Triune Self-Giving: One Key to the Problem of Suffering

TRIUNE SELF-GIVING: ONE KEY TO THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING SOME YEARS AGO a witty friend of mine used to make a pretense of defending the view that this is the worst of all possible worlds. Though undoubtedly far from the worst possible, this world plainly falls short of some conceivably better, if not best, scheme of things finite. Discerning savants of the next century or two may look with pity, mixed with a good bit of anger and contempt, on the atrocities committed or officially condoned by that curiously arrogant and morally obtuse creature that some glorify as twentieth-century man. But whatever the judgment from whatever vantage point passed on our period, the current rising tide of troubles raises anew, perhaps more poignantly, the problem of evil in a universe traditionally held to be cradled in the everlasting arms of an allloving Father. As men, all of us at one time or another must struggle with pain and injustice. As thinkers (at least in some modest sense) , we must come to grips with one of the murkiest of puzzles, that, even where it may not afflict the heart, perplexes the mind: how are we to square the dreadful fact of evil with the sweet face of an all-good and all-powerful God? In recent years the problem has been somewhat recast: how can an all-loving God remain unaffected by the suffering of the men he has created? It is to this narrower formulation of the question that this essay addresses itself. The God of classical theism is totally other and unchangeable; as wholly other, he has no need of human love; as unchangeable, he cannot be touched by whatever transpires for the weal or woe of his rational creatures. No matter what evils agonize man in or outside time, God remains self-subsistent, holily self-loving, serene in boundless beatitude. The chasm infinitely dividing God and 173 174 JOHN M. QUINN, o.s.A. man apparently annuls any humanly meaningful sense we might assign to. his being all-loving and all-caring. From one angle such a God evokes, along with trembling awe, a certain moral and aesthetic repugnance. He seems to be mysterium tremendum et repellens. Affective disenchantment intimates that an infinitely distant God may he an irrationality , a vestigial idol of an outmoded theology. In place of an Absolute, process-thinkers, notably A. N. Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, have vigorously argued for a supreme but limited God. Finitist theism has also proved alluring to minds not ordinarily catalogued under process-thought, and of these we have chosen to take a quick look at Nicholas Berdyaev, a legatee in part of Boehme, and Peter Bertocci, an avowed disciple of the American personalist, Edgar Brightman. First, we shall sketch the main lines of these four finitist approaches. While initially prepossessing, the finite-God case is saddled with a number of difficulties, some of which appear mortal. For all the obscurity that clings to any conceptualization of the strictly divine, the God of classical theism turns out to be incontestably loving and caring not in spite of but because of his immutability and infinity. Nothing inferior to a being of limitless wisdom and power can explain the otherwise paradoxical harvesting of good and harmony out of the evil and poisonous discord in the universe. Secondly, for further light on the still enigmatic features of a loving but nonsuffering God's tie-in with creation, the rational theist who is a Christian can cross the border into theology. In Jesus God suffered and died in some reasonable sense. The suffering of the God-man, however , leaves God impassible. Yet because Jesus is the incarnate revelation of divine life, his death out of love signalizes the selfgiving within Godness itself. A nonsufiering but self-giving trinity of persons in God serves as a model for making each man a god. One key to analytical and existential mastery of suffering lies in the renovation of finite spirit in the image of the triune self-giving of infinite spirit. TRIUNE SELF-GIVING 175 I Whitehead and Hartshorne present apparently compelling briefs for a limited God enriched by as well as enriching...