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Where was God? An interview with David Bentley Hart.

Article Excerpt
DAVID HART'S 2003 book The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans) was widely touted as a theological tour de force. He offers in that book a powerful and deeply learned statement of Christian truth that draws on the Eastern Orthodox tradition while engaging modern and postmodern critics of Christianity. After the tsunami in 2004 he wrote several commentaries in response to what he regarded as unhelpful attempts to understand that catastrophe theologically. His reflections were expanded in a book, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Eerdmans). Hart, who next year will be a visiting professor at Providence College, spoke with us about evil and its place in the world that God created and loves.

It's often said that three claims of the Christian tradition--"God is omnipotent," "God is love" and "Evil exists'--present a logical contradiction. One of the claims has to be revised. Do you agree?

If by "evil exists" you mean that evil possesses a real substance of its own, and that it therefore exists in the way goodness exists (or, for that matter, a tree, a rabbit, an idea or a dream exists), in point of fact Christian tradition has usually denied this quite forcibly. Patristic and medieval thought (drawing, admittedly, on Platonic precedent) defined evil as a privation of the good: a purely parasitic and shadowy reality, a contamination or disease or absence, but not a real thing in itself. This, incidentally, is a logically necessary claim if one understands goodness and being as flowing alike from the very nature of God and coinciding in him as one infinite life.

That said, there surely is no contradiction between God's omnipotent goodness and the reality of evil. It may seem somewhat trite to invoke the freedom of creation as part of the works and ends of divine love, or to argue that the highest good of the creature--divinizing union with God in love--requires a realm of "secondary causality" in which the rational wills of God's creatures are at liberty; nonetheless, whether the traditional explanations of how sin and death have been set loose in the world satisfy one or not, they certainly...

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