Christianity and the Left
Consider this: if Jesus sat at your dining room table tonight and laid out your whole life story – the miserable, recurring sins, the hidden agenda, the skeletons in the closet, the dark desires unknown even to yourself—you would still experience joy, peace, and acceptance in His presence.
Why? Because you would finally recognize the being of inestimable value that Jesus sees in you. And because you would hear him say, “Your sins go over here. It’s you that I’ve come for, My friend.”
“Knowledge of good and evil” in the book of Genesis may not mean realizing the truth that good and evil already exist. Knowledge of good and evil is not a “fall from innocence” in the sense that one had not heard of or even imagined evil but then comes to know of it. The knowledge of good and evil comes about in the context of a non-dualistic universe where there is only good, and it needs no evil to set it off, to be its foil. But to know good and evil is to fracture good into both, to create evil, unnecessarily.
The “knowledge” of good and evil here is not only an abstract knowledge, but more like “cleaving unto,” a knowledge in the erotic sense. One emerges in a fallen world where good seems to need evil (even in the imagination) to exist as good. This may well be the greatest evil of the situation. (See also Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” as a marvellous exploration of this idea of “necessary evil.”) One is leaving behind the knowledge (in both senses of that word) of an entirely good world, to a world where this pure good cannot be imagined, cannot be made workable, even as a theory. To the fallen world, the world where good and evil are known, a world of pure good seems an absurdity.
It is in this context then, that in order to save us from this situation, to restore us to a world without evil, Christianity offers the solution of belief in Christ. At this point the words of Francois Jullien become illuminating:
“Because it involves ipseity—selfness in itself—believe takes on a whole other meaning. ‘Believe in’ (pisteúein eis, πιστευειν είζ), John often writes. And, in fact, everything rides on the shift from ‘believing that’ [croire à] to ‘believing in’ [croire en]. What we believe when we believe that is from the start limited, constrained, objectivized (even when the belief is that God exists). But believing in—i.e., in a self, in an ipseity—is not undefined but infinite. When I say ‘I believe in you’ I have no limit in view. Moreover, believing that can be detailed and itemized: I can believe that X is and not that Y is, and thus make a selection. But belief in is by necessity whole; it calls for an absolute. When I say that I believe in you I no longer wonder “what” in you I believe in. To put things differently, believing that entails a necessary measure of credulity, even if I have good reason to believe, because I might just as easily not believe what I believe. I recognize its hypothetical character (e.g., belief that Santa Claus exists). Whereas belief in is not credulous but trusting. By the phrase ‘believe in yourself’—one that a parent might say to a child, or vice versa, or that one lover might tell another—I mean that I am counting on you, that I am expecting something of you, that I am placing my hopes in you, in you as yourself, in your ipseity, or that I am expecting everything of you. Thus belief in entails a self, an ipseity, on both sides. When I believe in someone I involve the entirety of myself. What I believe in in the person in whom I believe is what he himself reveals of himself, but also what he conceals within. Belief that might be open to convincing, but its truth will still rest on insufficient grounds; I would prefer knowledge that was certain. But the truth of belief in, precisely because it entails an as-in-oneself, will not be measured by a truth subject to proof; it is its own guarantee and can claim no other. You must believe in me, says Christ, and not believe what they say of me. But hasn’t the Church, with its dogma, been compelled to shift from belief in (ipseity) to belief that (identity)—and made the latter into the ‘faith’ that tempers its armor?”
(Francois Jullien, Resources of Christianity English edition, 2021, Polity Press, pp. 82-84)
In That All Shall be Saved (Yale UP, 2019) David Bentley Hart says,
“The truth is that all of these theological degeneracies follow from an incoherence deeply fixed at the heart of almost all Christian traditions: that is, the idea that the omnipotent God of love, who creates the world from nothing, either imposes or tolerates the eternal torment of the damned.” (78)
It is one thing to argue that a just and loving God might annihilate or even torture forever some of his children. Infernalists and universalists clearly are on opposite sides of the fence here; the issue is usually argued on the basis of reason, scripture, or both.
But what does it mean spiritually or psychologically to believe in an infernalist God?
What does it mean politically?
I think that Christian infernalists are houses divided against themselves. As Hart asserts, probably many Christians only think they believe in hell.
But might it be that infernalism has hamstrung the church? Might it be that laying our arguments for infernalism aside, the infernalist position sets up a God who, even if he can be justified on logical or scriptural grounds simply cannot be loved? I believe so. The god infernalists love (or think they love) is not lovable. This cannot be stressed enough. It is all very well to take a hard line on divine sovereignty and say that since God is God there are no ethical constraints above him to which he must comply. But if what God does with this infinite right and power strikes us as abomination, how are we to love him? We cannot. We may proclaim that it is ourselves who are totally depraved in objecting to hell and to such a God, but whatever one makes of that argument we still cannot love the God of hellfire we claim to believe in.
If a Nobel Prize winning mathematician told you that 2+2=5 you might choose to believe he is right, even if you cannot see how. But you have disqualified yourself from ever doing mathematics again.
And if a cruel and monstrous god is supposed to be love itself, that makes it more difficult for us to truly love ourselves or each other. This is true in both the personal and political spheres.
So what is going on?
Why this insistence on the divine bogey, the horrific Nobodaddy?
Once one has swallowed the balderdash of infernalism, one can believe almost anything. If an omnipotent deity wants to save everyone, but cannot because his hands, supposedly, are tied by our free will, what other social, political, economic monstrosities can be rationalized and accepted? Feudalism, patriarchy, capitalism—one can do a song and dance and accept their necessity or even goodness if one can believe the holy, just, and loving creator of the universe will roast certain of his children over an open flame forever.
In effect, the church has corrupted itself by holding a form of moral idiocy close to its heart. It does not help that the idiocy of infernalism has been believed by many people who are by no means idiots. It seems that most thoroughly respected and even brilliant theologians have believed it. The idiocy has been believed by people with loving hearts and a true desire to know Christ.
It is also notable that it tends to be the more politically and socially conservative of the church who are most likely to believe in hell and to emphasize it. Could this situation be one of the reasons why Christianity and the Left have so often been at odds and even outright enemies? By this I mean not only that leftists object to infernalism, but that there is something in the beliefs and attitudes behind infernalism that are inimical to the entire leftist project.
(It seems to be a common phenomenon to find people who are theologically brilliant, but politically obtuse. Likewise, some of the most acute and perceptive political thinkers are blind or ignorant when it comes to matters of religion.)
Not that there has not always been a Christian Left, of course, but in his 2017 Protestants: The Faith that Made the Modern World (Penguin) Alec Ryrie asserts, “The real novelty of our own time is not the prominence of the religious Right but the silence of the religious Left” (7).
It is time for this Christian Left to arise. We must tell the world that infernalism is not fundamental to the faith.
Even if one makes the case that the secular left from the 19th century onwards owes its sense of justice to Christianity, this is no reason for religious triumphalism. What it means is that while the Church largely fumbled the ball by siding with the powerful, opposition to oppressive systems and ideologies like capitalism has been left largely to a secular Left, thereby deprived of the greater strength and spirit it might have had.
At numerous times and places the secular Left has had a stronger and more Christian ethic than the church. I am convinced the church’s frequent hostility to the secular left comes in part from an unacknowledged moral envy the church has sometimes had when it failed to help the poor the left was in solidarity with. Could it be the church’s ethic and spirit has been crippled by infernalism? Could it be that a more ethically sensible Left found itself unable to cleave to a religion that demanded eternal torture for some malefactors? I by no means advocate that Christianity should give up infernalism in order to gain more converts. One can only justify universalism in the name of truth: whether or not that gets you more or fewer converts is not relevant. But perhaps the secular Left has been more morally intelligent on numerous occasions.
One of the defenses of infernalism is that in order for human beings to be human, to be worth something as opposed to being simply robots, we must have free will. We cannot truly be with God unless we freely accept him. And if our will is truly free, then it must be possible for us to reject God. And the rejection of God must necessarily lead to damnation. Therefore, we are told, universalism must violate free will, since it states that all shall be saved and this seems impossible if everyone is free to reject God.
Let me deal with just one element of this whole argument here. According to the standard Christian view, we are all fit for hell to begin with. Our own sins, or original sin inherited from Adam and Eve or something of the sort, has made it just and fitting that we be damned.
No exceptions are acknowledged here. Simple justice, we are told, means that of all the billions of human beings existing or who ever existed they all deserve to be damned, and would be damned but for the mercy of Christ.
It seems peculiar that of the billions of humans who lived or ever will live, they all chose or will choose to sin badly enough to be damned. For surely, to deserve such a horrible fate one must have at least freely chosen the wickedness one is damned for.
Now this is a very strange free will indeed. Apparently, without exception, we have all freely chosen a path of sin bad enough to deserve hell. You would think that at least a handfull would have chosen to be sinless.
But one laughs at this of course. Sinless? Impossible. Even the greatest saints sin and sin seriously, as they are the first to admit.
So where is that famous free will then? How is it that when universalism wishes to storm the gates of hell and liberate all, we are told this violates free will; but when each and every one of us is born in a world where we are inevitably doomed to freely merit damnation one hears not a peep about how our free will is violated, and that therefor God cannot tolerate the situation to exist?
Let me dare the following rant, at the risk of feeling ashamed of myself later. For religion has its religiously correct attitudes which reign us in, and in the name of avoiding sin we curb thoughts that may need to be aired, to be pondered, lest we miss something. People complain of “toxic positivity” in our culture, and sometimes rightly. Religion has its own versions of this, wherein some thought or feeling that steps outside the doctrinally correct is immediately stifled. The good Christian folds his hands prayerfully and smiles grimly inside, intoning, “think doctrinally correct thoughts, think doctrinally correct thoughts,” like those lamentable characters in that horrific story, “It’s a Good Life,” thrusting all rebelliousness from their minds lest their omniscient tyrant hear them. Must Christians hunch their shoulders through life in mortal dread whenever the traditional wisdoms are questioned? And for Christ’s sake anyway, what has he to fear from my thoughts or words? You may say WE have something to fear of our thoughts and words, very well. We also have something to fear of NOT saying them.
Thus:
You can’t tell people that if justice were done they would be tortured forever, and then in the next breath tell them you love them. Humans are not made this way. Here is what God, according to some Christians, is saying to us constantly: “you are a worthless sack of shit, and I love you.” No. This does not work as love. This is the manipulative, Good-God/Bad-God. And there is no sense saying we SHOULD be able to humbly accept the love of someone who thinks we deserve eternal torture, that we are being PROUD: the fact is, we don’t, and we can’t. How can you oblige someone to do the impossible? (even assuming the impossible should be done in this case even if it could). And obligeing us to accept in gratitude the gift along with the supposely graciously suspended judgement does not work. If we are wholly evil, and nothing but wholly evil (and we must be to deserve eternal damnation) there is nothing there to love. And there is no point saying, “God does not love us for something in ourselves, but because it is his nature to love.” This is blather. “Love” is not an intransitive verb. It has an object. And if this is not the case, we must say simply, “God loves,” but we cannot truly say “God loves us,” if indeed, there is nothing good there to be loved. For how can God love evil?
Nor must we say therefor that we seek to be loved through merit, because parents love their babies, and what merit has a baby performed? The baby is in some way good in their eyes, and we tend to agree with them.
No matter how evil we are, no matter how much we need the mercy, if there is not someone beneath the rust of spiritual ruin to receive that mercy, then who is it who is being loved? Perhaps God simply loves himself then? Then who are we?
There is no point exorting humans to be good and then saying they can’t do it, and judging them for inevitable failure. “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory”; does not reason pipe up here and say that if not one has been righteous there is more going on than countless billions of people, all of whom just happen to be evil? Might there just be something systematic about this evil none of us could escape of our own efforts? Liberals have been mocked for being soft on criminals, saying they are in some way “victims of society.” But what kind of “society” is it, when every bloody citizen of it is a criminal? I think there is a wee bit of a structural problem here that nobody can escape. Sin is that structure.
What are we to say to God, then? “Love me according to my deserts?” God does not love according to deserts, does he? Was this not the mistake of the pharisees? Thinking they could buy or earn God’s love? Is it not free? And we don’t quite bloody know, each of us, exactly what our deserts are anyway. Certainly we cannot claim somehow to have earned eternal bliss. Nor can we claim, in truth, we SHOULD have.
Good-God/Bad-God is Blake’s Nobodaddy, hypocritically pretending to love freely while all the time reminding you of what a rotter you are. “Just think what I MIGHT have justly done to you,” he mutters under his breath.
Enough! Enough! All this nonsense, and maybe this meditation itself, is simply another attempt to keep justification hovering in the background as a dark and powerful shadow, even as we try to accept with trembling gratitude the Master’s love. “Oh Lord, please judge me positively for eschewing my worthiness…”! Yes, let us say we are too proud to accept unmerited love, then. But we are too filled with self-loathing also to accept that love. Ah, but the sages, say, that self-loathing is a form of pride. Perhaps it is: a form of pride we learned from those same sages teaching us humbly to loathe ourselves!
No, what is needed steps outside, beyond even what I am saying here. What is required is a miracle.
This is from the first volume of Marx’s Kapital, Chapter 14:
The division of labour within society brings into contact independent producers of commodities, who acknowledge no authority other than that of competition, of the coercion exerted by the pressure of their reciprocal interests, just as in the animal kingdom the “war of all against all” more or less preserves the conditions of existence of every species. The same bourgeois consciousness which celebrates the division of labour in the workshop, the lifelong annexation of the worker to a partial operation, and his complete subjection to capital, as an organization of labour that increases its productive power, denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt to control and regulate the process of production socially, as an inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property, freedom and the self-determining “genius” of the individual capitalist. It is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have nothing more damning to urge against a general organization of labour in society than that it would turn the whole of society into a factory.
A more recent capitalist objection to conscious regulation of production is the usual harping on about the failures of the Soviet command economy, such harping revealing a studied lack of imagination: as if the only conceivable alternative to market-as-god must be the undemocratic bureaucracy-as-god.
But more importantly, translating Marx’s view of capitalist competition into religious terminology, one might say this competition is the capitalist form of idolatry. The effect is not simply that this false god, competition, demands and gets his supposedly rightful place in the scheme of things, but that he demands the right to invade and conquer and transform into his own likeness all non-competitive relationships. Competition does not demand to be a god among gods, but the god, before which there shall be no other.
This is one reason why I speak so often about hell. Ultimately, beneath a belief in infernalism is a kind of spiritual competitiveness, a demand that the universe be functioning as a system of scarcity (economics often being defined in the capitalist mindset as “competition for scarce resources”) which necessitates, even justifies competition. “If there is enough salvation to go around for everyone, if we all will get God’s undying love forever, how could that love be worth anything?” is the plaintive and unspoken cry of the infernalist. While accusing universalists of presumption (as if trust in God’s love simply had to be presumption, for some reason) the infernalist reveals a pride which does not want any salvation so bountiful that everybody gets it. Where is the distinction in that? Where is the achievement? While the infernalist may go on about her unworthiness to be saved, her redemption being the product of God’s grace alone, she secretly feels she really has accomplished something, if she ends up in eternal bliss while others end up in the fiery pit.
This soteriology is a zero-sum game which pretends to be something better. For the infernalist is not usually so vulgar as to say that there are only so many seats in heaven and a certain number of individuals must therefor be damned no matter what happens. Theoretically, according to many infernalists, everyone has the power to accept God’s grace and thereby be saved, and therefor there is no reason why not everyone will, in fact, be saved, other than that there will likely be those who reject the grace, entirely of their own free will, of course.
But the infernalist well suspects in his schema that there will not only be the damned, but likely quite a few of them. Human “freedom,” as he conceives it, is not only necessary to make salvation worth anything (God does not want predetermined “robots” in heaven, is the claim) but also pretty much makes universal salvation impossible. If we are not free to choose damnation, salvation is nothing. And if we are truly free to choose damnation, it is pretty much inevitable in this schema that some shall. In this outlook, therefor, God is relieved of any blame for having limited the number of the saved, while the infernalist gets the proud and secret satisfaction of rescuing heaven from meaninglessness: without the damnation of some, the salvation of any is worthless. The demand of pride that zero sum philosophy prevail over the universe is satisfied, while the Creator is held blameless of any limits placed on his generosity. The hypocrisy is blatant.
Competition in the economic or soteriological sphere creates a need for hell: economically, or eschatologically. And it may well be the case that Christianity’s training of humanity to accept hell on an eschatological level made it easier to accept hell on the factory floor or in the office cubicle.
There is one Christian temperament, which might be characterized as apocalyptic, and which demands that there be a point, a wall, into which the wicked must run sooner or later and be permanently defeated. Broken, humiliated, spiritually crushed by the truth they hate, unrepentant sinners are either annihilated or sent to a place of unending punishment.
Then there is another Christian temperament that insists, “God shall be all in all,” and that all is quite literally ALL: this temperament does not wriggle out of ALL in a lawyerly way by saying the damned are not part of ALL, or preach that weaselly nonsense about how God loves the damned and that it is this very love which will torture them forever, since they reject it. (Talk about passive/aggressive!) As Rob Bell puts it, Love Wins. Who knows?–perhaps love wins even retroactively, such that evil will never have existed. Could this be the (granted, quite unimaginable, quite absurd) answer to the problem of evil? Perhaps.
I confess I am, unfortunately, of the former temperament much of the time. I do not know whether the enneagram is reliable or useful, but I am probably a one (and if not that, almost certainly a nine). So I often have the pharisaical and unchristian weakness to desire the unrighteous be crushed rather than that they repent and be forgiven. Fortunately, I also have the critical strengths of enneagram one, and measuring Christianity rigorously against itself, I come to the conclusion that the ALL in ALL (universalist) conclusion is the Christian truth, even if my vengeful heart is not always in it. (I have selfish motives for universalism, I admit, though they are not relevant to the truth. In other words, if universalism is not true, how do I know if I am saved or damned? Infernalism is wretchedly coy on this matter, to be sure.) My beliefs, my deeper understanding, are better than the passions of my angry heart.
Let the infernalists not say we universalists are naïve. This accusation seems to be the position of N.T. Wright in his chapter on hell in Surprised by Hope. This is, on the whole, a very good book, by the way. But his defense of infernalism is pablum. Perhaps I will blog about this at a later date.
I was inspired to write this short post while outraged by some of the latest fascist shenanigans of Trump followers, and my apocalyptic side was triggered quite violently. Let these murderers of the truth be sent screaming hysterical and naked into the fiery pit, says one side of me–but it shall not be forever—says the better part. God shall have them all at his side, eventually, and eternally, whether I want it so or not.
How Christianity tears a believer apart!
I’m not going to undertake here a thorough refutation of the free will defense of infernalism, but just present a few thoughts.
The free will defense of infernalism states that in order for humans to truly love and be loved, we must have free will. In order for us to be more than robots, we must have the ability to choose freely whether to love God. And therefore, if we truly are free, some of us may well choose to reject God, and that must mean we get hell. C.S. Lewis said, “some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot” (“The Shocking Alternative” from Mere Christianity).
But what is seldom pointed out is that if free will is so important to our value in the eyes of God and to our eternal fate, why does each of us have so little of it? I do not argue that we have no free will, simply that our free will is only partial, incomplete. I consider it a fairly obvious axiomatic truth that we have some power of choice, at least. Others may disagree with me and say free will is entirely illusory, but if they are right, everything I or they say on the matter is moot anyway: I have no choice over what I am saying here, and you have no choice how or whether to respond to it. There is no point worrying about the matter. (However, if those who say we have no free will are right, we have no choice anyway whether we worry about these things or not, and so on.)
That being said, how much free will do we have? It seems each and every one of us has chosen sin to the point where we deserve perdition and can avoid it only by the grace of God. It seems to be a standard theological claim that without the resurrection and grace of Christ, we’d all go to hell, and we’d all deserve it.
Funny how literally billions of people, all quite free, just happen to fail to make the right choice. If you gave an exam to billions of students and every last one failed, you might come to the reasonable conclusion the exam was unfair. (On the other hand, if we really do want to blame the billions of students instead, keep in mind the professor who wrote the exam up is the same one who tried to teach them in the first place. We would have reason to question his competence.) In fact, we are told not only that it is impossible for us to be sinless by our own efforts, but that it is the sin of pride to see it otherwise.
In other words, we are all inevitably damned by our own free will.
“For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Indeed, I believe this quotation to be true. And if we were able to count up all our various crimes we might each of us truly say, “I might have sinned even more, but I chose not to; I might have sinned much less, but I chose not to,” and so on. I do not understand sin as sin in the most serious sense without the concept of free will. One might err in a state of unfreedom, but one must have some freedom to truly sin. But the record would seem to indicate that without exception we all freely choose to do what must make us deserving of damnation. (Of course, if we take up the idea instead that we are born deserving damnation because of the sins of distant ancestors, so much for the idea of free will. Clearly, we have no more freedom than robots after all, and the free will defense of hell falls.)
Either way, it seems this “free will” is a trap. Nor is this changed by the fact that any given sin of ours on any given occasion could have been avoided. It seems we all inevitably freely choose to sin from time to time (that is, if the sin is not inevitable on any given occasion, it will inevitably and frequently come nonetheless, and freely) and therefor become hell fodder.
The free will defense of hell tells us therefore that we need this free will in order to truly enter heaven, but that this same “free will” inevitably leads to us deserving the opposite.
Now, if we are in the midst of this paradox, that of inevitably freely choosing to sin, but we are told we still have enough free will to warrant our crimes serious enough to receive damnation, why might we not turn this on its head? Why not say that we shall all inevitably freely choose to accept the love, grace, and forgiveness God offers us and thereby be saved? C.S. Lewis and the infernalists object to this, but I don’t think they can do so without having to note that the same God who so cherishes our freedom in order to make meaningful eternal union with him possible, seems to have presented us in the meantime with a very strange sort of freedom indeed. When we are offered the grace of salvation we must be free to reject it or that grace is naught, it seems, but the same free will so necessary to our salvation earlier bound us powerlessly to be damned. We are forced to need salvation, but not forced to get it.
Let me put this another way. If we can claim we were free when we inevitably damned ourselves, why can we not be predestined (all of us) to receive salvation and say we accepted that in freedom also?
I said earlier that we must have freedom to truly sin. But is it not also the case that we must have as well unfreedom in order to sin? That is, must we not also be tempted to sin? And is not temptation, especially when we consider that it conflicts with our better impulses, a form of unfreedom? Who, being free from temptation, would choose to be tempted? Is the recovering alcoholic, torn between putting her life together and having another, potentially disastrous drink, more free that someone who just doesn’t want that drink at all? To be tempted is to have a will or desires divided against themselves, and this does not sound like freedom to me.
But this is where the story of Adam and Eve, quite frankly, screws us up. The way it is so often read leads us to think their fall into sin actually makes sense. They knew they should not eat the apple, but they were tempted, and fell. We all have this experience. But that is because we are free, but less than perfectly free. Would not a perfectly free Adam and Eve not be tempted to begin with? To understand their story, we would have to look at them through pre-lapsarian eyes, which is something we do not have (and hence, perhaps also a reason why Lewis could not imagine the creature he said he could not imagine).
In other words, sin, though real, does not make sense. And that is why hell does not make sense either, because it cannot exist without sin. (You may counter that if sin exists despite not making sense, hell might then exist anyway, but I would ask you on what basis. The existence of sin is experiential. On the other hand, many of us have suffered greatly, but I take it we have no direct evidence of the hell the infernalists are talking about.)
Alas, I feel as if there are further and more elusive developments to make on all this, but I must end here for now. There is something about philosophy and theology that always seems to avoid complete closure. This essay threatens to become a book. Indeed, one reason I blogged little until recently was my fear I could say nothing without saying everything, and that doing so was impossible anyway. But I then decided to accept the necessary lack of thoroughness needed to get anything done. Better a series of imperfect blog posts than that handful of long and perfect articles that are never written.
The worst temptation, and that to which many monks succumb early in their lives, and by which they remain defeated, is simply to give up asking and seeking. To leave everything to the superiors in this life and to God in the next – a hope which may in fact be nothing but a veiled despair, a refusal to live. And it is not Christian to despair of the present, merely putting off hope into the future. There is also a very essential hope that belongs in the present, and is based on the nearness of the hidden God, and of His Spirit, in the present. What future can make sense without this present hope?
Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1965). (Image Books edition, 1968, page 184)
Hope in the present! What a strange yet enticing concept. When we think of hope, we think inevitably about the future. When we live on the basis of hope too much, we begin to see that “hope is a beggar.” It is so much better than outright despair, but only a wan shadow of what we really want. To live on hope too much is to invite despair.
“Hope in the present.” One might water this down by thinking Merton simply meant hope in the very near future, but I don’t think that’s what he’s about. I think it has to do with a dimension of reality that is here now, but may not be clearly manifest to us, and perhaps in our looking at it that way, it does become clearer. Constantly we are told in our culture to “focus on the present”: take Eckhardt Tolle, for example. But perhaps what Merton is telling us here is not some ascetic cutting away of past and future to some infinitely narrow point called “the present.” What he promises here is something more rich and strange.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was no rhetorical question. Jesus did not know the answer. If those last words of Jesus were not asked for real, if they were just some show to say to an unappreciating world, “look how much I’m suffering for you!” then Jesus was never fully incarnated, never had the full deal of the shittiest elements of the human experience, which includes not understanding why suffering and injustice exist: he was merely slumming.
Both trees—the tree Adam and Eve ate from and the tree Jesus died on—are absurd. That is the whole point. It makes no sense that from a creation that was good in every respect a choice was made that brought sin and death into the world. It makes no sense that omnipotent God, the ground of all being, must suffer death for life to prevail. If we could make sense of evil, that would mean God had ordered a proper place for it in the creation, or that evil was a force outside his control and rivalling him. Christianity rejects both these positions.
Jesus did not die absurdly so we could make sense of our own pain. He embraced the darkness and absurdity that we also are in. His resurrection indicates there is an answer to his question, but we do not know what it is.
I know this is not a rational answer to the problem of evil. My point is that this side of the grave there isn’t such an answer even imaginable. But let me say that the cross and the Resurrection are grounds for faith in the unimaginable.