A Theology of Everything

Part 3, A Dance Between Sunlight and Shadows

Having described the fairly non-controversial doctrines of creation ex nihilo and ex Deo, in this post I want to share something more speculative and, perhaps, more controversial. 

If creation ex nihilo declares an absolute ontological contrast between God and the world, what is the nature of that contrast? As described by many theologians, this contrast concerns necessity versus contingency. Where God exists in the necessary fullness of His own Being, creation exists in contingency and is bounded by finitude. 

Now, why might is fairly straightforward observation lead to controversy? 

Well, because it seems to me that a tension exists here between finitude and the claim that creation was created primordially "good," as declared in Genesis 1. Genesis 3 describes a "fall" from an Edenic Paradise. And yet, everything in this life that we describe as "natural evil"--damage, disease, decay, and death--flows out of creation's contingency and finitude. 

To my eye, there is a tension here. On the one hand, we were created in a state of "goodness." But if we are created as finite, contingent creatures this seems to imply that were are necessarily prone to damage, disease, decay and death, the very experiences we describe as "evil." You see the tension. As creatures we are contingent. Contingency implies natural sufferings we describe as "evil." And if this is so, how can we claim that creation is "good"? Being born/created into contingency seems to be a bad thing. 

Of course, the move here is to quickly point to Adam's fall, our descent into the consequences of contingency. The idea here is that, in our prelapsarian condition, we were protected from the consequences of our contingency because of our connection to God's divine life. 

(By the way, "prelapsarian" is a theological term of art. It comes from the Latin words "prae" (before) and "lapsus" (fall). Life after the fall is described as "postlapsarian.")

But the point I want reiterate is that creaturehood is inherently shadowed by contingency due to its finitude. Stated in a more metaphysical register, creaturehood is always tending toward non-being. If not connected to God, creaturehood drifts into non-existence. Necessarily so. And this drift into non-being is experienced by the creature as "evil," as it must be described given that this movement into non-being is movement away from God. Upon Adam's fall, about which I'll have more to say in the next post, creaturehood experiences an "ontological drop" away from God and begins drifting into non-being. 

But again, to return to the point, while protected from these consequences in the prelapsarian condition before the fall, creaturehood is already "shadowed" by contingency and finitude simply because we are creatures. That is, there seems to be a potential for "evil" baked into the very nature of creaturely existence. 

And if this is so, is there a threat here to the claim that creation is inherently and primordially "good"?

We might start here by pondering the Hebrew word tov that is translated as "good" in Genesis 1. Tov has a range of meanings--happy, pleasing, good, desirable, perfect, content, favorable, beneficial. If we interpret tov in Genesis 1 as descriptive of God's pleasure and happiness with his creative acts, then we lower the stakes in claiming that creation has some sort of primordial value of "goodness." Creation is "good" simply because God is happy with it. Creation is "originally blessed" because God smiles upon us. 

Basically, even though creation is shadowed by contingency and finitude God is pleased with us as the creatures that we are. We are good simply because God delights in us, creatures though we be. Stated more strongly, our finitude, our humanness, in all our frailty and nonpermanence, is good, just as it is and just as we are.

But what about goodness from our perspective? Can the creature name its creaturely existence as "good" given that creaturely existence is always tending toward non-existence? Might we be tempted to describe this existence as an "evil"? For example, Ecclesiastes seems to worry about the “goodness” of our nonpermanence.

I have two responses here. 

First, creaturely existence is only experienced as an "evil" when it is separated from God. Once creaturely existence "drops" from its ontological connection with God it becomes shadowed by non-being. These shadows we name "evil." "Evil," in this view, is a term describing our tending away from God's own being. 

Second, I want to float Augustine's notion of privatio boni here, that evil is the privation/absence of the good. If creaturely existence is ex Deo (from God), and continuously ex Deo, then life and being are rooted in God's own Being and therefore a positive good. Non-being is "nothing," the privation of the good. Since creaturely being exists in God it can only ever be a positive good. Creation-as-being is wholly good. Anything we experience as "evil," therefore, is creaturehood encountering its drift into non-being. "Evil" is the word creatures use to describe slipping away from life. 

To summarize: Whenever we point to the damage, disease, decay and death of creatures we are not pointing to created realities, we are pointing toward the shadow of non-being. Existence and being can only ever be good given their rootedness in God. 

When we point at evil we point at "nothing," the encroachment of non-being upon being. Given our finitude, creaturely existence is bounded by nothingness, being abutting non-being, a dance between and sunlight and shadows.