Christian Origins: Theology, Rhetoric and Community Book

A review of Chapter one only. It was pretty mind-blowing.

Chapter 1 deals with the problem of Evil which is always the Big One, and here we find a very remarkable interview with Peter Kreeft, Christian philosopher. Maybe for the first time I am beginning to really get an idea of the worldview of the thinking Christian. It's so alien. See what you think.

As you will know the problem was stated by Epicurus 300 years before Christ :



God may be all powerful and he may be Good but he cannot be both, because of the presence of evil. So, God could choose to prevent the birth of Hitler, because he could, but he didn't do that, so he's omnipotent but not good. Or, he wanted to prevent the birth of Hitler, but he couldn't, because he's not omnipotent.

Let me say that neither the author Lee Strobel nor Prof Kreeft spends any time contemplating that maybe God isn't good or loving. For them, the idea is unthinkable.

Kreeft's two ideas here are that suffering on Earth is short-term, and people who moan about it are just not seeing the big picture. But let the man himself explain:

If God's wisdom vastly exceeds ours… it is at least possible that a loving God could deliberately tolerate horrible things like starvation because he foresees that in the long run more people will be better and happier than if he miraculously intervened. That's at least intellectually possible….

It's at least possible that God is wise enough to foresee that we need some pain for reasons which we may not understand but which he foresees as being necessary to some eventual good. Therefore he's not being evil by allowing pain to exist.

The universe is a soul-making machine, and part of that process is learning, maturing, and growing through difficult and challenging and painful experiences. The point of our lives in this world isn't comfort, but training and preparation for eternity….suffering is compatible with God's love if it is medicinal, remedial, and necessary; that is, if we are very sick and desperately need a cure. And that's our situation.

Strobel puts the question : "But good people suffer just as much - or sometimes more- than the bad."

Kreeft floors him with a haymaker:

Well, the answer is that there are no good people.

And follows up by saying we should thank God for all the suffering we get to go through on Earth. :

In Heaven we will say to God "Thank you so much for this little pain I didn't understand at the time, and that little pain; these I now see were the most precious things in my life.

So - thank you God that Ted Bundy kidnapped, raped and killed my daughter then went back and violated her corpse. Thank you God that my mother has Alzheimers for ten years. Thank you God I and my whole family were killed in that earthquake although we didn't get much chance to learn much and grow and mature from that experience. Thank you God for female genital mutilation, that has helped millions of girls to learn and grow spiritually. Thank you God for Aids. Thank you…. Well, I think you get the picture. But this concept of Christianity (& I assume the other two monotheist faiths) clearly does imply this kind of (what I would describe as) inhuman version of reality. Kreeft pulls no punches:
Compared with knowing God eternally, compared to the intimacy with God that Scripture calls a spiritual marriage, nothing else counts. If the way through that is torture, well, torture is nothing compared with that.

So, there we have it. In many theology books I have read this question is simply pussyfooted around with. Nobody gets in your face like this guy Kreeft. My hat's off to him. You can clearly see the connection between his Christianity and the current jihadi version of Islam. Isis would 100% agree with Kreeft, except for the bit about Jesus which I have omitted from the above excerpts.
Now, just to be clear, I do of course think this point of view is deranged but it's coldly rigorous. It really does make its own sense. This life on Earth is nothing. Heaven is everything. Anything that gets us to Heaven is good. Suffering gets us to Heaven. Suffering is good. Evil is good.