God on Trial
Reverend Benjamin Maucere
First Unitarian Church, Philadelphia, PA
James Morrow's book, Blameless in Abaddon, is a fictional account of a Judge Martin Candle's prosecution of God at the International Court of Justice at the Hague, for crimes against humanity. Elie Wiesel wrote his play, The Trial of God, about an actual trial of God he observed while a fifteen year old and an inmate at Auschwitz.
The case against God is clear and unambiguous. If we can say, with e.e. cummings, "I thank you God, for most this amazing day," if we thank and give God credit for beauty and wonder, not to mention good fortune, then why not hold God accountable for evil - for the world's inexplicable and unimaginable suffering?
God on trial would have to answer for natural disasters. What do we call floods fires tornadoes and earthquakes? "Acts of God - what else?" What kind of God are we talking about here?
God would have to answer for human-caused catastrophes - from the Crusades and Inquisition and the Middle Passage to the Holocaust all the way through to September 11. For the current death-embrace in what is with heartbreaking irony is called the Holy Land. What kind of God would allow these things to happen?
When a child dies, sometimes well-meaning people will comfort the parents by saying that it was God's will - God wanted their child in heaven. Again - what kind of God would take a child from her parents to decorate heaven?
We've been taught that God loves us and cares for us. God's eye is even on the sparrow - and, Jesus assures us, we are more valuable to God than many sparrows. So people try to reconcile the paradox of a loving God who allows suffering. Over the years, much has been written in God's defense.
What Jerry Falwell invoked to explain September 11 was the Disciplinary defense. Classic Augustine: suffering is a teaching tool that we might learn self-restraint and return to the One True Religion. It's for your own good.
It's related to the Hidden Harmony defense: we're just too small to see the entire picture. What appears bad actually serves a greater good. A forest-fire, for example, has an ecological purpose. So Hidden Harmony asserts that everything happens for a reason.
Or, as the student asks the Zen master, "Why does carrion smell so bad?"And the master replies, "If you were a vulture, it would smell like chocolate." That is to say, evil is relative - it depends on your perspective.
The problem with the Hidden Harmony defense is that we really don't believe it. A character in Morrow's book says it well: "When an upright citizen hears that his neighbor has met with an earthquake or a hurricane, he doesn't stop to ask, 'Is there a hidden harmony here?' He rolls up his sleeves and tries to help."
Both of these theodicies come into play in the understanding that suffering ennobles - that it makes us better people. And sometimes it's true. There are those who have, in the face of suffering, deepened their humanity and developed a spiritual maturity. I pray for us all that we will react in such a way.
But there is also suffering that is random, senseless, cruel, and just plain wrong. Ask the abused child; the rape victim, the non-smoker dying of lung cancer how ennobled they are.
The eschatological defense, that it will all turn out well in the end, was effectively demolished by the ram in the Abraham and Isaac story. "Life is hell but then you go to heaven" is unacceptable.
The ontological defense is that creation is - of necessity - imperfect. Only God is perfect. To which we could reply, "it doesn't have to be perfect - but it could be a hell of a lot better!
In the fourth century, Lacantius argued a variation of the ontological defense: "Good cannot be understood without evil, nor evil without good'. . . . our ability to know happiness, pleasure, and contentment depends entirely upon our firsthand experiences with sorrow, pain, and misery."
This cannot be denied. But consider the scale of human suffering! To argue that thousands of people die from war or famine or disease so that we can count our blessings is monstrous!
And in the seventeenth century GW Leibniz, in The Theodicy, made his famous assertion that this is "the best of all possible worlds." Puhleeze!
The most persuasive theodicy is the free will argument. We have the power to choose good or evil. It's what makes us human. The fact that so often people choose evil, even in the name of God, isn't God's fault - it's ours. In the absence of free will, we would be bland automatons - mere robots programmed for goodness. Which, as a matter of fact, was how we were created, according to the Adam and Eve myth. By not creating us with a knowledge of good and evil, we were created as not fully human. We finished the job ourselves. Go Eve!
The only argument against the solid free will defense is that the fact that we so often choose evil constitutes some kind of design-flaw. We can blame God for that.
In fact, all the classic theodocies fail in the face of God's own words in the book of Isaiah 45:5-7, "I am the Lord and there is no other . . . . I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things."
All these things. All this despair and devastation. A body count in the millions.
So we have a confession! A guilty plea! The problem is, rather than pass sentence on God, it passes sentence on us. A life sentence of accepting that good and evil will come our way and finding a way to cope.
Or in the words of Jesus toward the end of Morris' book, "Bitterness is not a philosophy, friend. Outrage is not an ethic. Stop counting corpses and reach a truce with the universe."
In Morrow's book, the Court at the Hague rejects the suit against God, Their unanimous decision is that evil is necessary, for, they wrote, "Consider the alternative: a universe devoid of gratuitous catastrophe. In such a universe, plane crash victims never elicit our sympathy, for we know they deserve their fates. Famines never occasion herculean relief efforts, for we realize mass starvation is cosmologically necessary. Cancer and Down's syndrome never inspire us to probe nature's secrets, for we understand pathology is essential to the divine plan. To wit, only by building random annihilation into the scheme of things could the Defendant have secured a world containing charity, compassion, courage, patience, self-sacrifice, and ingenuity."
Elie Wiesel's experience took place one night in the concentration camp when three great Jewish scholars "created a rabbinic court of law to indict the Almighty. The trial lasted several nights. Witnesses were heard, evidence was gathered, conclusions were drawn, all of which issued finally in a unanimous verdict: the Lord God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth, was found guilty of crimes against creation and humankind. And then, after what Wiesel describes as an 'infinity of silence,' the Talmudic scholar looked at the sky and said 'It's time for evening prayers,' and the members of the tribunal recited Maariv, the evening service." (Robert McAfee Brown, in the Introduction to Elie Wiesel's The Trial of God.)
This brings us to one final theodicy I call the mistaken identity defense, or "You've got the wrong God." It's the theory espoused by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner in his immensely popular book When Bad Things Happen to Good People.
Kushner affirms, as I would, that god is not some cosmic puppet-master blithely smiting away at us puny humans, afflicting us and wreaking havoc and dispensing evil. God is not omnipotent, all-controlling, all-powerful.
God, in my theodicy, is a word for the source of hope and healing,
strength and courage,
love and justice.
Any more than that, I don't know.
But a God working within us and among us, and beyond us,
helping us move in the direction of our deepest values and our highest aspirations,
inspiring us to face evil
and helping us move the world closer to the heart's desire -
there is a God I can work with.
And be thankful for.
I thank you God,
for most this amazing day.
AMEN.
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