Never Normalize
In the days following the news of the attack on the Christchurch Mosque, it became increasingly evident to me, as I spent any time on Facebook, of how toxic social media can be. While on one hand there were the more outrageous comments, a fellow baptized Methodist, for instance, writing “kill all Muslims,” the majority of comments I saw just seemed feel like business as usual. The majority of responses seemed to imply an element of hopelessness, an attitude that seems to suggest that the world as it is is just the way the world is. We live amongst it and there’s nothing we can do about it. The world as is is normal. And so the best we can offer is our thoughts and prayers.
And I think this attitude is to be expected, that is the strategy of babel, to create apathy, to lead us to simply accept the status quo, that the way the world is is just the way the world is. However, in accepting the world as is and being unwilling to question it we might be tempted to turn towards a fatalist understanding of theology. The way the world is is the way God intends it to be. The world is simply following God’s predestined plan for creation.
I hope we might realize how problematic this way of viewing is though, after all, it implies that God is less the source of being and the one who is goodness itself and more-so just the one who is an all-determining will, a God who is either “beyond good and evil” (whatever that means) or just evil. As the Eastern Orthodox professor, theologian, and philosopher David Bentley Hart would put it:
“If all that occurs, in the minutest detail and in the entirety of its design, is only the expression of one infinite volition that makes no real room within its transcendent determinations for other, secondary, subsidiary but free agencies (and so for some element of change and absurdity), then the world is both arbitrary and necessary, both meaningful in every part and meaningless in its totality, an expression of pure power and nothing else.”[1]
Given this option then, this image of the world as arbitrary and necessary, meaningful and meaningless, I might instead say that I prefer Shane Claiborne’s more succinct, albeit challenging statement, “another world is possible,” a phrase which reflects our own mission as United Methodists to make disciples for Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.
We find a similar attitude of fatalism in various sources, one that comes to my mind is Stephen King’s 2013 Guns, a Kindle only book which lays out King’s view on how a mass shooting “shakes out,” in it, he offers a twenty-one step timeline of events. In essence, he explains how and why the system works so as to disallow change of any sort so that (moving away from his words) the principalities might work together in order to preserve the status quo, to convince us that this is just the way the world is.
And we find then a certain set of unspoken beliefs rampant in our culture, phrases or attitudes that arise after any shooting:
So long as “they” don’t “take our guns away” our American Freedom will be preserved.
-or-
So long as we continue our blood sacrifices at the altar of guns and war God will preserve our American Freedom.
This tendency towards sacrifice though is more a product of natural theology than Christian thought. Natural theology, at its most simplified, implies that we can determine the way God works through observing the natural world around us. The flaw here is that the God we might view through the lens of natural theology is ultimately a God who is cyclical, or dare I say, pagan; a god who is evil. To turn back to Hart once more:
“It is as if the entire cosmos were somehow predatory, a single great organism nourishing itself upon the death of everything to which it gives birth, creating and devouring all things with a terrible and impassive majesty… However one chooses to interpret it, the cosmos as we know it is obviously a closed economy of life and death.”[2]
The flaw in natural theology, from a Christian perspective, is that it cannot show us how God actually works in the world, or at least not how the Christian God works in the world as Christian thought points us towards a God who is not reliant on death or consumption in order to be sated. Or as Jesus tells the Pharisees, “I desire mercy not sacrifice” (Mt 9:13). If we hold to natural theology it shows us a god who does desire sacrifice as, in natural theology, life requires death. Trees require decay to grow. Humans require the killing of animals and plants to thrive. Natural theology tells us these things are not only necessary, but they are actually good. Actually required.
The problem is that the Christian witness informs us that death is not natural. Death is a curse. Death is the enemy, “the last enemy rendered ineffectual” (1 Cor 15:26). Now there are a great many theological and philosophical schools of thought which might say yes, these things are natural, good and necessary even. Certain schools of thought might claim God intends these things to happen (all for his predestined and divine glory of course) so that his divine plan might be enacted as intended.
To say though that evil, suffering, or pain is necessary or normal in the enacting of God’s plan for creation, even if that plan results in the final good of all things, ultimately implies and points us towards, once again, an evil god. A god who is (as he is the source of life and being itself) evil in-and-of-itself. Fellow blog contributor Ethan recently posted an article in which he borrowed from fifth-century Patristic Pseudo-Dionysius (or Dionysius the Areopagite as he was also referred) the same Patristic I now borrow from:
“All the names appropriate to God are praised regarding the whole, entire, full, and complete divinity rather than any part of it, and that they all refer indivisibly, absolutely, unreservedly, and totally to God in his entirety.”[3]
With this in mind, we realize that, were God the cause or the source of evil, or perhaps even “beyond good and evil” it would ultimately just mean that God is evil. God cannot be “in part” evil because God cannot be divided into parts- God is indivisible, God is the sole oneness (Deut 6:4), God is divine simplicity. And so were God to contain evil, were God to enact evil it would mean that the very source of being itself, the fount of being, is ultimately tainted.
The key message, one of the oldest in Christian thought is that this is not normal. This is not natural. While we may have come to adapt ourselves to the world as is, though we may have sword allegiances to powers and principalities who insist this is merely the way the world is, this is not true. The world is good (Gen 1:31). The world is fallen (Gen 3).
Never Normalize
This post is a bit squirrelier than I might have liked and it is a long way of saying that we should never normalize evil. When we are faced with the news of undeniable evil in the world, when we are faced with the news of another shooting at another house of worship in another islamophobic attack we might be tempted to eventually declare that this is just the way it is. That this is the way it has to be. That this is normal.
It’s not.
The nature of the principalities is that they convince us that the way it is is just the way it is. That the status quo is good enough. That we are powerless to change it. I don’t have the answer, beyond just saying Jesus, of how to fix the world, but at the very least I know that we can never be satisfied with the world as it is. Our task as Christians is to never accept the status quo, whatever that status quo may be. The world doesn’t have to be like this. The mission of the Church itself is to change the haves, to transform the world. The world as is is fallen and so the world as is is never truly the world as it is supposed to be.
And so may we never normalize. May we never accept the lie that says this is the way it is. God has given us more than just “the way it is,” more than natural theology, more than fatalism. May, at the very least, we remember especially in this season of Lent:
Another world is possible.
Grant us disquiet, O Lord, that we might never accept the world as is. That we might never give up, wash our hands of the evils we see around us. That we might never find ourselves apologizing for acts of evil, trying to tell ourselves that what we think is evil is only evil because of our perspective. May instead we work to trust in you, that we might move closer to your beatitude, towards your shalom. Guide us closer into you. Amen.
[1] Hart, David Bentley. The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? Grand Rapids, MI: William B Eerdsman Publishing Company, 2005, p30.
[2] Doors, p50–51
[3] Pseudo-Dionysius, The Classics of Western Spirituality: Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, translated by Colm Luibheid. New York: Paulist Press, 1987.
All Scripture comes from:
- Hart, David Bentley. The New Testament: A Translation. New York: Yale University Press, 2017.
