_______
Author: Janet Sassi
Original Title: On God and Evil:
Philosopher-Priest Revisits an Age-Old Question
Original Publication Date: 21 Apr 2008
Originally Publishing Website: http://www.fordham.edu/campus_resources/public_affairs/inside_fordham/april_21_2008/in_focus_faculty_and/on_god_and_evil_phil_29584.asp
Brian Davies, O.P., Ph.D., is in the unusual position of being both a scholar who ponders the nature of God and a Catholic priest who belongs to the order of preachers, the Dominicans. You might say that the professor whose specialties are medieval philosophy and analytical philosophy of religion is ripe to give an “immersion” course in God—if such a thing existed.
In his eighth and latest book, The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil (Continuum Press, 2006), Father Davies tackled one of the questions central to the philosophy of religion: Does the presence of evil suggest the absence of God?
“Many contemporary philosophers would say that evil disproves God’s existence,” Father Davies said. “The idea is that to say that God exists, and to accept that evil exists, is a bit like saying that some circles are square—it’s impossible; there is a logical contradiction.”
Father Davies characterized such atheistic thinking as misguided.
“I argue that a discussion on the topic of God and evil is fruitless without going back to basic questions like, ‘Why believe in God in the first place?’” he said. “If there are good philosophical reasons for believing in God, then evil doesn’t disprove God’s existence,” he said.
He further took issue with those who believe that God has a hand in promoting certain evils in the world, or that God is morally culpable for the world’s ills.
“I want to reject the theistic and nontheistic discussions of God and evil that start from the presupposition that God is the sort of thing I am, a moral agent subject to duties and obligations,” he said. “If someone said, ‘Oh well, the tsunamis prove that God isn’t doing what he ought to do,’ I am going to describe that comment as very misguided since it does not make sense to suggest that God is subject to moral obligations.”
Father Davies’ own beliefs are rooted in the teachings of classical Christian philosophers, such as St. Augustine, St. Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas. As the eternal creator of the universe, God is “omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, perfectly actual,” he said. God is the cause of the existence of everything for as long as it exists, Father Davies explained.
“If we ask, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is there anything at all?’ fundamentally, that’s the God question,” he said. “Some philosophers reject that question. I have spent quite a lot of time defending that question, and I have tried to explain what could be true and false when it comes to what makes the difference between there being something and nothing.”
In a world that is created by God, what is evil? And is it something created by God, as, for example, cats are?
Father Davies described evil as the “absence of due good.” Due good is good that we as human beings expect to be there, but is missing, much like light is missing from a black hole. An indiscriminate murderer cannot be pure evil because, Father Davies pointed out, there is some good in the simple act of existence: To be at all is to be good. According to Father Davies, even the Devil is not all bad.
What makes someone or something evil or bad is the standard by which that person or thing is being judged—the context.
“You might say of Mother Theresa versus Anton Chigurth (the emotionless assassin in the 2008 Academy Award-winning movie, No Country For Old Men): good her, bad him. What’s the difference?” he asked.
“In the case of a really vicious human being, what you have is simply a human being like you and me who is not meeting a standard [of behavior]. If I suddenly embark on genocide, I won’t turn into something different. I’d just be a bad example of the kind of thing I am.”
“What you have is a really bad case of injustice, a behavior which offends against what we take to be essential to living well together.”
If, indeed, the existence of the universe and all souls in it is proof of the existence of God, and if evil is the “absence of good,” how does the average churchgoing person conceptualize a divinity that has been depicted over the ages in many forms—a man in a white robe, a hand reaching across a universal chasm, or even a face on a tortilla?
“You can’t envision God,” Father Davies said. The anthropomorphizing of God and the hypostatizing of evil are both philosophical mistakes and theological mistakes, he said. “According to Catholic thinkers from St. Augustine to the present, God is entirely simple. There are no metaphysical components to God. God is not an individual of a kind; he is not a member of a class; in fact, he is not part of any world. He’s the creator of the world in which we distinguish between things of kinds.”
Having edited more than 29 volumes of Outstanding Christian Thinkers for Continuum Press and other books on theology, Father Davies is no stranger to scholarly recognition. (He is, in fact, among a handful of Fordham professors listed in the online people’s resource, Wikipedia, with W. Norris Clarke, S.J. and Daniel Berrigan, S.J.) Additionally, Father Davies is the recipient of a 2007 Distinguished Teaching Award from his peers for his work in the classroom. Currently he teaches an introductory course on St. Thomas Aquinas.
Churchspeak: Missional
May 2, 2008
_______
Author: Rebecca Barnes
Original Title: What are missional churches?
Original Publication Date: 08 Apr 2008
Originally Publishing Website: http://www.churchcentral.com/nw/s/template/Article.html/id/24659
Ten years of describing the latest in church trends as missional and yet we still don’t know what that means. Maybe the term is intended to function that way. Perhaps the mystery is part of the charm.
J. Todd Billings, assistant professor of Reformed theology at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Mich., admitted the vagueness of the term, then took a stab at defining “missional” recently for Christianity Today.
“Some use missional to describe a church that rejects treating the gospel like a commodity for spiritual consumers; others frame it as a strategy for marketing the church and stimulating church growth. Some see the missional church as a refocusing on God’s action in the world rather than obsessing over individuals’ needs; others see it as an opportunity to ‘meet people where they are’ and reinvent the church for postmodern culture.” Billings writes.
Whatever the meaning, the term is plied with multiple definitions by people who prefer it to describe either their own church or the way their church should be.
Billings‘ broad definition of missional is, “… a sense that the church is not primarily about us, but about God’s mission.” In this definition he concurs with the work of Craig Van Gelder, whose book “Ministry of the Missional Church” I reviewed recently for Church Central.
Van Gelder is also a professor—currently of congregational mission at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minn., and a former professor at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Mich., and holds degrees from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and the University of Texas at Arlington. Maybe you’re beginning to think as I am that higher degrees are a requirement for comprehending this term missional.
Van Gelder categorizes churches as: corporate, established or missional. He further defines missional as a spiritual social community called to God’s mission in the world.
That seems as vague as ever.
Enter pastor and church consultant Barry Winders, whose self-published work entitled, “Finding the Missional Path,” may clarify missional by what it is not. Winders provides a concise and informative chart illustrating all the various ways churches can become distracted from their original mission—making disciples. See if any of these are familiar, either in your own institution, your house church, or in the congregations where you consult:
Missionary church – sees leaders as fundraisers and members as givers
Maintenance church – sees leaders as recruiters and members as clubbers
Seeker-sensitive church – sees leaders as presenters and motivators and members as seekers
Consumer church – sees leaders as producers and members as consumers
Church growth church – sees leaders as programmers, assimilators, analysts and members as participants
Activist church – sees leaders as catalysts and members as activists
I wish Winders had a correlative prescriptive chart for churches that are models to follow. I wish Van Gelder or Billings had more of a definition. Billings can only conclude by warning Christians that missional means about as many things as evangelical.
“With so many variant views, the term missional church now needs something like an FDA label: Warning: Contradictory and conflicting views of the church inside,” Billings writes.
Van Gelder ends up defining missional as differing from other church growth and health trends such as purpose-driven or emergent, because it is more than a strategy to help struggling churches. Instead, he writes that missional is a community led by the Spirit of God. While that definition includes more types of churches than it excludes, it informs clearly on why this term missional is so nebulous and yet so attractive at the same time. I mean every healthy church wants to be a part of the Spirit of God’s work in the world. And the Spirit is notoriously difficult to pin down in something as small as a working definition.
