"God Makes Himself Scarce"

“'THE great tragedy of science,' as Victorian biologist Thomas Huxley observed, is 'the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact'. He was talking about the origins of life, but scientists of all stripes would have agreed – perhaps more today than ever."*

Huxley also might as well have been talking about theology or, more specifically, about Theodicy, which F Buechner addresses in his following essay: 

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God Makes Himself Scarce WHEN JESUS WEPT over the dead body of his friend Lazarus, many things seem to have been at work in him, and there seem to have been many levels to his grief. He wept because his friend was dead and he had loved him. Beneath that he wept because, as Mary and Martha both tactlessly reminded him, if he had only been present, Lazarus needn't have died, and he was not present. Beneath that, he wept perhaps because if only God had been present, then too Lazarus needn't have died, and God was not present either, at least not in the way and to the degree that he was needed. Then, beneath even that, it is as if his grief goes so deep that it is for the whole world that Jesus is weeping and the tragedy of the human condition, which is to live in a world where again and again God is not present, at least not in the way and to the degree that man needs him. Jesus sheds his tears at the visible absence of God in the world where the good and bad alike go down to defeat and death. He sheds his tears at the audible silence of God at those moments especially when a word from him would mean the difference between life and death, or at the deafness of men which prevents their hearing him, the blindness of men which prevents even Jesus himself as a man from seeing him to the extent that at the moment of all moments when he needs him most he cries out his Eloi Eloi, which is a cry so dark that of the four evangelists, only two of them have the stomach to record it as the last word he spoke while he still had a human mouth to speak with. Jesus wept, we all weep, because even when man is good, even when he is Jesus, God makes himself scarce for reasons that no theodicy has ever fathomed.  -Originally published in Telling the Truth ++++++++++++++++++ The fact that "no theodicy has ever fathomed" is due to theologians' failure to carry their question into a process of logic. Which may be intentional, because of the prospect, as Huxley suggests in the context noted above, of "slaying a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact". I'll give it a try. The theodicy question:  "If God is all powerful and all loving, why is there suffering in the world?" A biblical answer may be the Genesis 3 etiology that there is suffering because we were disobedient, and so were turned out of mythical paradise into life as nature lays it on us. But I'll try something different. Converted to a process of shaky logic: Premise: If God is all powerful and all loving, there is no suffering in the world. Premise: There is suffering in the world. Conclusion: God is not all powerful and all loving. Perhaps then we have failed to apprehend God as God evolvingly reveals God's self to us? The logic is shaky at least in that we may not all agree on the first premise. However, the apparent ugliness of the conclusion is not necessarily the end of it. Dealing with the death of his beloved son from progeria, Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote that if he must choose between a God who is all powerful and a God who is all loving, he'd choose a God who is all loving. How do you feel about that? Can we theologize that, in our Experience through God in Jesus, God is all loving, but that in general, God has limited God's exercise of divine power to the laws of Creation, of Nature?    It ties into Hals' thesis** that God's sole characteristic is Grace, lovingkindness, unconditional love.  But is the objective of theological discourse to reveal a God whose characteristics we choose, such as love or power; or a God whose Being we Experience? Our Anglican theological process is said to be based on Scripture, Reason, and Tradition. Perhaps we need to add Experience to our theological discourse? IDK. Maybe not: the Galileo affair witnesses that the Church has been too defensive of its Tradition to evolve with Creation's evolving revelation of herself to us. RSF&PTL T+ PS, after several iterations of this contemplation of theodicy, I think I'll leave it alone now. It's still not satisfactory to me, but I'll move on. TW+ 29Apr2021 *Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229751-700-better-to-see-the-beautiful-ugly-truth-of-the-cosmos/#ixzz6tKgR6OUp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/galileo-is-accused-of-heresy https://www.historyanswers.co.uk/people-politics/the-real-wakanda-inside-the-lost-city-of-benin/ https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-galileo-controversy **Hals, Ronald M, Grace and Faith in the Old Testament, Augsburg 1980