Egon Schiele's early 20th century version of the classical motif 'Death and the Maiden'
First, there was the issue of the extreme nearness of “heaven.” Kathryn noted that she’d not heard this before, and most of us seemed to agree that it was both fairly new, but also an appealing idea that the atmosphere around us is already part of heaven.
Second, John registered some surprise that the possibility of bad things happening in life was framed in this chapter as an issue of trust, rather than an issue of “theodicy.”
Then, Jeannine raised a challenge to the prayer quoted on p. 66, which contained the plea to God to “help us . . . to see that in this evil there is some purpose.” Since the context was the imminent death of the author’s very young daughter, Jeannine questioned the use of the term “evil.” How can death be an “evil,” when death is natural, inevitable, part of life, and not something to assign blame to anyone for?
This led to a vocal discussion of the status of death, and its connection with evil, both in the Christian tradition, the tradition of western humanistic thought, and in our contemporary minds. Several of us noted that death is, in many circumstances, desirable as a release from pain and suffering, or even extreme old age and the loneliness that accompanies being the lone survivor of a generation or family. Along with this is the sense that death is a transition to something else, like a better life, a different stage of life, or the realization of the immortality of the soul. John strongly questions the fixation on terminology like “evil,” “bad,” and other evaluative categorical terms anyway, and questions what would happen if we began to withdraw energy from seeing these as absolute designations, and instead recognized them as value assignments we make, for whatever reasons, relative to our preferences and conditions.
Jeannine and Arricka synopsized a great old film, On Borrowed Time, that dramatizes the point of the necessity and, ultimately, the acceptability of death in the context of a world of pain, disease, and old age.
Heather — insisting that she was speaking for the classical tradition, despite being “an outlier” in the class — countered that death is definitely an evil, has long been regarded as such, and has been treated both philosophically and theologically as a radical threat to every human value for centuries. (At which point, John reminded us, in light of his recent reading of The Great Emergence by Phyllis Tickle, that paradigms do shift every few centuries, and we are in the midst of such a shift at present.) The reason we are even close to being able to think of death as something other than a radical evil is that we regard it from the standpoint of people whose victory over death has been won by Jesus Christ in the event of the resurrection. But then, Heather doesn’t think “evil” implies the operation of malicious intent; she was thinking of the category of “natural evil,” which includes things like sickness and pain as well as death and decay.
Paul pointed out that pain isn’t always a bad (i.e., dysfunctional) thing, either. A lot of negative consequences come from people trying to avoid some kinds of pain, like the pain of waiting for something, or the pain of learning something new, or the pain of exercising. Several people reminded us that pain physically is functional, keeps bodies from being injured worse than they might be, etc. Plus, as Kathryn reminded us, if we didn’t have pain, we wouldn’t have joy. And Linda added that the knowledge of death is a motivating factor: since we’re not immortal, we get busy and try to make the most of the limited amount of time we have.
Great class!
We agreed that we would stay on Chapter 3 for Sunday, October 31, because there’s more to talk about in there (like “Father” language for God), and because some of us still need to catch up in the reading.
Tags: death, evil, God, Good and Beautiful God, heaven, theodicy, trust
