Cancer, Corvettes, and the Creativity of Grace

I've been talking with my friend A.J. for several weeks about a theme that has been plaguing both of us independently. He's been noticing that in any number of encounters in daily life, the moral judgment we normally employ is too broad-stroked to account for the complex, layer-upon-layer of moral dimensions which truly order reality. For instance, picture a luxury vehicle (I'll leave it generic to prompt your imagination. And also because learning about cars is as exciting to me as listening to the NASDAQ report as narrated by Ben Stein). It's price tag strikes some as Good, as an indication of absolute value (nothing costing that much could possibly be shite). Others see such costs as exorbitant and reflective of obscene individualistic consumerism, blissfully ignoring more substantial possible allocations of said budget such as providing care for elderly, etc.; the motives for buying such an exquisite machine seem laced with selfishness and self-promotion, and the car itself is undoubtedly a first-class polluter, created from materials possibly mined by exploited workers, etc. (Full disclosure: as my comments might imply, I have no love lost for the first perspective). But even though such evils pervade the making, buying and using of such a car, it is undeniable that there is an aesthetic dimension which can hardly be said to erode the human soul – the fine-tuned engine, the pristine paint job, the lumbar-supporting leather seats – all seem to evidence and promote human excellence and well-being. How are we limited creatures to understand and faithfully navigate the complex modes of morality which intertwine in every step of our lives?

C.S. Lewis, in “Miracles”, notes a certain “Principle of Vicariousness” whereby all created things depend on each other. He sees this phenomena as morally neutral: one the one hand, interdependence and symbiosis are reflective of the Trinitarian community and the wholeness which God imparts on his beloved universe. But more ominously, this can also be read as an endorsement of the necessity of evil, because goodness can come from evil (to wit: Joseph's phoenixian rise to glory in the wake of his brothers' enslaving intentions). More tangibly, all life itself lives only at the expense of other life...except, perhaps, plants. Even Jainism, seemingly the most life-conscientious religion (which advocates the continuous donning of breath masks to avoid inhaling and thus killing insects or bacteria) cannot avoid the fact that even vegetarianism, its preferred diet, is the act of consuming other life. Of course, in our pre-packaged culture, we forget that the things we ingest and digest were once breathing creatures. We cannot live without killing other things. So, where does this leave us? Presumably, in a state of ambiguity where our fallen, limited selves can never truly know goodness, because whatever goodness around us is laced with and feeds on evil. How then should we live?

This is why it's important to have a *historical* understanding of God's work and righteousness. We long for paradise, but based on what? The knowledge we have that, once upon a time, God created everything and it was good. Not merely passable, or morally neutral, but absolutely, positively good: every creature lived out of its function perfectly. And then, the foundations of the universe shook under the weight of the Fall, and everything changed.

For me, this is the most powerful objection to natural selection. I think that evolution is entirely compatible with the Scriptures. But natural selection's M.O. presupposes that self-preservation and self-propagation are *necessarily violent*. Nothing that exists today could exist without the Hobbesian mechanism of the universe's natural state, where life is “nasty, brutish and short”. Under the metanarrative of natural selection, the power dynamics and selfishness which characterize human life are due not to a historical rupture in God's unfolding will for the universe, but instead are *built into the very foundations of the history of reality itself*. Constrast this to St. Augustine's “privation theory of evil”, which claims that only Goodness is truly real, because God is the “most real” being; therefore, evil is only an infection on the Good, a distorting and perverting of originally pure intentions and functions. Under this view, it seems to me that the “creativity”of evil, which allows for *seemingly* proactive movements (ex. cancer is an active growth, not a physical withering) is an illusion: evil multiplies diversely only because Goodness is necessarily creative and diverse in its function. Evil only follows Goodness along for the ride, and hijacks it at interesting points. Natural Selection has no original peace, no original goodness. Whatever “goodness” we can acknowledge now is simply too bound up in apparent violence and “evil” to have any meaning, and certainly we have no ground to project an original Paradise.

I disagree. I believe there was an original Goodness to creation (whether or not it looked like the Genesis account, or whether such a story is a poetic rendering of the cosmic narrative which moves from perfection to fallenness and ultimately back again). Goodness characterized by God's gratioutous love and grace which can never be tied down to a lelgalistic interchange of works for salvation, but instead an uncalled-for gift. This giftedness of creation is inherently creative. This is the most important claim I'll make in this piece: mercy does not follow disobedience. God's grace does not operate only after the fact, to close the gap between ourselves and Himself; instead, it exists always-already. His love and grace are waiting for us – waiting for us not merely to sin, but to help share in His creative work. Grace's movement of mercy does indeed occur after we sin, but not to bring us back to “normal” with God, but instead to propel us forward, into the world. The purpose of reconciliation is not static, the nature of peace is not neutral, the nature of health is not simply “not-sick” but is a positive state which allows us to be who we were created to be and act accordingly. Being right with God, with one another, with creation is a positive, grace-filled, creative thrust. Each of us is different, rich with different gifts and loaded with different sins and wounds (which exist only because they've hijacked the original creativity of good work, of health, etc).

A.J. doesn't buy the Privation theory of evil – it simply seems too real and necessary in existence. So, he asks, can we really know the true opposite of evil? The problem with evil in our period (and perhaps always) is, as Hannah Arendt noted, its banality. Evil is rarely obvious and ominous: it usually seeps into our lives (like an infection) in seemingly good (or at least tolerable) ways. We justify preemptive war with cries of liberation and democracy; we justify all kinds of immature vices because...well, because 'boys will be boys'; we rationalize deception, however apparently insignificant, at every twist and turn. More troubling, we sometimes *actively* promote evil because it seems good. This is the moral ambiguity has troubled A.J. and myself.

But original Goodness can make no accord with Evil, just as there is no negotiating with cancer. It's always troubled me to read that God *hates* evil: after all, I thought God was love! But it makes more sense if we think of Evil not as a unified Person (the Devil) but instead as a force which pervades all of reality, shattering order and instituting its own infectious growths. It's important to note, I think, that Evil is not necessarily Disorder but a distorted reOrdering. Evil doesn't exist as a Manichean deity, nor as real, but it nonetheless has a logic and purposes of its own: it bends the tendency of creation (the “groaning for redemption”) toward God (the true, absolute reality) to absolute nothingness. Basically, what I'm saying is that Evil is violent, but it is not chaotic – its' only chaotic in relation to the Goodness of Ordered Creation. The style of evil, therefore, is an alternate order which deconstructs and twists the original, righteous order.

What this means, then, (and this is crucial) is that EVIL IS NOT NECESSARY. (For the record, I'm drawing a LOT from the work of Eastern Orthodox theologian/philosopher David Bentley Hart). Instead, evil is/was a potential for rebelling against God, and it has/has had disastrous effects, but God works through evil, using evil. But His use of evil toward His own righteous ends seems to be a different kind of “hijacking” than that of evil upon the Good: instead, He imbues the byproducts of evil with purpose in His kingdom. The Special Olympics is premised on the fact that many disases and accidents have hindered people from living normal lilves, but divine creativity, as displayed in the founders of the Special Olympics, has wrought joy and goodness out of painful and “unnatural” afflictions (a term I use delicately, and only insofar as it relates to God's original and sustained purpose for a whole, healthy creation) which have nonetheless shaped people's lives and identities. The important thing is, this is not logically necessary – people (and by extension, creation) could have been eternally whole and worshipful of their Creator. But His graceful love, which always reaches us before our sin ever does, works in spite of a wholly unnecessary Fall, and beats evil at its own game. But even if that's the case, A.J. rightly asks incessantly, where does that leave us in thinking, discerning, and doing, among such ambiguity and ambivalence, *even if* God is working through it? How can we possibly discern the levels upon levels of reality within which the forces of nothingness prey on Godly upbuilding, and righteousness redeems the byproductsof evil and repurposes it toawrd the divine light? How then should we live?!

To be continued...

(Spoiler alert: there is hope just around the corner!)