Pannenberg on Evil, Love and God by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2002-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

The Power of Love

DOI: 10.4324/9781315599342-5

The previous two chapters have considered the understanding of the place of evil in the world in Pannenberg’s theology. It was argued that evil is a necessary part of the creation, part of the cost entailed in the act of creation. It is a cost that the Creator is willing to accept. Inevitably, this raises questions about the nature of God and the nature of divine love in particular. This and the following chapter seek to address these questions: first, through a discussion of the nature of God as love in this chapter; in Chapter 5, the focus shifts to God’s action in the world through Christ to overcome evil, where it will be argued that the ‘career’ of Christ is the proleptic enactment in time of the eschatological fate of the whole world.

In the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, David Hume places into the mouth of his sceptical character Philo the classic formulation of the problem of evil for the Christian theologian. God is either impotent or malevolent.1 Philo, and hence Hume, does not regard these questions and their answers as an argument against the existence of God, but as pointing to an elucidation of the character of God. In this, he is similar to Ivan Karamazov in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. 2 Specifically, they challenge the idea of a loving God. Philo’s conclusion from his reflections upon the presence of evil in the world is that the true source of all things is indifferent to the presence of evil in the world.3 This could, of course, be taken to mean that the universe originates from an entirely a-personal source. Philo, however, goes on to challenge the assumption that the moral rectitude of the Supreme Being is analogous to human moral rectitude. This suggests that what Philo has in mind, when he speaks of the indifference of the origin of the universe to the state of the universe is that this origin is indeed personal, but that what this being considers important is of a wholly different order to that of human beings: what is of concern to us is of no consequence to the Creator. This raises a number of questions for the Christian theologian. If the Creator is indeed indifferent to our plight, why was the world created at all? What is the nature of the relationship of the creation to the Creator’s purposes? Is it possible to speak of God’s love at all? If the origin of the universe is indifferent to the universe’s state, then surely the only sensible response is one of indifference to such a Creator. Philo’s triad owes much of its contemporary popularity to J.L. Mackie’s 1955 paper ‘Evil and Omnipotence’.4 Three years before Mackie’s paper, W.T. Stace had already declared that Hume was right: Philo’s charge had never been answered and never could be answered.5 However, as the result of the work of Nelson Pike and Alvin Plantinga, most analytical philosophers of religion claim that this so-called ‘logical problem of evil’ has been solved.

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