Evil Shatters the World
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Armstrongism: A Brief Case Study in Theodicy
By Scout
Is he (God) willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing: whence then is evil? - David Hume, Eighteenth Century Philosopher
“I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee.” - Job
One of the most difficult areas of theology is theodicy. Theodicy seeks to answer the question, “If God is all-powerful and perfectly righteous, why is there evil in the world?” I have come across many unsatisfactory answers to this question in my reading of theology. I personally do not have a solution to offer. In this short essay I would like to pose a much narrower question of theodicy: If Armstrongism is harmful to people, why does God permit it to exist?
Answering this question, as I have approached it, is essentially justifying God. This starts with the proposition that Armstrongism is harmful. And this harmfulness is an assertion that I will not deal with in this context though the pages of this blog are rife with data in support of this proposition. Then one must explain why God would permit something harmful to exist and have influence. What follows are two reasons among many for why God might permit Armstrongism to exist:
· God wants us to understand that a religion can be concocted using Biblical vocabulary that may sound like Christianity but it is not.
· God wants us to understand that the nature of a church is not to be found in what it says about itself but in what it does.
These are just two justifications that might emerge in answer to this question. There are many others. And reactions to these justifications will vary. To some people this is evidence that God mercifully teaches people using real world issues. Christians have been elected to train for the Priesthood and will reign with Christ and understanding the two principles above will be important. To others, the idea that even only one person loses salvation because of the existence of Armstrongism places a mark on all of us and diminishes all of us throughout eternity. The cost is much greater than any benefit. What we need is the clarification that would be granted to us by knowing God’s view on this yet when we independently try to construct the Godly view our limited understanding fails us.
Why doesn’t God just pull the plug on Armstrongism, if it represents a serious harm to lives of some people? I admit that I do not know.
18 comments:
The issues/questions you raise Scout have been pondered by countless others down through history. I think of the holocaust. And those that followed. I believe the holocaust occurred because of the inherent evil found in the human psyche. As is commented on in Job, man drinks sin like water. I don’t believe in the inherent good of mankind. And many good descent innocent people died in the flames of WW2. We all suffer and will continue too. Until Christ returns. Who then can be saved? With man it is impossible but with God all things are possible. We must make do with an impossible task, living in a world separated from God but next to Him at the same time.
Scout, I suspect the answer to your question about God allowing Armstrongism (and the larger question about the presence of evil) is found in your admission that you do not know. I would say that none of us can truly comprehend or fathom the mind of God. We make decisions and choices in life based on a very limited perspective and database of information. Unlike God, we cannot see the end of all things - we cannot foresee all of the consequences of our decisions.
Like Adam and Eve before us, we decide for ourselves what is good and what is evil. Based on our own experience and the "hurts" or "harms" that we associated with it, we view some event as positive or negative, "bad" or "good." Many of us here view our experience in Armstrongism as having been very unpleasant, negative, hurtful, wasteful and harmful, or even evil (I know that I do). And yet, I understand that I would not be the person I am today without having had that experience. I learned so many things about myself, others, and life in general that I might not have incorporated into the person known as Lonnie without having had that experience! I know that I am more careful, thoughtful, kind, humble, forgiving, merciful, and tolerant than I was back then. I know that I am less dogmatic, certain, opinionated, materialistic, racist, and self-serving than I used to be.
Why do we have the ability to learn and make choices/decisions (or have what some of us refer to as free will)? As a parent and grandparent, I have experienced the pain of being forced to sometimes allow my children/grandchildren to make poor choices. It is painful to watch them reject my training and learn some lesson in the school of hard knocks. I would save them from the pain and sorrow that I know will follow, but I also understand that somethings have to be learned through experience. "Don't touch that stove - It's hot - you'll get burned!"
Anyone who is familiar with me and my family has heard the story of the tornado and the ATV accident. A powerful F3 tornado (responsible for killing 6 people and injuring another 130) danced through MY yard, where my two children and my brother's children were sleeping in our mobile home. The storm hit in the wee hours of a February morning, and we had just enough time to get them out of bed and kneel in the hallway to say a quick prayer. The neighbors on all four sides of us suffered catastrophic damage to their homes and severe injuries, but our mobile home remained intact! Then, just nine years later, one of the children that had been spared in my mobile home that day died in a horrific ATV crash.
Why had she been spared from the tornado only to die nine years later in that awful accident? Was it just chance? Was it by design? Were we all spared because one of our number would be needed later to play some part in God's plans - design? What would her life had been like (she was only 15 years old)? Would she have had children? Would she have experienced joy or heartache? I do know that three other lives were saved that day by the donation of her organs. How would those the lives of those three people unfold? How many lives would they influence along the way? There is just so much that we do not - cannot know? You know - the butterfly flapping its wings and the pebble being dropped into the middle of a pond thingy.
We can speculate, but we don't have enough information to really make even an educated guess. What do you think?
Anonymous 8:10
Look at it this way: all the sentient creatures in the creation operate under license from God. God permits what you describe in your comment. God permits Armstrongism to operate. This means to me that there is a purpose for this - not just random evil acts. But I don't know what the purpose is.
One of the most salient issues in human life and we, for the most part, do not have an understanding of what it is about. The elephant in the room.
Scout
You wonder why God doesn't just pull the plug on Armstrongism?
In a sense He has pulled the plug. The edifice built on lies has crumbled.
People, or I should say many people, including myself, who joined thinking it was the only one true church and possessed with the extreme vanity only we knew truth (whilst other believers did not ) had to face the reality of our error.
We become forced to re-evaluate everything, and through this process and with a spirit of perseverance, and turmoil, we have come out stronger and more anchored in our faith.
Those who seek to rebuild Armstrongism are yet to learn, as they don't want to. They still believe things taught by Armstrong embody truth, unable to see the magnitude of the lie.
But God is not going to force those who choose to remain in the vestiges of the crumbling 'one true church' any different outcome if they steadfastly refuse to hear and refuse to see.
Hopefully in time they too will wake up but this won't occur if their whole endeavor is to recreate the fakeries of Armstrong.
Jesus gave the lesson of knowing false teachers by their fruits. He did not go into manner of doctrines. If people refuse to follow Jesus's teaching here when ample opportunity has abounded for decades that Armstrong fruits were really bad, it will persist. For how long we don't know.
One of the most mysterious laws of the universe is polarity. The minute a positive is known, it also automatically obviates the complete opposite of that positive. It can never be that the negative to that positive does not exist. Negatives will always exist even if only in the hypothetical realm. Poles exert a pull, the strength of which is determined by one's closeness or proximity to that pole.
The concept of the tree of knowledge of good and evil has always baffled me. How can one only have knowledge regarding the positives, when these positives also immediately make one aware of their opposites, the negatives? To put this into Armstrongist terms, the instant one becomes aware of the sabbath, one also becomes aware of its opposite, the breaking of the sabbath.
Armstrongism is simply one of the opposites, or negatives. And, there are any number of very similar negatives. Humans are capable of focussing upon or being drawn to not only the positives and negatives, but also the temporary positions which can exist in between those poles, including the neutral zone in the precise middle, equidistant between the two poles.
BB
Miller Jones 8:57 wrote, “Unlike God, we cannot see the end of all things - we cannot foresee all of the consequences of our decisions.
Milller, I appreciate your insight on this topic and your willingness to relate a personal experience.
Part of the problem in discussing this topic is level of abstraction. For example, one might say that opposing evil develops character. This then makes evil a link in an essential chain of events that leads to good. Would God really make a creation where a foundational and constructive principle is evil? We could debate the issue of evil at that level but this is downstream from the classical problem of evil. At the extreme level of abstraction, we might ask why evil even exists at all. Could it not have been interdicted at inception so that it would not take over the Cosmos? I do not believe the God of all grace would do this lightly. There must be some purpose involved here that we do not see or comprehend.
We are all beings whose formation included exposure to evil. Christ himself dealt with it and came to deliver us from it. And in the Eschaton, evil will not exist. Some might speculate that it is educational. My guess is that this is the best answer. But it challenges the imagination to believe that the Holocaust was merely a classroom. The profundity of evil outweighs all the conjectures I have ever read as to why it exists. It is a mystery.
A theological sidebar: The Augustinian view is that evil does not really have substance. Evil is a privative attribute of Good. In other words, evil is the absence of Good. This was confusing to me when I first read it but many theologians believe this. I thought, if evil can be defined as an absence of Good, why can’t we define Good as the absence of evil. Good then would be a privative attribute of evil. This is possible semantically but is true in reality? The Biblical revelation is that it is the other way around because God created Good. In Genesis we have, “And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” So, in the created realm, Good is substantive and evil is privative.
Scout
I know it's customary here to search for Biblical or Theological explanations behind some of the great questions we ponder on a daily basis. God also created the laws of the universe, so it is totally valid to look to those for answers as well. It's not as if we aren't already aware of weeds, termites, gnats, waste materials, and all the great predators in Earth's ecosystem. Armstrongism fits into some of those classifications very well, especially the waste materials and predator.
I just wish there were a more universal protection against some of these things. Unfortunately, it often requires damaging experiences to keep us aware of the negative and bad. I also have to remember that the negative pole in an electrical circuit provides a method of completing the circuit so that the electricity has direction and a place to flow. Or, if you are dealing with early British Lucas automotive and motorcycle electrics, "positive earth" is used.
BB
So many questions, so few answers. We were instructed not to eat of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The adversary said we wouldn’t die if we ate, but be like God knowing good and evil. The rest is history, and we collectively have come to know both good and evil. Our own helplessness is amplified by the knowledge that Jesus was preordained to come even before the foundation of this present world. In our present form we are helpless, like leaves in a breeze. We await redemption, which Christ won for us with His death and resurrection. We have come to know good and evil and live with its appalling consequences daily. Perhaps that is the purpose. To learn to experience to suffer and finally to acknowledge there must be a better way, and that way is before us, in Christ. I know my short commentary here will be unsatisfactory and inadequate for many, as I said, so many questions………
This is what I am thinking. Nothing can exist unless God wants it to exist, so how does evil come into existence? And here I am thinking of Byker Bob’s polarity example in a way. If God creates something, it can have an inherent absence effect that is sort of like an opposite pole. If God creates water, then dryness comes into existence along with it even though dryness was not the intended object of creation. Dryness is an existential hitch-hiker. Likewise, if God creates something good then its absence, something bad, can possibly exist. It is almost as if evil is an unintended consequence, a consequence that need never happen. It is a privative attribute of good just like Augustine asserted.
But this is not the full story. We cannot use this model to say that God never intended evil and it was a surprise when evil originally happened. Say, one day God discovered that one of his sentient beings elected to do something that was not good. And this snowballed and now the Cosmos is pervaded by evil. Paul speaks of this “present evil world” (aionios – age in Greek). God created time. He knows past present and future. Evil did not just slip by him. He knew it was going to happen. It has a utility and its utility is a mystery. Armstrongism may be useful in the lives of some people for some set of conditions and outcomes. Though it seems like Armstrongism should not exist. But it does.
Scout
Considering the vast scope of this subject, with its many theories and categories, I agree that on the "individual" level, we find ourselves in the same position as Job's friends, that we don't have enough information to really know or speculate what's really going on in a person's life and given circumstance. But, on the collective scale, those conspicuous movements which affect the great masses of humanity in a negative way by bringing out the worst in man's nature, Scripture gives many clues as to their origin, why evil exists, why God allows it, and how long He will permit it to flourish before He pulls the plug.
There are many things in this "world" that are just as harmful as Armstrongism. Armstrongism is but a microcosm of this world system and its many destructive forces. On this site, it would be anathema to suggest one could somehow make Armstrongism presentable and "better". Yet, most wouldn't have a problem at all believing this " world" could be made a better place through good deeds derived from human planning and effort. A fitting comparison would be whited sepulchres (the Pharisees) who appear beautiful outward, but within are full of dead men's bones. It's neither possible or scriptural!
One thing is for sure. In His own time God has promised to destroy evil, make all things new, and "send Jesus Christ, whom the heavens must receive until the times of restitution of all things", Acts 3:20-21.
BB 728. Your powerful point on polarity is very revealing. It unlocks many biblical passages!
Why doesn’t God just pull the plug on Armstrongism ...
Why doesn’t God just pull the plug on people who ask that question. They have problems too.
Theodicy is a study in theology that does not seem to be popular. I believe it is because nobody has good solutions for the various problems it raises. Yet the failure of the church to develop an effective theology is of great moment. Many people leave Christianity or never even get started on Christianity because, after viewing some tragedy, they cannot conclude that a gracious and merciful God exists.
Theodicy also has great pastoral relevance. A pastor who must be with a set of parents who just lost a child may be asked questions that are within in the realm of theodicy. "If there is a good God, why did my child die."
Some of the most profound issues in Christianity are questions of Theodicy yet Theodicy gets little air time. I believe there is more discussion of Theodicy among atheists than among Christians. Notice how few people respond to this little post. There is not even the ususal flood of sound-bites.
I am not being critical. I don't have much to say about Theodicy myself. It is a difficult topic for the pulpit. And I would imagine that the people in the pews do not often express much curiosity about it.
Scout
Thanks, BP8. I can't take complete credit for that concept. Years ago, I read a paper on the presence and implications of some of the natural laws which prevail throughout the universe, and of them, the principle of polarity was perhaps the biggest takeaway for me. Polar opposites are quite ubiquitous throughout nature. I immediately pondered the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Also, everything in the entire creation is vibrating! Solid items are vibrating, but at humanly imperceivable slow rates. People can be sensitive to, and influenced by specific vibrations, such as music, or the sweet sounds of some good custom Harley Davidson exhaust pipes.
Another factor that people may not realize is that some of mankind's best inventions work in part because man has learned to utilize select laws of physics against one another, to make the seemingly impossible possible. Flight of incredibly heavy aircraft was cited as a primary example of this.
BB
Scout 918
You might scoff, but I always thought Theodicy was one of Armstrong's strongest hooks. They had several articles on the subject and a booklet (not sure of the exact title), "God, Why Did You Let Tommy Die"?
Personally, I'm aware of many who were comforted by the idea of the second resurrection to a chance for salvation, which alleviated the fear people had about a loved one going to hell before they had an interest or opportunity to know Jesus Christ. This was especially true for those with children who died from a disease, accident, or some evil action.
Armstrong's Theodicy summation? This is not God's world!
BB 1249
I'm more familiar with the concept through the idea of "the 2 classification of things", an idea prominent in the early 20th century. The Bible is explicit on this. A sampling would include
Light, darkness
Life, death
Good, evil
Truth, error
God, Satan
and a ARMSTRONG favorite, give, get.
The "2 ways" follow this pattern.
Anonymous 2:38 wrote, “Our own helplessness is amplified by the knowledge that Jesus was preordained to come even before the foundation of this present world.”
This is a very preceptive comment. Christ was slain from the foundation of the Cosmos (Rev 13:8). From this we know that God knew what the effect of evil would be on humankind. Humankind would need a savior. I have also wondered what the adversary was doing in the Garden of Eden. Why was that influence permitted to be there at all? Could Adam and Eve really be expected to resist the adversary’s blandishments?
The data makes it seem like evil was to be a foreordained part of human history. People sometimes wonder what would human history be if Adam and Eve had just done the right thing. That was never going to happen. Christ had already been slain when Adam and Eve awakened to the presence of God. The Cosmos had been founded billions of years earlier.
I do not think that God was thwarted by Adam and Eve and had to switch from Plan A to Plan B. I believe that right now, everything is going according to plan for humanity. The model is the Creation, then the Cross, and finally the Re-creation. But why this has to be the model is a mystery. Another piece of data to bring into the picture is that I know that we will all be different people in the future because we had practical exposure to evil rather than classroom exposure to evil. Another piece of data: the educational value of evil is paled by the intensity of what has actually happened. The Holocaust is not a learning experience – it is a monumental, near incomprehensible tragedy.
Theodicy is an uncomfortable study. It does not feel like the study of, say, soteriology. I think this is because theodicy seems to automatically put the student in the mode of second-guessing God about the very fundamentals of his plan for Creation and Humankind. All the answers will eventually come to us and we will see that God is correct. But in the meantime, looking through a glass darkly and seeing only part of the story naturally invokes conjecture. That’s the way we are created.
Scout
And another thing. The animal realm is disgusting. I watched a documentary on animal life one afternoon and it showed a pack of wolves running down a coyote and killing a coyote. The wolves ate the coyote. Right now, on my TV I am seeing a pack of wolves run down a bison in the snow. There is a great struggle and the bison is eaten alive. The snow is scarlet and the wolves are howling. The revolting predator-prey cycle has been going on since nearly the beginning of life on earth.
A leading minister at the headquarters of Grace Communion International once put me in touch with a scientist who is a Christian. The scientist and I had a little correspondence about the animal world. He was very much a proponent of the idea that the animal realm was idyllic. He posited the idea that we mistakenly believed that when animals ate other animals, the victims felt pain. He felt that we mistakenly projected our feelings onto animals. Anyone who has ever seen an animal kill another animal knows that this idea is preposterous. The animal victims die for real and in agony just like we would. Whence and wherefore this evil?
Scout
Not long ago, wolves were reintroduced in some national park in order to keep the deer population down. The deer were destroying the habitant by over grazing and muddying the local streams. The before and after photos show the improvement once the wolves were reintroduced. I've wondered whether the existence of vicious animals has something to do with God's background. There's two individuals in the Godhead, but could it be that there were more than two at some point. Was there a nasty "civil war" which resulted in only two remaining? Are vicious animals a reminder to not thread that road? Just speculating.
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