far we could push the envelope here regarding spiritual reality is unclear: the law of non-contradiction may be relatively accurate in telling us the truth about the material world. It may not, however, be fully accurate in describing to us the world of God where paradox seems the norm. (The acceptance of this law as canonical even colors our assumptions in that fetching question: “If God can do anything, can he make a rock too heavy for himself to lift?” The correct answer, I believe, once we become aware of our assumptions about the law of non-contradiction, is yes: God could create a rock that was too heavy for himself to lift—and then turn around and lift it. The deeper truth—the reason I deem this answer the correct one—is that it points to the fact that the apparent limitation is not found in God: the apparent limitation is found in our assumption of non-contradiction as we have framed the question. Thus, if we are prepared to grant the apparent absurdity of the question, we should not cry “Unfair,” at the apparent absurdity of the answer: that would be most contradictory of us.) We quickly enter into a conundrum when we try to predicate systematic theology on the law of non-contradiction: when we assume that knowledge of God must necessarily answer to the law of non-contradiction. (Perhaps it does, for that matter, but are we absolutely certain? is anything absolute except God? are ultimate laws absolute or contingent?)
When it comes to freedom, particularly human freedom, there is some serious dispute that takes place, especially in the realms of theology, philosophy, and science. The common-sense of everyday experience suggests that we do in fact have real freedom. But a rational examination of the question raises some surprising difficulties, surprising, at least, if we have never considered the question. Looking solely at theology for a moment, if, as we have said, prayer does not change God but changes us; if God lacks nothing whatsoever and has no need to fill; if God is sovereign in all things: well, where is there any room for human freedom and autonomy? Can we really have both? Many seem to say no. Modern materialism suggests that autonomy is a figment of our imaginations, an elaborate illusion. Philosophy very often suggests one side or the other but generally not both (and in my experience, most often determinism) and a good portion of theology gives to humanity no freedom or rights whatsoever, insistent that to do so takes away from the utter sovereignty of God. That may, of course, say something to us about the nature of prayer if true, but the answer seems a bit less satisfying somehow and does not really seem to speak to our everyday experience. In order for our ideas to hold together, the theological framework has to allow for the free will that seems self-evident enough in our daily lives. If we will but allow that one tenet, a good many other things may be cleared up. But if we insist on holding predestination and the sovereingty of God to the virtual exclusion of human freedom, as A and ~A never the twain shall meet, we shall constantly butt our heads against the wall. Perhaps there is another perspective?
Let us suppose, for a moment, that sin is real and further that sin is exactly what we said it was at the beginning of this newsletter: it is a willful transgression against God who alone is utterly good: it is disobedience. Let us also assume that evil is the corruption of good, a reality that does not exist in itself but only as a parasite of the good. If these things are true, God is incapable of evil, because by definition God lacks nothing and evil is a lack of good. That can only mean that if we are to blame God at all, evil is something for which he is only indirectly responsible. As the Rev. William Sloan suggests in the NPR interview we cited in the previous issue, we do not blame a parent for the behavior of their children except up to a point: if there is an expensive watch that we give a small child and that small child dashes it into the dirt, destroying it, that’s our fault: given what we know of the behavior of small children and of expensive watches, we should never have given the child the watch in the first place. Likewise, Sloan argues that God did not create evil but rather that evil is the result of free will. We may blame God for giving us free will; as Sloan suggests: “maybe we weren’t ready for it.” But it seems to him—and it seems to me—that this is the extent to which we can blame God for the atrocities people commit, even atrocities committed in God’s name. As Emmet Fox writes in his 1938 exposition The Lord’s Prayer:
We have seen that man too often chooses to use his free will in a negative way. He allows himself to think wrongly, selfishly, and this wrong thinking brings upon him all his troubles. Instead of understanding that it is his essential nature to express God, to be ever about his Father’s business, he tries to set up upon his own account. All our troubles arise from just this folly. We abuse our free will, trying to work apart from God; and the very natural result is all the sickness, poverty, sin, trouble, and death that we find on the physical plane. We must never for a moment try to live for ourselves, or make plans or arrangements without reference to God, or suppose that we can be either happy or successful if we are seeking any other end than to do His Will. Whatever our desire may be, whether it be something concerning our daily work, or our duty at home, our relations with our fellowman, or private plans for the employment of our own time, if we seek to serve self instead of God, we are ordering trouble, disappointment, and unhappiness, notwithstanding what the evidence to the contrary may seem to be. Whereas, if we choose what, through prayer, we know to be His Will, then we are ensuring for ourselves ultimate success, freedom, and joy, however much self-sacrifice and self-discipline it may involve at the moment.
I am again reminded of the conversation with our friend from the previous issue: a part of it we did not gloss. In speaking of the stupidity of other persons, one complaint our friend had was that people were constantly trying to get the world around them to fit their pet ideas and theories rather than adjusting their theories and pet ideas to reality. Likewise, in his 1942 effort World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence Stephen Pepper talks about the bases of hypotheses, among many other things relating to epistemology, and how their ore is the stuff of common-sense which they seek to refine and make pure. However, they must repeatedly keep coming back to common-sense reality to touch base, because if they do not, they threaten to grow into towering structures without root or foundation, soon enough toppling, utterly lacking in relevance to our lives and thus effectively useless. Even as they seek to extract purified knowledge from common-sense ore, they require common-sense to make them relevant and meaningful. The hypotheses provide a framework for the facts, but they begin to break down either in degree or scope the further away they get from the facts they purportedly seek to explain. (Pepper’s book is a somewhat heavy read and not especially fun, though at least in my opinion totally worthwhile if one is not afraid to have one’s perspective of truth challenged and clarified; it may be perused in its entirety online from the State University of New York Institute of Technology. And incidentally, we also cite Pepper to some extent in The Color of Emily’s Bedroom.)
Einstein likewise grappled with that balance between theory and common-sense from both sides of the issue, as portrayed excellently in Walter Isaacson’s new book Einstein: His Life and Universe: his ideas did not fully take shape or form until through a group of friends he encountered philosophers such as Spinoza (for his unorthodox Jewish panentheism we mention in part in Enlightenment Thinkers: The Death of Teleology), Berkeley (for his conception of spiritual substance and God), and Hume (for his skepticism, particularly concerning the logical necessity often predicated to cause and effect). However, Einstein’s later ideas became so abstracted in the hands of others and used to justify such atrocities that he was at a loss. The conclusion we may draw is that if it were not for theory at all, we would have no framework to hold together the assorted facts of our world; if it were not for these facts, the theory would have no purpose or meaning. Given that this newsletter is devoted to the spiritual life, we might be especially concerned that our theological framework does not detract from the experiential reality of God’s presence in our lives. Our theological framework can certainly help clarify things, but it can quickly both stand in the way of the living God and the loving of our fellow creatures as well, obscuring as much as it illumines. I am reminded of the words of Martin Buber in his essay “The Faith of Judaism” from the 1948 Israel and the World:
The question has often been raised whether a Jewish dogmatics does or does not exist. The emphasis should rather fall on the question of the relative power of dogma in Judaism. There is no need to prove that there are dogmas, in view of the incorporation of Maimonides’ thirteen articles of faith into the liturgy. But dogma remains of secondary importance. In the religious life of Judaism, primary importance is not given to dogma, but to the remembrance and the expectation of a concrete situation: the encounter of God and man. Dogma can arise only in a situation where detachment is the prevailing attitude to the concrete, lived moment—a state of detachment which easily becomes misunderstood in dogmatics as being superior to the lived moment itself. Whatever is enunciated in abstracto in the third person about the divine, on the thither side of the confrontation of I and Thou, is only a projection onto the conceptual construct plane, which, though indispensable, proves itself again and again to be unessential. (Qtd. in The Writings of Martin Buber, 254.)
Dogma, then, can provide a framework for our beliefs, just as theories can provide a framework for our facts. Yet all the dogmas in the world cannot supplant a single lived moment of reality. In any case, we were speaking of detached dogmas at times no longer helping but actually serving to hinder spiritual reality: more precisely, we can blame disputes on determinism and free-will on the very assumption discussed in the previous issue: the assumption of A and ~A.
In Choose This Day Whom You Will Serve, we cited the Swedenborgian thinker Daniel W. Goodenough who proposed that to the degree that God was in complete control, humanity could not have true freedom and to the degree that humanity had true freedom, God could not be in complete control, suggesting an overall trade-off between the two. Certainly none would argue that we do not have complete freedom: his point is very well taken that there are forces that constrain us on every side. But what if, according to some unknown spiritual law of the universe, the idea of true freedom (even if necessarily bounded and constrained, if for no other reason, than by our physical limitation as finite creatures) and God’s complete control were not exclusionary even to this degree of a sort of trade-off but were rather mutually reciprocal like yin and yang, like partners in a dance stepping in and stepping out in unison? Martin Buber at least approaches this line of thought in the continuation of his essay “The Faith of Judaism” from the 1948 Israel and the World; in our extended excerpt below he is speaking about the “lived dialog,” that communion between God and his creatures:
The fundamental attitude of the Jews is characterized by the idea of the yihud, the “unification,” a word which has been repeatedly misunderstood. Yihud involves the continually renewed confirmation of the unity of the divine in the manifold nature of its manifestations, understood in a quite practical way. Again and again, this recognition, acknowledgment, and reacknowledgment of the divine unity is brought about through human perception and confirmation (Bewaehrung) in the face of the monstrous contradictions of life, and especially in the face of that primal contradiction which shows itself in multitudinous ways, and which we call the duality of good and evil. But the unification is brought about not to spite these contradictions, but in a spirit of love and reconciliation; not by the mere profession of unification, but by the fulfilment of the profession. Therefore, the unification is contained in no pantheistic theorem, but in the reality of the impossible, in translating the image into actuality, in the imitatio Dei. The mystery behind this fact is fulfilled in martyrdom, in the death with the cry of unity on one’s lips, the “Hear, O Israel,” which at this point becomes testimony in the most vital sense.
A wise man of the Middle Ages said: “My God, where can I find you, but where can I not find you?” The East European Jewish beggar of today softly and unfalteringly whispers his Gotenyu in the trembling and dread of his harshest hour; the term of endearment is untranslatable, naive, but in its saying it becomes rich in meanings. In both, there is the same recognition, the same reacknowledgment of the One.
It is the dialogical situation in which the human being stands that here finds its sublime or childlike expression.
Judaism regards speech as an event which grasps beyond the existence of mankind and the world. In contradiction to the static of the idea of Logos, the Word appears here in its complete dynamic as “that which happens.” God’s act of creation is speech, but the same is true of each lived moment. The world is given to the human beings who perceive it, and the life of man is itself a giving and receiving. The events that occur to human beings are the great and small, untranslatable but unmistakable signs of their being addressed; what they do and fail to do can be an answer or a failure to answer. Thus, the whole history of the world, the hidden, real world history, is a dialogue between God and his creature, a dialogue in which man is a true, legitimate partner, who is entitled and empowered to speak his own independent word out of his own being. (Qtd. in The Writings of Martin Buber, 254–255.)
Judaism, then, clearly sees humanity as God’s potential partner: that is, humanity may freely choose this day whom it will serve and if it chooses to partner with God, God participates in the partnership. Man is imago Dei—created in the image of God—but it is only as he willingly participates in imitatio Dei—the imitation of God—that he discovers finally and fully what he is and brings to bear on earth what exists in heaven. It is in this partnership, as we have seen in our discussion of Buber’s I and Thou, that humanity finds true freedom. What is proposed for humanity is then not a matter of fate nor of doom, but of destiny. We have nothing to fear: we may rest free and secure in God’s provision, knowing that destiny awaits us. We are not to be anxious about our destiny, but we are to be watchful and aware, knowing it awaits us at any turn, at every turn. Returning again to Emmet Fox’s 1938 essay The Lord’s Prayer, we see a similar idea at play:
Man being manifestation or expression of God has a limitless destiny before him. His work is to express, in concrete definite form, the abstract ideas with which God furnishes him, and in order to do this, he must have creative power. If he did not have creative power, he would be merely a machine through which God worked—an automaton. But man is not an automaton; he is an individualized consciousness. God individualizes Himself in an infinite number of distinct focal points of consciousness, each one quite different; and therefore each one is a distinct way of knowing the universe, each a distinct experience. Notice carefully that the word “individual” means undivided. The consciousness of each one is distinct from God and from all others, and yet none are separated. How can this be? How can two things be one, and yet not one and the same? The answer is that in matter, which is finite, they cannot; but in Spirit, which is infinite, they can. With our present limited, three-dimensional consciousness, we cannot see this; but intuitively we can understand it through prayer. If God did not individualize Himself, there would be only one experience; as it is, there are as many universes as there are individuals to form them through thinking.
* * * * * * *
Our business is to bring our whole nature as fast as we can into conformity with the Will of God, by constant prayer and unceasing, though unanxious, watching. “Our wills are ours to make them Thine.”
“In His Will is our peace,” said Dante, and the Divine Comedy is really a study in fundamental states of consciousness, the Inferno representing the state of the soul that is endeavoring to live without God, the Paradiso representing the state of the soul that has achieved its conscious unity with the Divine Will, and the Purgatorio the condition of the soul that is struggling to pass from the one state to the other. It was this sublime conflict of the soul which wrung from the heart of the great Augustine the cry “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they repose in Thee.”
Prayer does not change God, it changes us. Yet the partnership is voluntary and we find in God an active—and responsive—partner. As Fox suggests in his exposition of the opening address of “Our Father,” in the Lord’s prayer, two things can be seen in that one seemingly very simple clause: God is our Father—the Father of goodness personified—and we are his children. Not only am I his child, but you are his child: in a phrase, we are his children: he is our Father. That includes everyone. He is also our Father “in heaven” and we are his children “on earth”: we are the weaker party in every way, but we are not powerless: our Father loves his children and often grants their wishes, particularly as their prayers freely prayed draw them closer and closer unto him: prayer does not change God—he is the same yesterday, today, and forever—but it changes us, opening a channel through which the changeless God may respond, moving and working in the affairs of his creation, the timeless, transcendent intersecting with the present now.
Most importantly of all, however, is that we say and mean, “Our Father”: these are not mere words but the addressing of our heavenly companion, provider, and friend, just as our Lord taught us to pray. And as far as evil, God is not the author of evil whatsoever: in our freedom, we have often sought provision apart from God. Apart from God there is no provision, and evil, being the absence of good, is of our own spawning. Evil is not its own force, over and opposite the good like Zarathustra’s dualistic forces in Zoroastrian teaching (we might briefly note that the law of yin and yang—binaries, dualism, or any other name you wish to apply to these or similar concepts—may very well be a true and guiding principle of the universe, but only as it applies to actual opposites: it surely does not apply to good and evil); to the degree that evil exists, rather, it is the perversion or corruption of the good for our own selfish ends. God did not create evil, and evil cannot stand on its own: evil is the result of God’s creatures choosing other than the good: the result of God’s creatures choosing other than God. Buber goes on to write in his essay “The Faith of Judaism” of this relationship between our Father and we, his children, here on earth:
What is presupposed when one is serious about the lived dialogue, regarding the moment as word and answer, is, of course, that one is serious about the appointment of man to the earth.
In strongest contrast to the Iranian conception with all its later ramifications, the Jewish conception is that the happenings of this world take place not in the sphere between two principles, light and darkness, good and evil, but in the sphere between God and men, these mortal brittle human beings who yet are able to face God and withstand his word. So-called evil is fully and, as a primary element, included in the power of God, who “forms the light and creates darkness” (Is. 45:7). The divine sway is not answered by anything which is evil in itself, but by individual human beings, through whom alone so-called evil, directionless power, can become real evil. Human choice is not a psychological phenomenon but utter reality, which is taken up into the mystery of the One who is. Man is truly free to choose God or to reject him, and to do so is not in a relationship of faith which is empty of the content of this world, but in one which contains the full content of the everyday. The “fall” did not happen once and for all, and become an inevitable fate, but it continually happens here and now in all its reality. In spite of all past history, in spite of all his inheritance, every man stands in the naked situation of Adam: to each, the decision is given. It is true that this does not imply that further events are deducible from that decision; it only implies that the human being’s choice is that side of reality which concerns him as one called upon to act.
It is only when reality is turned into logic, and A and non-A dare no longer dwell together, that we get determinism and indeterminism, a doctrine of predestination and a doctrine of freedom, each excluding the other. According to the logical conception of truth, only one of two contraries can be true; but in the reality of life as one lives it, they are inseparable. The person who makes a decision knows that his deciding is no self delusion; the person who has acted knows that he was and is in the hand of God. The unity of the contraries is the mystery at the innermost core of the dialogue.
I said above that evil is to be taken only as a primary element—humanly speaking, as passion. Passion is only evil when it remains in the directionless state, when it refuses to be subject to direction, when it will not accept the direction that leads toward God—there is no other direction. In Judaism, there recurs again and again in many forms the insight that passion, the “evil urge,” is simply the elemental force which is the sole origin of great human works, the holy included. The verse in the Scripture which says that at the end of the last day of creation God allowed himself to see his work “that it was very good” has been taken by tradition to refer to the so-called “evil urge.” Of all the works of creation, it is passion which is the very good, without which man cannot serve God, or truly live. The words, “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart” (Deut. 6:5) are interpreted, “With both thy urges,” with the evil, undirected, elemental urge, as well as the good, because directed, urge. It is of this so-called “evil urge” that God says to man: “You have made it evil.”
Consequently, “inertia” is the root of all evil. The act of decision implies that man is not allowing himself any longer to be carried along on the undirected swirl of passion, but that his whole power is included in the move in the direction for which he has decided—and man can decide only for the direction of God. The evil, then, is only the “shell,” the wrapping, the crust of the good, a shell that requires active piercing.
Some time ago, a Catholic theologian saw in this conception a “Jewish activism” to which grace is unknown. But it is not so. We are not less serious about grace because we are serious about the human power of deciding, and through decision the soul finds a way which will lead it to grace. Man is here given no complete power; rather, what is stressed is the ordered perspective of human action, an action which we may not limit in advance. It must experience limitation as well as grace in the very process of acting.
The great question which is more and more deeply agitating our age is this: how can we act? Is our action valid in the sight of God, or is its very foundation broken and unwarranted? The question is answered as far as Judaism is concerned by our being serious about the conception that man has been appointed to this world as an originator of events, as a real partner in the real dialogue with God.
This answer implies a refusal to have anything to do with all separate ethics, any concept of ethics as a separate sphere of life, a form of ethics which is all too familiar in the spiritual history of the West. Ethical life has entered into religious life, and cannot be extracted from it. There is no responsibility unless there is One to whom one is responsible, for there is no reply where there is no appeal. In the last resort, “religious life” means concreteness itself, the whole concreteness of life without reduction, grasped dialogically, included in the dialogue. (Qtd. in The Writings of Martin Buber, 256–258.)
In Buber’s words, we now have the ability to put together the pieces of the puzzle. Evil is not something that God creates directly; evil, being the absence of some good, is the result of the freewill God has granted his creatures. Yet just as his creatures can choose not to choose God, they can also choose to partner with God. In choosing to partner with God, the result is no longer fate or doom but destiny and freedom. Yet partnering with God is not something done once, it is not simply the nodding of assent to creedal statements: it is a lived reality, a reality of the everyday, lived day by day in the mundane, concrete details of our day. We partner with God, speaking to him and expecting to be heard, he answers us, if not in so many words, than by the change effected in our lives, the fruits of the Spirit becoming increasingly evident. He speaks to us by responding to our prayers, granting our petitions, or, in due time, giving us the wisdom that we may come to understand why they have not been granted.
Prayer does not change God, it changes us. But prayer is a gift from God to us: God lacks nothing and needs nothing, though he delights in his creatures. Just as his creatures were instilled with the ability to let down their guards and communicate one with another—indeed, no intimacy is possible without it—so too, he has instilled within us a desire, even a need, to let our guards down and commune with him. Prayer is our right and our privilege, but it is not something that comes automatically, of its own. It is something that must be cultivated and practiced, as human relationships also must be cultivated if they are to grow and flourish. Yet lovers do not mind in the least the cultivation of their love and can think of nothing but: so too, God’s children soon learn the joys of communing with their Father. Even his correction is welcomed; even when he says no, the answer can be sweet to our ears. For prayer does not change God, it changes us: it changes us increasingly into his likeness: it changes us into the creatures he intends us to be.
As a corollary, we now have a basis for understanding the words of Jesus as recorded in the gospel of John. In John 14, Jesus is talking with his disciples, telling them of his upcoming departure. Specifically he states: “Whatever you ask in my name, that will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it” (13–14). At first blush, the implication here would be rather startling. Surely we cannot ask just anything at all in Christ’s name and expect that prayer to be answered. The Greek ἐν μου ὄνομα is here key: “in my name” carries the idea with it of being “in union with me.” So then, just as I and the Father are united, so you and I are also united as a vine and its branches. Prayer itself is a way in which we become united with God, and thus united to God, we are transformed, coming into closer union with God. What we ask for, when thus united with God, is certain to be answered, because it is in keeping with the heart of God and flows out of the perfect will of God.
It is rather interesting, in fact, to see the self-giving of Jesus as he promises to leave his peace with his disciples a bit further down in the chapter: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you,” (14:27). The Greek ἀφίημι (“leave”) suggests the idea of bequeathing: on my death bed, I bequeath the house to Mike, the car to Jenny, and the cat to the neighbor next door. Thus, Jesus tells his disciples in effect, “I am going away now. But I bequeath my peace to you: I leave it with you, as I would leave behind my cloak or my staff for your safekeeping. Further, the peace I am giving to you is a perfect kind of peace, coming, as it does, from the Father who lacks nothing and it is a peace that will not be taken away from you again.” Therefore, “Do not let your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful.” And when our hearts do become troubled and when we feel fearful (for we are human and God divine), we have but to turn to him again in prayer. Prayer is his gift, his communion with us. And so often it is that we do not have, because we do not ask.
Prayer, then, is a perfect Father’s gift to his imperfect children. Prayer is conversation and fellowship, a dialog into which the perfect Father and the dependent child enter into relationship. The child is taught by the relationship, the Father beams his good pleasure as the child learns and grows, and the joy and love of the Father overflow to the child, just as it is said that the joy and love of the Father and the Son overflow with the Holy Spirit. This unity of spirit is a lived moment-by-moment reciprocity, just as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not nouns but verbs: ipsum esse and actus purus. Prayer does not change God, it changes us, for God is already the giver of many gifts, and prayer merely opens us to receive them in full.
Prayer does not change God, it changes us; and yet, entirely of his own volition, prayer often spurs God into action on our behalf: I have plenty of personal accounts to share in this regard, as (particularly with a moment’s reflection) likely do you. Answered prayer (along with unasked-for gifts) is one of the chief reasons my faith remains buoyed even in seasons of drought. Prayer is a powerful spiritual force, and if it be any force at all, while we cannot conform God to our selfish desires and wishes, as we are conformed to God, he works and acts on our behalf and responds to our requests. When we pray in his name, in accord with his will, for selfless ends and for the greater good because these are the things we desire, it is startling at times just how responsive we find God to be and how powerful our prayer.
I have often been taught and believe it true that he hears every prayer we pray and believe with all my heart that he does not give us what we deserve—if we are honest with ourselves at all, we find that we truly deserve little to nothing at all—but rather God gives us what we need—with extra beside. This newsletter has not been written from the standpoint of personal narrative—what is more, God sometimes seems to be strangely silent in my own life and certainly not all my prayers have been answered at all like I wanted even though I prayed earnestly, begging and pleading on my knees with agony wracking my soul and many tortured tears—but I would like to break the illusion of objective, impersonal prose here at the end just long enough to say that our prayers do spur God into action, that he does love us, and that I say this with utter confidence not from any systematic theology I have learned, not from any reasoned conclusion, but simply from my own life’s experience of serving God and hanging on: hanging on through the periods of silence and drought because I have seen and tasted that God is good: very good to me. About the time that I want to give up and turn my back on God for good, he pulls through in ways that shame me, hot tears the automatic and only proper response: tears of hot shame pouring down my cheeks mingled with the love and gratitude welling up in my heart at his sheer and utter goodness undeserved. During such moments, I find God better than I expected and far more than I dreamed: I ask him for the world and he gives me the sun, moon, and stars; I am an ingrate squandering his riches, and he personally wraps me in a royal robe, places his own ring upon my finger, and then, folding his arms about me, he guides me to the feast he has prepared that I do not deserve and can never repay. This is the Father I know; this is the Father against whom I sin.
Father, forgive me.
God bless,
Eric
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