The witness of sin, a theodicy

Contents

CHAPTBR PAGB

I. God and Sin 9

II. Evasions 20

Introduction

If there were not the strongest ties of natural affection as well as the bonds of Christian love between the author of this book and myself, I might speak more freely than propriety will now permit me.

Inability to reconcile the goodness of God with the existence of sin and all its dire consequences in this world where God is both immanent and transcendent has staggered many a soul and clouded its faith with doubt.

It seems to me that no difficulty in this most abstruse problem has been evaded in this discussion. Sophistries and casuistries have been stripped off and thrown aside. The real difficulties have been uncovered and met.

If the conclusions of this book are true, and I believe that they are, we may w r ell thank God and take courage.

The riddle of Samson will have a new solu-

8 INTRODUCTION

tion when applied to the existence of sin in the universe,

"Out of the eater came forth food And out of the strong came forth sweetness."

Nathan E. Wood.

i

NO apology or preface is needed for the subject of sin in the world. Of all the problems which force themselves upon us as we look at human life, this is the greatest and most insistent. The evils of the world need no vivid and elaborate setting forth. They are the commonplace of rhetoric, and they speak for themselves with a thousand voices. But that which makes sin, with its myriad evils in society, in characters, in fortunes, the supreme problem of human life, is not the mere consequences of sin, awful as those are. That which makes sin not only the practical problem of life, but the supreme problem of the reason, is the fact that sin, this universal and vital reality, is in strange and terrible conflict with the supreme reality, which is God. In this defiance of God by sin lies the real problem. Sin is, and God is ; but how can

o both be in the same world? Each may seem to deny the other, but the danger of the problem is that, to many, sin seems to deny God. To many others it is a cloud upon the blaze of His existence ; and to all it is the profoundest problem contained in human life. The existence of a supreme, a Divine, an all-good and all-powerful Being, is the hope of the world. But if God is the quest of the ages, sin is the barrier of the ages. No problem or perplexity, nothing except the actual working of sin itself in their own souls, has kept so many from seeing God as has this problem of sin in His world.

Some sort of a theodicy, some showing of the way in which sin may exist in the world of an all-good and all-powerful God, becomes a necessity, at least in any religious thinking. The two highest of undivine religions have made a theodicy their framework. Buddhism fantastically represents the world as the evil sloughed off from a good deity, and as destined, with the dying of evil, to be reabsorbed into deity, and to cease to exist. Zoroastrianism made its theism a theodicy, depicting the world as held in a gigantic balance of Good and Evil, Ormuzd and Ahriman, each a deity, with good victorious in the end. In the Bible we find no framework of theodicy, for the purpose of the Bible is to do what no uninspired religion has done, to deal with the practical problem of sin, by showing man a way out from sin. But except that it reveals infinite truth about God and about sin, the Bible states the problem of theodicy but once, in the Book of Job, where it shows as its sublime solution the overwhelming majesty of God and our own ignorance of His ways. Butler's " Analogy," written in the light of the whole Bible and of modern intellect, presents the same argument in the profoundest rational form. " Paradise Lost " and Augustine's " City of God " have made other aspects of the problem a part of the world's thought. In the largest sense these mighty works are theodicies. But they have not sought to give a specific answer to the direct question of theodicy, " How can sin and an all-powerful God be in the same world? " With the Bible, and after it the "Analogy/' to show the folly of doubt because of sin; with the Bible, and after it " Paradise Lost/' to show how sin entered the world ; with the Bible, and after it the " City of God/' to show God's dealing with sin in the world ; — people still ask the question of theodicy, of the nature of God, the goodness and power of God, in view of sin.

A specific answer to that question has not been given, and to-day we face the problem more plainly than ever. For a time indeed the thinking world has left the theistic problems of the days of Leibnitz, Voltaire, Edwards, and Butler, and has been drawn away by the advance of physical science to what is not a problem, but a battle of opinions, the question of natural and supernatural. But while that conflict, like every conflict of opinions, has left both sides about where they were before, it has brought both sides back to the problem which has never ceased to be foremost in the popular mind, the problem of sin and God in the world. For there has arisen, as a result of the generalisations of science, a tendency to look at things in a cosmic way, to think of the race rather than of individuals, of the world rather than the race, and of the universe rather than of this particular world. And this cosmic thought, this largest view of God's working in the world, brings us face to face with the great unsolved problem of the days of theistic and atheistic strife. In this large plan of God in the world sin presents itself, a universal apparition, a defiant and undeniable reality. To every theist this becomes a supreme question. We have had in these days of science a vision of the Divine order almost Pauline in its sweep. What is the place of sin in this order? We behold, we think, as never before, the hand of God in nature. Where is the hand of God in sin? It may be said of this problem of theodicy, if it may ever be said of any problem, that it demands solution, for it belongs to actual life.

We do not have to evolve it for ourselves, like certain problems of criticism, over which many dervishes whirl themselves frantic. It forces itself upon us. Neither is it bewildered by the " anise and cummin " of dates and styles and words. It is as broad as the universe and as deep as human life. It is indeed the most human, the least abstract, of all the problems of philosophy. For this reason there is no problem which perplexes so many of the people who do not claim to be thinkers, but who nevertheless think, as this question of the existence of sin in the world. Even the thoughtless pause to ask it. It is a universal abstraction of the most concrete form. It is a paradox which actually exists. While abstruse, divine philosophy retires to its grove and strictly meditates the " highest good " or the " first principle," common philosophy, in the street and in the home, is ever propounding this problem, which stares one in the face: "How can sin and God both be true? How can they be in the same world? " There is no other enigma in philosophy, divine or undivine, of which the world so strictly demands a solution, for the problem demands it of the world. There are problems in religion which are made what they are by the element of infinity, which are forever seen by the soul, but not grasped by the intelligence. The mystery of the Three in One is of this nature, and the mystery of fixed fate and free will. These parallels meet only in eternity. But perspective plays no part in the mystery of sin in the world. It is not a discrepancy, or a gulf, between God and sin ; it is a conflict, and a shock of meeting. And this meeting-point is not far off, beyond the ultimate outpost of our thought. It lies within our own experience. Sin meets God in our own souls.

It is undoubtedly true that the problem of evil is more likely to present itself to the student of the natural world or to the average man as a problem of natural evil, of pain, suffering, misfortune, sickness, and death. We are all more puzzled over the evil which we suffer than over the evil which we do. But all the problems of evil rest upon the problem of sin, and are explained by sin.

For the injustice and oppression which are in the world, the inequalities of fortune, the wicked prospering, the righteous failing, innocence trampled upon and virtue cast down by vice, — " and captive Good attending captain III," — all these things, which are to many persons the problem of life, are simply aspects of the question of defiant sin: sin prospered and triumphant for a time, for it is only for a time, in defiance of God, — the sinful and the wicked striking down the virtuous and oppressing the innocent, in defiance of Divine justice.

And what we call natural evil, such as pain, misery, sickness, the scientist sees as the direct or indirect result of moral evil in ourselves, or in our ancestors, or in society at large. The Scriptures add to this summing up of the natural evils which are the harvest of sin, that sin is the seed of death. But if natural evil may undoubtedly be traced to sin as its source, this but adds to the burden of the problem of sin.

Beyond this, natural evil reveals itself clearly to modern eyes as a punitive force. In pain, misery, and privation, even in an earth discordant in her fairest scenes, sown with suffering, and red with blood, moral order appears at its corrective work. Purifying power blows in it like a destroying wind through miasms. He is blind who to-day cannot see in natural evil the divine order of the universe asserting itself against sin. But sin, with this divine machinery of trouble arrayed against it, is more a problem than ever. What shall we say of that which calls for the correction, which needs the punishment, which leaves the debris to be purified? What shall we say of that sin against which the divine order of the universe must assert itself? Sin stands a blacker mystery than ever in the light which shines through natural evil. It is not hard for the theist to see, back of natural evil, God, arraying the universe against moral evil. A recent writer * has drawn the philosophy of natural evil into a phrase and set forth God's personal relations to natural evil, when he says : " Suffering is God's protest against sin." But what shall we say of sin ? In this tremendous indictment of sin by the voice of all natural evil, appears more awful than ever the power

1 Principal Fairbairn.

and antagonism of that sin against which God must protest!

This problem of sin, though it lies in man's nature, is far more profound than the problem of the origin of sin in man. It is indeed strange that man could have sinned. For we cannot believe that God created man with sin, or the seeds of sin, in him. How then did sin begin in a sinless being? But we can point to the free will of man, which explains how man could have sinned, if not why he should have sinned. Sin was not impossible to man. This problem is shallow beside the deeper problem of sin and God. A sinless being, with freedom of will, has power to sin, and the occurrence of sin in the soul of a being who, though sinless, had power to choose between love of God and love of sin, is immeasurably less mysterious than the occurrence of sin in the world of a God who must forever hate sin.

This problem of sin is also in every way more vital than the question of the origin of sin in man. For tracing the origin of sin cannot change the fact of sin. Sin, however it got here, is here, and the real and vital question before men is, not how sin got here, but how to get rid of it. But in order to get rid of it, God is necessary ; and the problem is that sin, by its presence in His world, obscures God, and to some seems even to deny Him. It is a question not of our past, but of our future, because it is a question of God. Sin has already affected the nature of man; shall we let it affect the nature of God for us? Shall we let it raise an unanswered question of the goodness and power of God ? God, by the very idea of God, must be perfect in goodness, but sin in His world is evil. He must be perfect in power, but sin defies Him. This problem of theodicy, of defiant sin and God, arising out of the actual world, from the conflict of these two great realities in our own souls, intensified by the revealing light of natural evil, and swallowing up the question of the origin of evil, is the most insistent, the most vital, the most profound, and indeed the only, problem which stands between our intelligence and God.

II

WHEN this question, " How can sin and God both be in the same world?" presents itself, there are many who would meet it by evasion. And the only way to do this is to deny that God and sin do both exist. Which of the two one denies depends mostly upon things outside of one's self. A mind prone to see but one thing at a time, or inclined to meet problems by evasion, may equally well become pessimist or pantheist. If such a mind is brought up in an atmosphere of naturalism or of materialism, it easily meets the appearance of sin by denying the existence of God. If such a mind has been cradled in the church or fed upon a mild philosophy, it gets faith by denying the reality of sin. Such pessimism, which is atheism, and such optimism, which is pantheism, are kith and kin. They are both of them evasions of the great problem of the world.

Atheism is no longer what it once was as a compact force and a definite theory. The glitter of Voltaire, the sword-play of Bayle, the lucid fallacies of Hume, are not of our day. It is a far cry, even from such thinking as theirs, to that recent well-paid apostle of atheism, the climax of whose philosophy was the question, superfluous to all who knew the work of the questioner, " If the devil should die, would God make another ?" Atheism, at the present day, if it is to be found in the form of thought, must be looked for rather in the guise of extreme agnosticism or of the theatrical pessimism of Schopenhauer. Pessimism is in fact the real atheism of to-day, and pessimism is an atheism which, unlike the older atheism, is founded entirely upon the evil which is in the world. In Schopenhauer this theme of evil in the world plays second part to a strange and gigantic self-conceit. But in his followers, such as von Hartmann, the denial of God because of evil is the burden of their pessimism.

The world is very bad, and there is, therefore, no God; there is only a blind and remorseless Will. As a recent writer has well said, they talk as though they had made the world, long ago in their youth, but had well repented of it. Such a denial of God is to any rational mind simply a weak evasion of the supreme problem of God and sin. It is no more irrational than the denial of the reality of sin, but it is more foolish from the practical point of view, for it loses all that could be gained by an evasion. One may seek, even by evasion, to see beyond dispute the existence of God; but no one cares for the undisputed existence of sin.

If we are seeking a theodicy, or an optimism based upon the facts in the case, atheism and pessimism do not lie in our road. We shall have dealt with them sufficiently if we find the answer to them in a solution of the problem. But the kind of false optimism which rests on a denial of the reality of sin does encumber the way to a true and reasoned optimism or to a true theodicy. The optimism of a true theodicy cannot be confused by pessimism, but it may be by false optimism. One is not obliged to clear away this false optimism, yet for the sake of the best understanding of the problem it is well to analyse these evasions of the problem by the denial of sin.

Those whose faith is not strong enough to lay hold upon God in spite of sin, and whose moral sense is so weak that sin in themselves does not lead them to the realisation of God, may find the denial of sin almost a necessity of the religious life. Of these there is little to be said. It is a personal matter with them, a necessity of their weakness. But wherever the denial of sin is set forth as a philosophy of the universe, it takes its place in a strange harmony by the side of pessimism, the atheism which is founded on evil, as a twin evasion of the problem of sin and God. We need not of course force this kinship too far, and try to make it identity. For the complete parallel to the belief that there is no perfect Being above is the belief that there is no imperfection here below, and very few would deny that there is at least some imperfection in human society. The denial of sin comes rather in the affirmation that there is no sin in the positive sense, as a moral evil defiantly and successfully opposing itself to God. Sin is explained as a negative thing, as a natural evil, as an imperfection. It stands no longer as the antithesis of God.

Probably the extreme form of this view is found in that theory of the world which we call pantheism. Pantheism knows no evil in the world, as atheism knows no God. Pantheism has, however, its own ends before it, and its view of sin springs less from a conscious desire to evade the problem of evil than from a philosophy oblivious to aught but itself. Certain forms of pantheism, which might almost equally well be called atheism, see no defiant evil in sin because they see no personal moral Being to defy. Those, however, like Spinoza, whose pantheism is theistic, who, to put it roughly, would not put everything in place of God, but would see God as the essence of all things, are equally forced to exclude sin as a reality from their divinely-intoxicated universe. Sin may somehow be in a world which belongs to God, but it cannot be in a world which is a part of God. God and sin may both be true, but pantheism and sin certainly cannot. Therefore the pantheist denies sin, and therefore also the world denies pantheism.

Next after pantheism the place in philosophy from which the denial of the reality of sin has been most often drawn is the Theodicee of Leibnitz, perhaps the most celebrated of all treatises upon the problem of sin. Leibnitz is one of the great names in philosophy, one in the line of hundred-handed geniuses, with Aristotle, Leonardo, Bacon, and Goethe. In his Theodicee, the fruit of a mind and temper unique for boldness, confidence and brilliance, ideas, arguments, metaphors, and illustrations crowd one another. The result is that side by side with a truly sublime conception and a really profound argument he has left many vague phrases about sin as " imperfection " or " limitation," which obscure the large structure of his thought. The great idea of the

Theodicee was that this world is the " best possible world." Now evil is in this world, and the presence and permission of evil here must be explained before it becomes clear that this is the best possible world. Leibnitz showed by analysis how evil could have come into the world. Man is finite. Metaphysically he falls short of infinite completeness or perfection. This limitation inborn in finite power, intellect, knowledge, Leibnitz calls metaphysical imperfection. Physical evil he explained as conditionally a good, not good in itself, but good seen in its context in the book of human life, where it appears as a corrective of sin. But this moral evil, or sin, which is not mere finiteness, and beside which natural evil is a good, was the real problem before him. And Leibnitz argued that moral evil is the result of this finite imperfection as it affects the moral nature. From this argument there grew many eloquent phrases about moral evil as " imperfection," or " limitation," or a " mere failure of perfectness." In this of course he confounded quality and quantity.

evasions n

The moral nature need not be infinite in quantity in order to be perfect in quality, that is, to be good. Nevertheless these phrases, the rhetoric of Leibnitz, have flown far more widely than his sober thought has gone. The thought of Leibnitz is that this finite imperfection, which works in all man's nature, works especially in the will of man. In the will of man, evil, before but a limitation of being, becomes moral, defies God, and is sin. The human will, he declares, is the source of sin, and finite limitation is but the occasion of it. Otherwise God, who is the author of this limitation, is responsible for sin. But Leibnitz declares that God in no way created sin; for while sin is made possible by this finite limitation, nothing but a will can give sin reality; it cannot be God's will which does this ; it is man's will, which sins in defiance of God. This is the main point of his argument about the origin of evil as it concerns the Creator. To show how sin could begin in a being created sinless, he finds some such influence as finite imperfection a necessity. But this would but charge the Creator of the finite soul with being the creator of sin, did Leibnitz not throw his strongest emphasis upon the fact that sin, made possible by finiteness, is itself wholly the work of the human will, a direct and positive evil, a defiance, not an incomplete attainment, of righteousness.

All this is, however, but a part of his more famous theory in regard to the present permission of sin in the world. Looking not at man's nature alone, but at the world at large, he declares that evil is necessary to the " pre-established harmony " of the universe. In itself not good, it is necessary as a foil to that which is good, and which without its foil would not be perfect. Sin is the shadow, the darkness, without whose contrast the light would lose half its brightness. This rhetoric, though not new in itself, nor in its idea of sin as a necessary part of a divine harmony, took original and logical form in his celebrated argument that this world is the " best possible world," because the " best possible world " is one containing sin. This greatest conception of Leibnitz is not, as many who employ it now seem to think, simply an enthusiastic and defiant yelp of optimism in the face of sin. By it Leibnitz means, and this is the greatest development of his Theodicee, that the " best possible world " is a moral world, one containing " morality," or moral agents, and in such a world there is always a possibility of sin. He does not say of the best possible world, as he said of his pre-established harmony, that sin is necessary to it. He says only that sin is a necessary possibility in it. For where there are free wills, God cannot absolutely prevent sin. Sin may come to pass in such a best world, as it has in this one, in spite of God, and God is not to be blamed for it. The whole argument rests then upon moral defiance of God as the real nature of sin, and here is his whole explanation of sin. The origin of sin is not with God, but in the free will of man in defiance of God. Sin's continued presence in the world is not to be made a charge against God, since it is here because the free will sins in spite of God. And the creation of such a world with such free wills in it is not a cloud upon God's goodness, since such a world, with free agents in it, is the best possible world. The argument of the Theodicee turns at every point then upon the fact that sin is positive moral evil, born of the free will in defiance of God. But the mind of Leibnitz was a restless and ardent one. He desired to storm the problem with every weapon at once. His great argument moves in a cloud of phrases about " limitation," " imperfection/' "negations," "shadows." And his very phrase, " sin as a part of the best world," which to him means wholly that sin defies God in the best world, is taken by the thoughtless, and by the wilful, to mean that sin as a part of the best world is itself not really evil.

But the idea of sin as a negation, an imperfect existence of good, or a mere absence of good, does not depend upon Leibnitz, nor for that matter upon any philosophy, or even upon logic. It has its own philosophy, which consists of illustrations, some of which have done long and hard service down to the present day. Sin, it is said, is not positive moral evil, but a mere negation; not a force, but an absence. It is like cold, the absence of heat. It is like shadow, the absence of light. It is a vacuum, where good is not. These, which are merely illustrations of an evasion of a great reality, do not in themselves deserve much attention. But they are so common, and so often take the place of reason and logic, that it may be well to consider what force they really have. Now illustrations have not the force of proofs unless they are analogies as well as illustrations. These illustrations of shadow and cold and vacuum set forth a condition of negation, from which positive force, light, or heat, is gone. They show then what is meant when it is said that sin is a mere negation. But they do not show that sin is itself such a negation as cold and shadow are, unless they do so by analogy. And there is no force of analogy in them in that direction. For used as analogies, as anyone may use them, they on the contrary sweep away all idea of sin as negation. Is sin really not a positive evil force, but only an absence of the good divine force? What causes the absence then? Is sin merely a vacuum of goodness?

Material nature abhors a vacuum, and Divine Nature and goodness must at least equally abhor one; it must have come to pass in spite of them; what defiant thing causes the vacuum? Is evil like shadow, the absence of light? What then casts the shadow from before the Divine righteous light ? Is evil like cold, the absence of heat? What is it which stops at one point the heat of Divine love which floods the universe? Something real must cast the shadow and chill the heat. That something, whatever it is, is sin. Two negatives make a positive, say the grammarians. It takes two positives to make a negative in a real and positive world. It takes a positive of tremendous power to cause a negation of a positive God anywhere in His universe. If sin is the negation of good, it must be a very real and positive existence. It must be, as Augustine says, a negation as fire is a negation. It creates the vacuum of goodness in which it dwells. It casts its own shadow. It is foolish to say that sin is but the shadow, which something else casts, for if something else casts the shadow, that something else, which stops the light of God, or rather that stoppage itself, is the sin. The sin which does all this is in defiant opposition toward God. For a negation cannot be in a positive universe of positive Power and Love without positive opposition to that Power and Love — and, in fact, successful opposition, since, if unsuccessful, it could not exist. No deeper description can be given of the terrible antagonism of sin toward God than this, that sin, wherever it exists, casts a shadow from His light, and dispels the warmth of His love, and is the negation of His righteousness.