The End of Theodicy - Part I

In an effort to understand why the "God problem" remains a constant task (as shown in his most recent New Yorker review ) for James Wood, Fr. Neuhaus describes him as the product of the "narrow escape syndrome." In explanation, Neuhaus says:

He was reared in a conservative Christian home, has moved beyond that, and is palpably fearful of being drawn back into the faith from which he has narrowly escaped.

That seems to me too simple a characterization. Wood may indeed fear being drawn back (spiritually) into the "conservative Christian home" against which he rebelled in his youth, but it does not seem to me that such a fear is based on the possibility that he might at the same time be drawn back to faith; it is based on the fact that to make such a return might entail a danger far greater than losing faith.

Throughout his "atheism" Wood has humbly maintained and defended (see his reception of Sam Harris) a nostalgia for a faith the roots of which were, in his own life, "relatively frail." I believe it is exactly because he knows he "never really possessed" faith that he fears (if Neuhaus is right to use the word) a return to his beginning. At the time of his writing, what he has, though it is not faith, is, at least, something. And this thought begins to demarcate Wood's particular contribution to "the task of thinking about God" - what is most dangerous of all for Wood is not, as with Christopher Hitchens, to be under the sway of belief, but rather, to usurp the strange and elusive power of "justification" and of theodicy and not be wrong. In other words, Wood does not recoil from the possibility that one might say, "I believe!" - he recoils from the possibility that those who profess to be "justified" and claim to know "God's plan" are not wrong about faith.

Wood makes this point better in his review when he distinguishes atheism from what he calls "wounded theism":

One of the weaknesses of otherwise useful atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris is that, lacking nostalgia for lost belief, they also lack the power to imagine why anyone would ever have professed it.

What he is saying is this: "Do not mistake Ehrman (or me!) for a run-of-the-mill atheist fearing the betrayal of logic, reason, evolution, science. I am something else. I know people have believed. Though I do not believe, I either remember or can imagine what it is like - and it is fascinating."

In spite of this genuine difference, there is something that could - if it were the last word on faith - make Wood say, as Hitchens has said many times, "I don't want it." Wood sets the stage:

Union University, in Jackson, Tennessee, might profit from intense classes in theodicy. “God protected this campus,” one of the students there said, because no one was killed in the tornadoes that devastated parts of Tennessee on February 5th. Since ordinary Tennesseans were killed elsewhere that night, the logic of such shamanism is that God either did not or could not protect those unfortunates from something that the state’s governor once likened to “the wrath of God.”

Wounded theism may well be built up by the apparent inexorability of God (and a teenage Wood's 'pro' and 'con' list), but what sustains it is the thought that there might be both this world and a God who does listen. To return to Neuhaus's terminology, what Wood has "narrowly escaped" is not belief itself, but rather the kind of belief that is privy to the theodicy indicated above.

And so I wonder whether Neuhaus is right to suggest that Wood might find something new and difficult - a preparation for faith - in this quotation from David Bentley Hart’s book, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?

Every free act—even the act of hating God—arises from and is sustained by a more original love of God. It is impossible to desire anything without implicitly desiring the infinite source of all things; even the desire of the suicide for the peace of oblivion is born of a love of self—however tragically distorted it has become—that is itself born of a deeper love for the God from whom the self comes and to whom the self is called. . . .

I wonder, first of all, because one of the salient moments of Wood's review is what he decides at the end of his early debate with himself about the existence of God -

I decided that if God existed, which I strongly doubted, then this entity was neither describable nor cherishable but was a vaporous, quite possibly malign force at the horizon of the sayable.

There are two "sentiments" here, different from the basic doubt - the ineffability of God and the essential malignancy of any god that would be a god of this "suffering" world. It must be admitted that the Hart quotation does speak to both these sentiments, but the question remains: in its speaking, how does it sound? For James Wood, like "theological scholastics." However true it may be, in the end, that the love of God is the source of all things - to say it is not the same as to say the truth of it (to let another truly hear it). This is by no means meant to suggest that theologians and people of faith ought to bear all the burden of meaning, or that they should stop speaking the language of "faith and reason." It is, instead, to wonder at the different sounds of faith.

As a conclusion, I refer readers to the remarkable final paragraph of David Tye's post - The Gods Are Here - at Life's Private Book. If it is not entirely relevant to what is written above, it at least makes clearer to me why I continue to think about these words of James Wood: "I'll go and sit in a cathedral."