{"id":597,"date":"2008-06-17T08:24:11","date_gmt":"2008-06-17T15:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=597"},"modified":"2008-06-17T08:24:11","modified_gmt":"2008-06-17T15:24:11","slug":"the-doors-of-the-sea-eastern-orthodox-theodicy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2008\/06\/17\/the-doors-of-the-sea-eastern-orthodox-theodicy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Doors of the Sea — Eastern Orthodox Theodicy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wonders for Oyarsa<\/a> recommended to me David Bentley Hart’s<\/a> wonderful little book The Doors of the Sea:\u00a0 Where Was God in the Tsunami<\/a>.\u00a0 Hart is an Eastern Orthodoxy tehologian with a Radical Orthodoxy sensibility.\u00a0 Unlike much turgid theological prose, his writing is lucid and gracious, sprinkled with just-right literary references.\u00a0 The terrible Indonesian tsunamis of\u00a02004<\/a> prompted\u00a0Hart’s reflection on theodicy.\u00a0 Much of his reflection in The Doors of the Sea plays off of Dostoyevksy’s The Brothers Karamazov<\/a>, particularly The Grand Inquisitor’s<\/a> devastating speech.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I loved this book, because it reminded me that things really are “not right” in this world.\u00a0 Having been immersed in the study of how Christian faith relates to the natural sciences, it’s easy to forget that the creation is “fallen.”\u00a0 There is no trace of a “fall” in the record of natural history.\u00a0 We can’t attribute the behavior of carnivorous animals, or the geological processes that inevitable give rise to earthquakes and tsunamis,\u00a0to Adam’s sin — these things existed on earth for billions of years before man appeared.<\/p>\n

Yet, we intuitively know that the apparently meaningless deaths of hundreds of thousands of people when the giant waves hit Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand is not “natural” or “right.”\u00a0 And, we know from scripture that “death” is an “enemy.”\u00a0 Developing a theology that accounts for God’s goodness,\u00a0human sin, the long, deep record of natural history,\u00a0and the “enemy” of death, is one of the great challenges every thinking Christian has to face.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hart insists that Christian theology not fall into the trap of thinking that nature is all there is — that death must inevitably be part of human history.\u00a0 But he also insists that we must not give in to a literalistic fundamentalism that ignores or distorts billions of years of natural history.\u00a0 How does he pull this together?\u00a0 In typical Eastern fashion, he really doesn’t.\u00a0 He allows this paradox and mystery to simmer a bit, and invites us to contemplate a God who is not bound by the ontology of the present creation.\u00a0 An ontological “is” is not an ontological “must” for God.<\/p>\n

I appreciated this approach.\u00a0 God knows, literally, that recovering fundamentalists like myself need to learn how to rejoice in mystery.\u00a0 But I confess that, categorizer that I am, I wasn’t fully satisfied.\u00a0 So I asked Prof. Hart how he draws these things together, and he referred me to the Patristic Father Origen.<\/p>\n

Well, now I need to read more Origen than I have.\u00a0 Here’s what I understand of Origen’s conception of the fall, however:\u00a0 for Origen, the fall happened in the wills of pre-existing souls, outside of “natural” time.\u00a0 Embodied in “natural” time, these souls recapitulate their original fall.\u00a0 This underlying theology is why, in the book, Hart makes some effort to distance himself from gnosticism.\u00a0 The Greek and gnostic themes seem evident in this notion of a pristine disembodiment that goes bad and becomes embodied, with the hope of redemption from embodiment in the eschaton.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I’m pretty sure I don’t know enough about Eastern Orthodox thought or about Origen to be getting this exactly right.\u00a0 I’d love to hear from any readers about nuances I’m missing.\u00a0 At the end of the day, this seems like far too elaborate and speculative an ontology for me.\u00a0 But, I think there’s something very true about the fall as in some respect an event “outside” of normal time — like, in a way, the incarnation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wonders for Oyarsa recommended to me David Bentley Hart’s wonderful little book The Doors of the Sea:\u00a0 Where Was God in the Tsunami.\u00a0 Hart is an Eastern Orthodoxy tehologian with a Radical Orthodoxy sensibility.\u00a0 Unlike much turgid theological prose, his writing is lucid and gracious, sprinkled with just-right literary references.\u00a0 The terrible Indonesian tsunamis of\u00a02004 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19,4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-historical-theology","category-spirituality","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-9D","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}