Transcript
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: -- back, and we hope you've had a very nice break, or snack -- whatever you've had. In this session, Dr. Houston will be talking about creation and theodicy -- that's "theodicy," not "the Odyssey" -- and probably covering one of the most interesting and at the same time the most puzzling paradoxes of the Christian belief -- that is, how does a God who is infinitely
loving and infinitely good allow evil in the world today? And probably even a more puzzling question: how can we -- or if we can call nature good, in an impersonal world of struggle, decay, and death. Before we start, I'd like to say a few words, or make a few comments on the lectures so far. One is on the spelling of the word "aetiology" -- if you're a barbarian
American, as I am, you could also spell it without the "a", just "et". Don't worry -- unless you're writing a paper for Dr. Houston, you could do it that way for anyone else. I think it would be of interest to notice that in earlier lectures, Dr. Houston gave biblical references to where the term "fable" and "myth" was used. Most of those references
come out of the epistles to Timothy and the epistles to Titus. It's interesting to notice that Paul is explicitly asking Timothy and Titus to guard against these false teachings, teachings of false -- people who claim to be prophets, or false teachers. So what we could conclude from this is that the truth that was originally revealed to Paul and revealed to the eyewitnesses who saw the resurrection and the death of Christ,
was definitely attempted to remain sanctified as inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Thirdly, if one looks at I Peter -- this is to the example of "days", and what does "a day" mean in the creation narrative -- according to the epistle of Peter, he states that, "To God, a day is 1,000 years, and 1,000 years is a day," and
you'll be seeing references to what a day is all through the Bible. And I just bring this up state that this concept of a day can be taken in many different lights, depending on the section of the Bible -- the section of the Holy Word that you could read. So, I think I've said enough. Dr. Houston's a much more interesting speaker, and I think I'll let him take the podium now.
HOUSTON: Well, I'm sure some of you will be disappointed if we don't have more time for discussion, so I hope that following this -- and also in our last session -- that those of you who have not yet spoken and want to raise any issues that you will feel free to do so. Well, we are going to consider now the issue of creation and evil. And, of course, this does arise out of what we were saying in our last talk, that the daily exercise of wisdom by biblical man
has reflected upon life that is lived in a rational world, that is dependable, that is morally structured, that is good. And how else, then, can wisdom cope if reality is not good, if it is only irrational, and chaotic, and unstructured? And so, in the history of mankind, there have been many answers given to this fundamental question concerning the intrusion
of evil. There are those who have argued that good and evil are both inbuilt into the nature of life. So that wisdom is the exercise of distinguishing between and inbuilt good and an inbuilt evil. And indeed we find that those who accept this dualistic system will even argue that evil is as much good as good is good. And that just as there is this
duality of night and day -- both are required -- so they would argue, both good and evil are required as well. Others refuse to recognize evil to be evil in any absolute sense. And we know that in some faiths, like Christian Science, evil itself is solved by not taking evil seriously. And so it's not in dualistic thinking, and it's not in the denial
of the reality of evil that there is any theodicy. There is no problem about evil in these systems of thought. Theodicy can only develop, really, within Christian thought. And it develops within Christian thought precisely because it has to grapple with the justification of a good God who has created a good creation, and yet one in which evil occurs. And so theodicy is where, on the one hand,
the goodness of God, and on the other hand, the evilness of evil, are both taken seriously. And unless we take them both seriously, then of course there is no theodic problem. It's only then, in such a context, that evil is a moral scandal -- that it is non-intelligible. And as you know, the dilemma of theodicy has been developed by what is called "Hume's fork",
his famous argument that, "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is benevolent. Is he both willing and able? Whence, then, is evil?" And of course, as we've seen, if evil is not taken seriously, it's not an issue. But if God is taken seriously -- if evil is taken seriously -- then it becomes
an acute problem. One of the things that is commonly argued today in secular thought is that, since man is only an animal -- albeit a very intelligent animal -- the problem of evil has been exaggerated. Indeed, it is argued, it stems from man's ability to walk upright, to put his head in the clouds, and to deny his animal nature by thinking he is some kind of god,
some kind of special creation. And you'll find that many neurophysiologists argue that man has inherited a reptilian brain, to which have been added two subsequent older and newer mammalian brains. And it's the interaction of their neural pathways that explain his evil or violent tendencies. You'll find that, in a Life production on the nature of violence,
this is what is spelled out and described neurologically. Man, then -- it is argued -- has an inadequate brain to cope with his false pretensions to god-like powers. So it is suggested that the greatest evil and misery in human affairs arises not because men are such rats, but precisely because they tried to make the world reflect back on an image of themselves that isn't rat-like -- that man's quest for absolute truth,
for goodness and justice, are the denial of man's non-animality -- animality. And so, such a quest is impossible, because man is merely an animal, and none of these absolutes is possible in a world of disease and finitude, chaos and (inaudible) and death. And so it's man's unmeasured ambitions to behave as gods, or to fix the blame of evil
on others, that undermines man's relationship with man. So the solution, says the man in the street today, to this kind of common philosophy is that all man needs to do is to recognize that he is only an animal and that evil is a primordial reality of the world, and things will remain much better if we recognize these two things. Well, of course, such a philosophy of the man in the street
is an amalgam of trends which goes back to many different things. So before we go any further, we really ought to map out what are the various interpretations of evil. And basically, there are three which lie behind this kind of man-in-the-street common sensical viewpoint: dualism, monism, and naturalism. Let's look at these in turn.
In dualism, evil is rationalized. And it's made intelligible because evil is caused by one of the two constituents of reality. Matter, that finite existence -- says a dualist -- is composed of a mixture of matter and form, physical and spiritual, mortal and immortal. And so, evil is inextricably mixed up with good. And it is necessary, says the dualist,
to unscramble the mixture. Just as in the past we had this platonic desire of the release of the immortal soul from the prison house of the body. To be finite is to be subject to evil. To escape is to desire the good. And of course, it was this system that has penetrated and impregnated so much of western civilization from the Greeks. Some thinkers, like
Plotinus, believe that the origin of evil for mankind arose when Adam and Eve fell into a physical state of mortality. Others like the Manichaes, to whom Augustine at one time gave obeisance, believed that the body and the soul always had been enemies of each other. And so a hymn of the Manichaen hymn-book declares, "I have known my soul, and the body that lies upon it,
that they have been enemies since the creation of the world." And so when Augustine began to be emancipated from this Manichaeistic thinking, that he said that the attraction that the Manichaes had for him was that they could intelligently ask and answer where sin came from. It was a rationalistic approach that appealed to him. They were uncompromising
rationalists concerning the origin of evil. So says Augustine: "So from that preaching I gathered an enthusiasm for religious controversy, and from this I daily grew to love the Manichaes more and more. So it came about that, to a surprising extent, I came to agree with everything they said, not because I knew any better, but because I wanted it to be true." The rationalism of the Manichaes was something that Augustine tells us
attracted him to this kind of thinking. And it's typical, of course, of gnostic philosophy, of those who desire a kind of esoteric knowing, that it is so intrinsically dualistic. We find in Plato, likewise, this dualistic viewpoint. But of course the dualistic viewpoint really deals with a limited God.
God is limited by the primordiality of evil. He's not an omnipotent God. He's not sovereign God. He's not transcendent in his world. And so it's certainly not a biblical view of God at all. So we turn from dualism to a second interpretation of evil, and that is monism or pantheism, because it's the same thing.
And in monism, all is in all. So that all things are identical with God. Creatures are not made out of matter, as the dualist would argue, but creatures are made out of God, is the monistic view. And so to the monistic view, evil is accountable with its association with finiteness,
with what the Hindu thought calls "karma." And evil is but the experience of "I" and "mine" as a finite center that is ignorant of its identity with the whole. And so evil disappears gradually as finitude progressively disappears, and evil is disposed with when the individual is absorbed into the all -- into the one.
And so, in pantheism -- and this is in very sharp contrast to the specifity [sic] and to the particularity that we have of biblical creation -- pantheism sees that all individual things are illusionary. The only real is the all. The illusionary is individual. And while pantheism argues that deep down man has the divine within him, Christian faith sees that deep down man is a rebel
against God -- that he's alienated from God. And of course, what lies behind pantheism is its utter confusion between the creator and the creature. It's incompatible with the otherness of God -- with the holiness of God -- with the biblical God of creation. And so, in the biblical view, the fall -- the fall of man -- is man estranged from God. In pantheism,
the fall is creation itself. The fall is the origination of concrete, particular individuals within space and time. It's the fall from the unity and the changelessness of the one. And so we see there an incompatibility between the pantheistic view. And you can see how little seriously evil is recognized within this.
Then thirdly, there's naturalism. And naturalism is certainly a more rationalistic way of looking at evil than monism, but both of these systems do not really face the issue of whether the ultimate life force is malevolent or benevolent. For according to naturalism, creaturely existence is the product of only natural causes -- without purpose, without direction.
And so evil, according to the naturalist, is what finite creatures can expect to face in the presence of the powerful and the blind forces which confront and which buffet mankind. So only when naturalism can be appealed to directly or indirectly does it avoid the conclusion of its pessimism.
The naturalistic temper, of course, does deny the reality of the spiritual dimension of life. It views them only in terms of being natural processes. And it may surprise you to realize that naturalism, which we think of as a very nineteenth century phenomenon, is a phenomenon which has occurred many times in the recrudescences of thought. We find it
in its -- one of its most overt forms, in the sixth century B.C. in the [Kavaka?] system in India. And various forms of naturalism have arisen within Hinduism. And certainly, it's typical that we find it associated within classical thought. Stoical thinking was naturalistic thinking. So naturalism has a long history in the mind and spirit of man.
But it's in modern times that perhaps naturalism has reached a high point, with the optimism of man's abilities in science and technology, and which flourishes in the milieu of human confidence as spiritual self-sufficiency. And so I think that we could trace the ups and downs of naturalism in the human spirit, in the human mind, according to those periods of stability, those periods of optimism
of the human spirit. And so, certainly, we find that in Eastern thinking that naturalism is identifiable with periods of prosperity -- periods of security and stability. But certainly, naturalism does not give us any real understanding of the origin and the problem of evil. Now, I think what also helps us -- not only to recognize
these contemporary perspectives, which have long roots in the spirit of man -- these three that we've mentioned -- but it's useful, I think, this afternoon, to look at some of the ancient theologies of the Near Eastern world, concerning their understanding of evil and chaos, in order to see how it relates to their cosmology -- we have
already touched upon that in our last talk. And if we were to contrast, as we have already touched on, the comparison between the Egyptian cosmology and the Babylonian cosmology, I think the differences between what we might call Egyptian serenity and Babylonian liturgical renewal, because whereas one is secure, the other is very insecure. And, of course, I speak here as a geographer. I think the contrast
between the Nile -- the monsoonal regime that provides like clockwork the mechanism for the flooding of the lower Nile in the proper season, and the rhythm which was so assured from year to year of the rise and fall of the river -- is in sharp contrast to the uncertainty of the river floor of the Tigris-Euphrates. For one thing, these two rivers have their headstreams in two different climatic regimes, and for another
the floods arise in time which is really not so conducive to the growing season of the crops, on the onset of the hot summer and the high evapero-transfer rates of that period. And so, generally speaking, we find that the serenity and security of the one, in its climactic rhythm, was really back of a great deal of the understanding of reality of the Egyptian mind. In this environment,
that we have called the prototype of the technological society, we find that the Bible makes allusion to this. God tells the people of Israel that he's bringing them out of the land of Egypt, "where thou waterest the land with thy foot." The shaduf bucket is the symbol of mechanism -- of the mechanistic universe -- of the technological society -- that belongs to the land of Egypt. And of course, the Israelite
was going to be brought into a land where the rain comes from Heaven, where God in His mercy is the source of it, and where they're thrown back upon their faith in the Almighty, and not upon their faith in their ingenuity. That the Egyptian has such profound awareness of the serenity of his environment is, I think, to be seen from the fact that his orientation in the physical universe was not, of course, as we would have it today in terms of the magnetic compass,
so that his primary orientation was the South. It was there that the Nile rose. And the word "face" is also the word for "south". So his facial orientation was to the source of blessing -- to the Nile. The North was also identifiable with the phrase for the back of the head. And so that, again, gives you some idea of the primary cosmic
orientation of the Egyptian spirit and mind. The rise of the sun was the magnification of creation, so one thinks of the East -- of the sunrise -- as the source of life. One thinks of the sunset as the source of death. And so, between these two cardinal axes of North-South and East-West, the Egyptian had his phases
of life and reality. And the sun god, Atum, expressed the beginning of life, and yet at the same time, there was the awareness that Osiris, the river god, is also the source of life. And so between the symbolism of the sun and the river -- as indeed in the orientation that these presented -- there was a marked serenity and structure to the realities of life in Egypt. Another
thing that we find that brings out the environmental significance of reality for the Egyptian was the -- just as helix, in the flood season, will stand above the floodwaters of the Nile, so the creation helic, whether it be at Heliopolis or Hermopolis or any of the other pyramidal sites, was to them where the creator first appeared. So that this helic theology
of Egyptian thought gives us an understanding of the sacred importance of the pyramids that were likewise those points of the promise of new life, where there was no firm dividing line between the gods and humanity. Indeed the gods are very human, and the creative principle of Ptah -- P-T-A-H -- that operates through mankind, operates
in such a way that man has this divine purpose within him, of a conceptive heart that thinks, and of a creative tongue that commands. And the pharaoh is himself a god, acting as the representative of the gods of the land. And so we find that in Egyptian theology, there's a very strong sense of symmetrical balance
between the realities of the environment, and also in the symmetry between the world of the gods and the world of man, and likewise as symmetry that is dualistic in its conception of good and evil. For we find in the divine the traits of both graciousness and terror -- of a rule that is both nurture and tyranny. So when the Old Testament speaks
of the wisdom of the Egyptians, it speaks really of a self-contained system of thought that it stable, that is self-confident, that is self-sufficient. And as we see the funerary symbolism of the pyramids, we find there an awareness of life that really is optimistic, humorous, hedonistic, carefree. I think that one finds a very close correlation between the exercise
of humor and the exercise of structure, because if everything is incongruous, then there are no congruities -- there is no place for humor. But in a structured world, you can exercise the awareness of incongruity besides congruity. And so, just as the medieval society was very humorous, and the professional clown was a very important member of that society, so it's obvious that the Egyptian world too was a world in its structure that was aware of the importance of humor.
It was a world that was free from anxiety, but it was a world that was apathetic to great spiritual exploration. The golden age of Egyptian thought lay in the past, and as such, it was pragmatic and materialistic. Easy pleasure, many songs, in bright sunlight predisposed the Egyptians to live as technically and superficially as many of our contemporaries
do today. And the serenity of its people have therefore given us no literature -- no great literature concerning the problem of evil. Theodicy is not really a trait of the Egyptian mentality. Now, in contrast, in the second model that we have of the Babylonian ritual vision of the world, here we find the antithesis. Here we find insecurity. Not only was there the hydrological
insecurity of the rivers, the uncertainty of their regimes, the unpredictability of their floods, but therefore also there was no pharaonic control -- the king was never confused with the gods. He was very human, and his coronation had to take place every spring, to reinforce in liturgy the attempt to overcome the principles of the chaotic -- the realm of the chaotic -- and bring order once more into the land.
And so the king was coronated every spring. It was a tedious business. His precariousness was worse than members of Congress, because at least he's got two years, but a Babylonian king only had one year. And he had to make sure that the gods had been placated, that this minefield of the divine had been explored carefully, and that he hadn't triggered off any bombs of jealousy among the gods in the course of his annual rule. So
the whole atmosphere that we find in Babylonian thinking is really just the opposite of the Egyptian life. And so it's a life that is insecure, self-despairing, distrusting, with divine rulers that are rivaling each other, and with human rulers that are hoping that somehow they will survive in the confrontations of the jealousies of the gods. Cosmic order therefore, unlike
the Egyptian, could never be taken for granted. And so, creation itself was celebrated annually at the spring equinox as a ritual of appeasement to the fickleness of the divine. There was no (inaudible), no justice, no creation principle, as there was in the Egyptian world. And I think what is of profound importance in this model is that pivotal and forming the foundation to the whole system was the primordiality
of evil. If one asks, "What lay in the beginning?" "In the beginning evil existed," is really the primary affirmation that can be made of Babylonian theology. We mentioned already how that the creation of the world took place from the murder of the slain god Tiamat, split in two to form heaven and earth. It was again out of violence that man was created, from the
slain blood of a murdered god. And the whole principle of maintaining oneself on top of things was that by more violence, one would seek to overcome violence. By the use of evil, one sought to overcome the evil that was already there. Man, as a slave of the gods, was himself
prone to the jealousy of the gods in the utilization of his service. And whereas, as we've seen, the Sabbath was in the Scripture the symbol of God's delight in man and his fellowship with man, and that this holy day was a day when man could enjoy God and rest in the security of the goodness of God, the Babylonians knew about a Sabbath on the fourth -- on the seventh,
and the fourteenth, and the twenty-first, and the twenty-eighth day of the year -- of the month -- and these were days associated with lunar phases. But they were days of doom. They were days of the fates. And one ceased from any effort on the Sabbath, because if was unlucky to work. It was because one shivered in the uncertainty of the fates and what they might decree
during these phases of the moon's tyranny over the fatefulness of life. And so, we find the antithesis of what the [sabatu?] meant for the Babylonians as the Sabbath meant so differently for the Hebrew. And what of course made the thing impossible was that the gods, themselves being evil, being jealous,
being subject to all the fickleness, and all the corruption of human nature, meant that there was no ultimate appeal to a distinction of right and wrong -- of good and evil. And that really the problem of man was that he was only too small and too limited to deal with the cosmic bullies that faced him at every turn, so that all that he could hope for was the fickle chance
event that one of the gods might turn out to be his patron at the right moment when he was being chased by the others. And so, we find that in the literature that deals with theodicy there is nothing but despair. One of the poems that's famous is called "The Dialogue of Pessimism," and it's a dialogue between the master and his slave. And the spirit of cynicism and of the relativism of all values is clearly enumerated.
It's all one in the end, whether one does good or does evil. None will remember the choice in the times to come. Here, for example, is an excerpt from the end of the poem: "Slave, agree with me. Yes, my lord, yes. Now then, what is good? To break my neck and thy neck? To fall into the river? That is good." So really, the ultimate is suicide.
The only thing that man has left in his sovereignty is to destroy himself. All is vanity. There is only one good that is left to man, and that is his ability to die. And of course, we know this is what happened. The Babylonian society died, dissolved by its own intrinsic anxieties that were based upon this insecure theology of creation, because in the beginning, there was evil. Now we turn to
a third model of evil. What we might call the Greek tragic vision of the cosmos. The more we know about the origin of Babylonian literature, and we find epics like that of king Gilgamesh, who is known to have been a king of Uruk about 2700 B.C.,
indicate that the epic tragedy is a literary genre that has long roots in the ancient Near East, and that long before the rise of Greek tragedy, the Babylonians were past masters of the tragic element of life. And what we mean, of course, by the "tragic element of life" is that man is only able to momentarily stop the juggernaut of fate,
by the sovereignty of his limited will. So that, for example, it may be that momentarily he can throw a defiance to the heavens, and he can shout out his challenge with his fleeting breath against the inevitable. But the tragic is that inevitably he will be crushed, and that ultimately he will be destroyed. And so the epic quality is that he is only able to do so momentarily.
We know that Greek ships plied between [Almina?] and Tarshish, and were in contact with the Assyrians in the gulf. And so it's not surprising that the heroes of Babylonia and of Greece -- of Gilgamesh and Enkidu and Humbaba -- share the same universe
as the gods and the mortals of the Homeric hymns, of Hesiod's theogony, and the Odyssey. But it may be that this quality of the epic was intensified in Greek thought by their own exploratory character as seamen who plied the realm of the chaotic, of the sea and of the abyss.
And where they asked profoundly questions concerning the meaning of life and death -- of creation and salvation. For the environment in which they developed was primarily the Mediterranean Sea, whether sailing from island to island or migrating to the coast of Palestine as the Philistines did -- and they were really predecessors of Homer and the Odyssey -- or sailing westward to found the
colonies of Magna Graecia in western Mediterranean world, typical of these explorers was the captain of a small crew, who Ulysses-like was a hero, whose courage, whose personal love of adventure, promoted a special kind of man -- a man that we call "the Ulysses factor" -- a man who pitted himself against
the elements of wind and sea, and in doing so, also against the gods and fates in his own finitude. We have an insight of this kind of character in the story of David and Goliath. For, in fact, the Philistine cult of Goliath is the hero -- the epic hero -- that we have in Greek tragedy. This tragic view of life
was expressed, then, intensely in terms of human existence. Why did man suffer? Why was he torn between the irreconcilables of good and evil, freedom and necessity, truth and deceit? What are the causes of his suffering? Blind chance? The evil designs of the gods? Or were they within himself? Why was truth so elusive? Why was goodness
so perishable? Tragic theology speculated about these problems. And yet, it was also a speculation, because we find that it was a spectacle played on the stage to be witnessed, and a hero who warns us of the outcomes of the fates, but who ultimately cannot [console?]. So really, I think that what we find in the
Greek model of the tragic concerning evil is that it is based upon all the previous assumptions of the Babylonian model. Because implicit in this is that evil is a primordial principle -- that chaos pre-exists creation. That there's no distinction between the divine and the diabolical, and that the awareness of this, if there is any, is veiled from man.
And so it's a characteristic of Greek tragedy, as in Homer and the Iliad, that the theme of human blindness is lead astray by a darkening of the mind in human impotence. And so the Homeric hero is lead astray in his feebleness, in the midst of hostile, transcendent powers. It's almost as if it becomes intolerable to the Greek spirit to believe
that the gods are implacably evil. And so all that the Greek can do is to blind himself to that implacability by losing himself in the mists of the moire -- of the fates -- which is the lot of mankind. How different then is the book of Job, from the plays of Aeschylus, his Prometheus Bound, which has sometimes been called "the Greek Job,"
where evil is inescapable, where loss is irretrievable, where suffering is inevitable, is in fact an extraordinary antithesis to what we have in the drama of Job. For the truly tragic element of this model is that when predestination to evil is confronted by human freedom, it is only halted momentarily. But eventually the human spirit
is crushed, with no meaning and no purpose in its downfall. So this dialectic of fate and freedom is what provides its tragedy. And so, even unlike the Babylonian ritual where one hopes for salvation at least every year, in this system there is no salvation, there is no deliverance. And so, we find in Sophocles
the tragedies of such insoluble contradiction -- in Antigone, in Oedipus the King, we find this endlessness of the tragic. And Euripides even takes it further when he depicts cynically the wrecks of human lives under the stress of the gods and the callousness of the gods. So that in all this Greek tragedy, there's no resolution to the problem of evil,
other than making the wise -- making the simple wise through their suffering. Well, now, I've spent time on these models in order to sharpen the contrast between them and what we find in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, the cosmogony that we have there is unique, and the uniqueness is spelled out in five different ways: in terms of the origin of evil,
in terms of the creation of the world, in terms of the relationship between God and man, in terms of the meaning of sin, and in terms of the acceptance of suffering. In all these ways, the biblical model is the antithesis of what we've been talking about. In all these ancient religions of Israel's neighbors, evil is primordial -- chaos is pre-existent.
And it's originating out of chaos that the stable foundations of reality are produced. But because of the foundations being so unstable, there is an inherent instability in all that is. And there's also the absence of any clear distinction between good and evil, and it's this which intensifies the insecurity of the whole structure.
We've seen how the Babylonian author of a pessimistic dialogue indicates that evil is not only unjust but it's senseless -- it's meaningless. And so there can be no ethical vision, as a center of action. And for Greek tragedy, evil in the gods is the ultimate and pitiless fate that overwhelms all mankind.
Now against all this, the biblical view is that evil is not intrinsic to the world at all, that God is good, that he's created a good world, that God saw everything that he made, and behold it was very good. And there's also denial that chaos is anterior to God. And that, likewise, evil is posterior to creation. Indeed,
God takes responsibility for all things. And so Isaiah 45, verses five to seven, declares: "I am Yahweh, and there is no other. Beside Me there is no god. I gird you, though you do not know Me, that man may know from the rising of the sun and from the west that there is none beside Me. I am
Yahweh, and there is no other. I form light and create darkness. I make wheel and create wool. I am Yahweh, who does all these things." So whatever evil there is in the world, God is saying, with broad shoulders, "I take responsibility for everything." At the same time, the Lord adds, in Isaiah 45, verse 18, "Thus says the Lord who created the Heavens, He is God, who formed the earth and made it. He established it. He did not create a chaos. He formed it to be inhabited.
I am the Lord, and there is no other." And so we may ask, "Where, then, does evil originate?" The Bible doesn't answer this question. It simply declares that it has arisen within the rebellious will of man against the Creator. And the biblical view is that man is the beginning of evil,
that through him, evil has entered into space and time, and that, indeed, the environment and the existence of Satan is related to depend upon the perversity of the human will. So we ask, "Where does Satan dwell?" The answer is, "He dwells within the perversity of human rebellion." And beyond man, the Bible gives no place for speculation.
And only man can know evil as that which he inaugurates. And so we do find this mystery, as I said before, that we do have in the choice that man had of trespassing those boundaries, so that the eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is surely the desire on the part of man to trespass the bounds between the creature and creator --
to seek, in the quest for omniscience, god-like powers, which he has not got a prerogative to have, and that, in the trespass of that situation and in the seduction of man by a creature -- the serpent -- man is fallen. Man is in rebellion. Man has forfeited his kingship. Man is enslaved by that which he should rule.
At the same time, we find that even in the Genesis story concerning the fall of man, that the very character of this narrative is that it's anti-tragic, because there is the promise at the end that the woman's seed will crush the serpent's head. That there will yet be unfolded from the
purposes that God has for man -- in God's purpose for man to rule -- that there will be, ultimately, a sovereignty given by man over evil. Of course, we know that in that woman's seed, we have a promise of the incarnation. That through the woman's seed there came the second Adam to vindicate the purposes of God, where the first Adam
had failed. And so the whole character then that we have, biblically, expressing this reality is the antithesis of all that we find. And likewise, already we've seen that in the book of Job we don't have a tragic epic. We don't have this Greek theme of the futility of man's struggle. For we find that Job confesses:
"I know that thou canst do all things, and that no purpose of thine can be thwarted. Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge? Therefore, I have uttered what I did not understand -- things too wonderful for me which I did not know. I have heard of thee by the healing of the ear, but now mine eye sees thee. And therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes." Job has vision.
Job has sight. Job is aware of the character of God. And this is anti-tragic, because in Greek tragedy, it's the blindness of man that is set before the ambiguity of the gods. But Job in contrast has only one consuming need, beyond his own mortality, beyond the meaning of his suffering, or the ending of all his suspense, it is to trust in the personal relationship
that he can have in God, whom he can know, and nothing else matters. And so we see there again the great contrast to what we find elsewhere in the ancient world. Before I stop, I just want to say something about chaos and the forms of evil.
Because as you read even Christian theological studies -- and my colleague who is now at Regent College, Dr. Bruce Waltke, has written a book called Creation and Chaos, in which he makes an exegetical study of Genesis chapter one, verse two. The dilemma about the seriousness of which he exegetes that verse is that you almost think that he really accepts the dualistic view of reality,
that chaos is a primary principle as well as creation. And of course I know that he's wrestling with this -- in fact, this last week he's been giving a talk to my own class on his meaning of "chaos." I wish I was there to hear him. But the dilemma can only, as I see it, be resolved by the fact that what we have in Genesis 1:2, "that which is without form and void," is really
the antelude to what takes place in the unfolding of those days -- that God is sovereign over the formless, and God is sovereign over that which is empty and nothing. And this is why, when we talk about God creating all things by his exercise of "bara," this unique word that expresses the reality of God, the church has wrestled to try
and reinforce the transcendence of God by getting away from the biblical idea of God creating by the Word, by talking about creation ex nihilo -- God creating all things out of nothing. And at first sight, it seems as if that is a very powerful way of expressing God's transcendent sovereignty. What I find suspicious about it is that it doesn't occur within the canon of Scripture. It does occur
in second Maccabees. And it does occur in later patristic writing. And we find that in the council of the church in 12 -- I think, 23 -- it was officially annunciated that this is what God had done, to create all things out of nothing. And it forms a very neat shorthand way of rationally expressing that God has created all things in His sovereignty out of nothing. But the dilemma is
that once we start occupying our minds with what nothing is, we run into the same kind of problem as we find in Alice in Wonderland when the king asks the messenger, "Whom did you pass in the road?" "No one, my Lord," says the messenger. "Well," says the king, "that must mean that you run faster than No One." And you see, the king is spelling "No One" with a capital N and O.
And the messenger is saying that he's passed "no one" -- with a small "n" and "o" -- on the road. And so the two get very annoyed with each other, because the messenger hotly denies that he has passed anyone, and the king argues that he must run faster than "No One." And of course, the dilemma that we have in that kind of semantic game, is that once we concentrate on "no thing" we make it into "something".
And the whole dilemma that we have in our understanding about chaos is like that -- that if chaos is nothing, then we tend to view it as a reality that we call something. And so, one dilemma that you'll find is that if you read Karl Barth's volume three in The Church Dogmatics, he takes this concept of Nothingness and spells it with a capital N,
as if nothingness really is something. He defines it as, "That opposition and resistance to God's providential will -- to that stubborn and alien factor," which he describes as the first and most impressive mention of nothingness, is in Genesis 1:2, in which there is reference of the chaos which the creator has rejected and negated and passed over and abandoned, even before he utters his first created world. Chaos is
the un-willed and the un-created reality, and so on. The dilemma then is that, in our intellectual enterprise, to analyze, to seek to study what nothingness means is, as they say, our [proneness?] to make it mean something. Dorothy Sayers has argued that nothing only seems to remain nothing so long as we refrain from thinking about it.
Any act of thought is apt to turn it into a sort of something. It acquires, in fact, she says, "Precisely that vague and disquieting sort of reality that we are accustomed to associate with the minus sign in algebra." And to say that God created the world out of nothing is, colloquially speaking, easy. But it is less easy if it presents itself in the form that before the creation of anything, nothingness
existed. The something-ness of nothingness attains, in the minds of philosophers, so convincing an aspect of reality that they ascribe to it qualities that form its own mode of existence. And this, I think, is the dilemma that we find in some of the theological utterances concerning the meaning of nothingness or chaos. Now others, of course, go further. And another model of chaos is
the model that is given to us in Berdyaev, the Russian thinker and philosopher, who in fact is really -- although he calls himself a Christian -- is giving us a dualistic view of chaos when he describes it in much more serious terms than Karl Barth as something which is a real threat to the reality of God. A third model of chaos -- and I have to pass over this very quickly -- is one that John Milton gives us in Paradise Lost,
where it's obvious that Milton is also wrestling with the problem of what nothingness is or what the chaotic is. Perhaps the one redeeming feature about Milton's approach is that he treats it symbolically rather than rationalistically. And he's safer in doing so. Symbolism, very often, is a safer way of not expressing heresy,
when we don't rationalize it as others may seek to do. So I'm going to sparse over that, because there isn't time to dwell on Milton's argument about it. But those of you who are interested might find it fascinating to see the way that he handles this. Now, in conclusion, let us deal with what are some of the distinctive forms of evil.
If the biblical view is that this is a good world which God has made then how can we express our understanding of the reality of evil? Well, evil is, in the first place, moral evil, and in the second place, we can speak of it as natural evil.
A moral evil, we've touched upon, is that perversion of human freedom -- for man to live unto himself, or man to confuse his creatureliness with God as Creator. And so, Paul expresses it in Romans 1 when he says that mankind exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator. And for this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable passions.
"And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct." This, then, is the essence of moral evil. It is sin. It is this folly of refusing to acknowledge the Creator, God. And because it is such, it is a perversion. And as such, it perverts everything else. So while it is an intruder, it is a mystery. It is something which is
parasitical, like the over-ripeness of good fruit -- something that has no intrinsic character of its own, but lives parasitically on that which is good and structured and of God. And therefore, there is this hopefulness that the Bible speaks about the eradication of evil -- that because evil is not an essential element of the structure of reality,
and because God is transcendent in his power, God's power is capable of conquering it. We are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. "For I am sure," says the apostle, "that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus,
our Lord." This freedom, then, to turn to God as the hope of our redemption is the conquest of evil. But then, too, there's another kind of evil that we experience in human life -- what we may call "natural evil" -- an evil which seems to proceed from what we may call "natural causes," which are uninfluenced by human motives:
actions such as disease or famine or flood or the cruelties of animal life, insanity, and much else. And here, it appears that natural evil -- unlike moral evil which results from human freedom -- seems to be a result of creation itself. This seems to be much more inbuilt into creation. And moreover, the gospel doesn't
seem to claim that it will emancipate us from natural evil in human life. So how can we relate to it? How can we deal with it? Well, I think there are two points that one can make. And the first is that created beings are, in their essential structure, dependent and yet real. No creature causes itself. Therefore, none can stand by itself,
independent of all else. And so, for example, we are discovering the interdependence of ecology, of the household of life's systems, that we're all in the family together, all aware that our life systems consist of interrelationships that compose our world, that there is a mutual interdependence of all created things. And therefore,
we are aware too that each creature is vulnerable in turn to outside influences, to insecurities, and ultimately to destruction. There's this awareness, then, of our contingent dependence -- our creatureliness -- as the basis of our created power, and also of our capacity to suffer evil. God, in his goodness, has willed this interdependence of all things on each other, although he does not necessarily
will the evil results of that interdependence as it works in nature and in history. And so, natural evil is the kind of runaway situation that we experience in cancer, where some cells create a kind of hypotrophy of runaway situations, where they're proliferating to the well-being of
the rest of the body. And where, to the detriment of the harmony of the whole, there is the distortion and explosion of some. And so we speak of cancer as a good model -- a good example of what we mean by natural evil. Well, I think we can take that same analogy and apply it to all other forms of natural evil. When a Guatemalan earthquake, or a Peruvian earthquake that triggers off landslides,
that roars down the mountain slopes and destroys hundreds of lives and floods the lower course of the river, which creates further havoc with further lives -- what we are discovering there is again a runaway situation, where in the interdependence of things, certain forces, certain powers, get out of control, get out of bounds. To a certain extent, earthquakes
are essential for the well-being of the planet, that, without the release of those pressures underground, there would be cataclysmic explosions. And so, the release of seismic waves is vital for the well-being of the planet. But it's when those seismic waves accumulate and create what we call a disastrous earthquake that we find it out of bounds. The pressure systems of our air masses,
which develop according to meteorologic forces, require that those forces of energy are released in their restiveness, in their behavior around our planet. But when we have a tornado, or a typhoon, we have again this runaway situation of the release of the powers and pressures that create destruction in flood, as indeed the absence creates draught.
All these evils result then from a whole system of interdependent causation, breaking down momentarily or indefinitely to create actions and reactions within the finitude of existence. And yet of course without a certain amount of release of these situations, our planet would be uninhabitable and chaotic. They are in fact
means whereby balances can be addressed within the whole. So if causes which act in one moment would fail to act in the next, then no relations among finite things would be dependable -- all life would be impossible. It would be a chaotic world in which all moral action would be impossible. And thus in creating a world of orderly interdependence,
a good God does not will directly all the effect resulting from the inner-workings of this world, but what his goodness wills is the orderly structure of our existence, which is a possibility alike of its value and of our experience of natural evils. But even in the presence of natural evil, which we may attribute to our fallenness and to the fallenness of our world, God gives man the Spirit to enable him to
transcend over these experiences, so that even in this realm he recognizes that all things work together for good to those who love God, so that ultimately natural ills are to us by no means necessarily evil. Natural evil is but one aspect of our given world, but God has given us the resources, morally,
to be more than conquerous through Him that loved us. When I was struggling with this paper -- and with this I now conclude -- I read a lot of the philosophy of theodicy. And it seemed to me that the whole dilemma of the philosophical enterprise to really wrestle with theodicy is that when we come really to the crunch, the whole dilemma about evil
is that it is irrational. And therefore a rational attempt to understand the irrational is an impossibility. And so, ultimately, we're driven to recognize the same dilemma that Job was in, that "though He slay me, yet will I trust Him." That ultimately the only way in which we can really wrestle with the problem of evil is by recognizing the dependability
of a good God in whom we can trust. And that it's not on the intellectual plane -- it's not on the rational plane -- that we can ultimately understand the problem of evil. And especially when, as we've seen, there are certain aspects of the problem of evil for which the Bible gives us no answer. It doesn't tell us where it came from. It doesn't tell us its nature, except certain aspects that are referred to --
personal, moral evil, yes. A lot is said about that. But the whole realm of contingency is not spelled out. And we know that it is within our contingency that evil operates as well. Well now, time is more than gone. Are there any -- yes?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Dr. Houston, I have two questions for you. I myself am grappling with the problem of disease, and, in fact, I have not come to a conclusion to the aspect of why disease should exist at all. The way modern bio-chemistry teaches us today is that the organism, in order to maintain its own order,
causes disorder around it, and that it lives in a balance of order and disorder called "homeostasis." However, there occurs in certain organisms, a time -- or an event, should I say -- in which this homeostasis is thrown in disbalance, and this time is called "disease," I guess you could call it, when the organism is out of balance in its own detriment.
My two questions are this: is disease -- is death part of God's plan? And if it is, as you were saying before -- if the earthquake occurs to head off a larger seismic disturbance -- do you believe, as Leibnitz believed, that we are in the best of all possible worlds?
HOUSTON: I cannot hope to answer all these issues. What I would refer you to, though, is an interesting article that has just been published by Loren E. Wilkinson in the Christian Scholars Review for 1976. It's volume five, number four, and it's entitled "A Christian Ecology of Death: Biblical Imagery and the Ecological Crisis." And what Wilkinson is trying to grapple, there, with is the role
and the significance of death. And I think he's right in recognizing that we've got to think of death multidimensionally -- that at one level, death is a provender. If one looks at the ecological structures of life, the trophic levels are dependent on death. And we find, of course, that in God's ordinance for man, that in his unfallen state
man was given the fruits of the earth, so that the death of those fruits was presumably implicit in the good-structured world that He had made for man's provision. What is significant is that it is not until we come to Genesis chapter nine, when the man's mandate after the flood, after the fall, after destruction, is that he's also given the bounty of animal food as well, as if man's
nature is extended over death of other things. So whether on can suggest that the death of fruits is on a shallow, different level from the death of animals, which in turn are a provender for man, I think it's worth looking at that possibility. So that, when we look at death in terms of being ecological providers for other complexities of life,
then I don't think you can think of death as being something that is evil. But then, of course, the Bible does speak about the second death. It speaks not only about the death of man and man's contingency and mortality, but the death of man's soul. And the New Testament makes it clear that that second death is something to be fearful of. The first death is not. And yet, there's an awareness
that death itself is for our finitude an outrage. And so I think really as serious thinkers -- and I've only just begun to think about this, so I really cannot go further with you -- but it does seem to me that we've got to really think not of death per se as an evil, but of the categories of death such as we've outlined just now. Now, in the light of that, then, of course,
we can say that evil is a disease -- that a disease is evil. That this imbalance, this disharmony, is something that we can certainly explore. And that -- that's how I see natural evil -- that it is an imbalance. It is something that destroys homeostasis. And that that concept of equilibrium is a meaningful one. But how far we can explore beyond that, to explore
the fallenness of creation, and how it's related to the fall of man, of course, are mysteries which I don't think we'll ever understand. But what the prophets indicate is that there's an intrinsic relationship between the fall of the earth and the fall of man. And so, again and again, the prophets indicate that "Because my people know not God," as Isaiah says in chapter three, "therefore the land wilts and mourns," do you see? So the -- not only in the fall,
as described in Genesis three, where in place of the fruitfulness of the garden there are now the thorns and thistles that man has to grapple with as evil. We find later on that in the millennial vision that this lying of the lamb with the lion, this playing of the child over the wasp's nest, suggest that there will be a state of innocence and a state of equilibrium that is inconceivable to the kind of world we live in today,
which reflects upon the mystery of evil that operates in every realm of life. So I think we can only just sort of make glimpses and see pointers, but we can't rationalize it.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Can you comment of the second question? Is -- do you believe that this is the best world that God can have us in, in the sense -- well, you were saying -- I asked this question in light of your comment about theological analysis of earthquakes and why they -- or natural evil -- and why they occur. It seems that you -- well, you lead me to believe, at least, that
they occur in order to head off things of greater evil. Could you -- and the question then is: is this the best world that God will have us live in?
HOUSTON: I would say, yes. And it's the best world for a number of reasons. First of all, because this is the world that God has set us in. First of all, this is the world that God has made, and He saw that it was good. And it's also, from our own empirical experience of reality, the best world. Provided we are always aware of our sovereignty over all other created things. And that we discover in our own lives that if our lives are lived instinctually -- animal-like -- then, of course, everything is meaningless,
everything is (inaudible) instinctual. But when our spirits can transcend all our passions and our law forms of existence, we discover that we are more than conquerous through Him who loved us. Perhaps then God has set us in the very structures of life, and in the very character of what seems to us to be so evil in order
to indicate our true being. And we find that, of course, it's the invalid, it's the sufferer, it's the person whose spirit of transcendent joyfulness and peace can overcome the world with all its limitations that really gives us a glimpse into sainthood -- gives us a glimpse of the sovereignty that God intended man
to have. And so we look to the sufferer in grace, to the One who is more than conqueror through Him who loved him. So that the Puritans, I think, were not wrong when they saw the world as a place of veil making, of soul making. Somebody else? Yes?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: If the natural ills that you talked about, including death, are a product of the curse of God on creation because of man's evil, man's rebellion, are they rightfully called evil? Or would the more -- would they better be called the righteous judgment, righteous curse of God upon man's evil? And wouldn't that give them meaning, rather than making them [inexplicable?]?
HOUSTON: Well, we could say that. And the dilemma that I have is going back to Hopkins's poem, that one can understand the searing and the baring of the earth, because of human evil. One can understand the environmental crisis. But what I think we're finding is implicit that when Paul speaks of a groaning creation, he's speaking about a depth that is more like the smell that Hopkins talked about,
whose mystery is inscrutable, whose causality is unknown. And while we associate it with the fall of man, we really -- we're not knowing what we're talking about. We can't say what we know; we don't know. So this seems to be the dilemma, that, yes, the prophets clearly bring out that it's the cupidity of man, it's his greed, it's his selfishness that creates havoc on the earth.
And we see that. And yet beyond those forms of sin, there's a sense in which there seems to be a fallenness and a groaning of creation in its own helplessness, in its own futility -- that goes beyond that. So I don't think it's enough to see it on one level. I think that we have to accept what Paul says, that it does groan.
And there's only once in my life that I've groaned, and that was when I couldn't articulate my sorrow. And I think that perhaps the groaning of creation is that God set man, as the Reformers recognized, there to be the priest of creation -- to articulate vocally the praise of all creation -- that there's an inarticulate longing on the part of every creature that God has made
to be able to be heard -- to be articulated and to be understood, as Psalm 149 expresses -- that the hail and the rain and the wind and the mountains and the valleys want to shout for joy, and they can't do so, because man, as the priest of God's world, is not hearing their cries and their desires for their Creator. Now, how far can you go beyond that?
That seems to me something of the groaning of creation today. Yes?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 3: I had a question concerning -- well, I'll start like this: while I realize that evil is not inherent within society, we didn't touch very much on the fall of Lucifer. Now, Jesus said, "I saw Satan fall." Now, in the New Testament we can see lots of times he roams up and down the earth. I would guess that we could assume that somehow he is here. Now, how does that connect in with -- you made a statement about that the existence of Satan and the perversity of the human will?
Satan pre-human fall -- are you speaking that way? Or do you see that fitting in with the existence of evil in our universe? Could you expound on that a little bit more?
HOUSTON: I can't expound on it, because Scripture doesn't give us any more to go on.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 3: You don't feel that there's enough there then?
HOUSTON: I don't think there's enough data to feed on -- for the mind to rationalize. Now people have speculated. Milton does beautifully -- you read Paradise Lost, he'll tell you all about it. But I can't tell you.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 3: Okay, I just wondered, because I feel like I've seen, and I've been there myself. So I just wondered if you…
HOUSTON: No, I think that perhaps where Scripture is silent, we have to be silent too. Yes?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 4: I was wondering about how if everything is in relation to everything else (inaudible) in creation, what does God intend by the supernatural or the things that are intrusions in the natural occurrences? (inaudible)?
HOUSTON: I think your question is very loaded -- there's an awful lot in it. You may not, you know, think so, but I think really that the dilemma is that it's we who've put this upstairs-downstairs mentality into the natural and the supernatural. When we're talking about God, there's neither natural nor supernatural. And I think the dilemma that we're facing, you see, is that we're recognizing that in the natural there is the rational,
there is the causal, there is the explicable. And when we introduce God beyond that, we're talking about the inexplicable, and the mysterious, and the transcendent. Now that's reasonable to do that, but the dilemma is that in our mindsets, inherited from the Greeks, is the self-containment of the natural -- the autonomous, you see? And this is not biblical.
So as we said before, there is no natural in the Old Testament. There's no word for it. There's no nature in the Old Testament. It's God who speaks in the wind. It's God who blesses in the rain, God who judges in the earthquake. Now that doesn't mean to say there isn't room for seismology, and meteorology, and all the other earth sciences that explain the finite condition of what happens when rain falls,
and when draught occurs, and when wind blows, you see? But it's really saying, "Look, we're concerned about the transcendent reality of God as the ultimate cause of all things." And our dilemma in using these upper and lower stories of natural and supernatural is that somehow we're living dichotomously between something which is self-explanatory and rational,
and something which -- we say, "well, you know, we have to bring in" -- what we bring in is a kind of god-of-the-gaps. And the whole dilemma about this mentality of natural and supernatural is that God only fits into the gaps. And as things become more natural, then the supernatural gets less and less. And so I think it's a biblical view of life to resist this mentality of seeing things naturally
and supernaturally. Does that help? And, therefore, you see in that kind of awareness then miracles don't have quite the sort of mystery about them, because everything that God is, is God. You know we say that -- when we see the evidence of God, we see a miracle. Well, all right, put that way, it simply means that you're saying you don't
understand what it means. But if you live with this awareness of the transcendence of God, then you can live in looking for miracles around every corner. It can be dangerous; you can dramatize life too much. But nevertheless, your faith is not so dichotomized, which the other reports tend to make it. Now there's somebody at the back and then in the front. Yes?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 5: In reference to your first question, this is something the -- the nature of the trophic food chains and how death is entailed in the (inaudible) of God's plan for the world -- this is something that is particularly intriguing to me. And I know, as you mentioned, this -- just to sort of (inaudible) -- you mentioned an article in discussing that, that I didn't get the name of.
HOUSTON: Oh, yes. Well, I'll give it to you again: Loren Wilkinson, "A Christian Ecology of Death," Christian Scholars Review volume five number four, 1976. And it's page 319, and onwards.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 5: Thank you.
HOUSTON: Now there's a question in the front?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 6: This is going back to something you said earlier. Do you believe that man is totally depraved -- totally evil -- or that there is some, like, some spark of goodness left in him, be it 0.001%?
HOUSTON: We do want to rationalize again, don't we? I think that this -- I don't think that it's Calvin -- it's more of a neo-Calvinistic emphasis on total depravity -- is something that perhaps we've over-exaggerated. If one is seeking to emphasis that every thought of holiness is God's alone -- if we are aware that
all our stirrings of desire towards God are his gift of His initiative of grace, and we take that kind of stance, then I think it's very wonderful to live in that type of faith -- this absolute trust in God's initiative, God's sovereign grace. When, however, we have a kind of dual theology about total depravity,
it is a desperate theology of pessimism. And there are some people who, in their sensitivity have been so destroyed by that kind of emphasis. So that I think so often in truth the error -- the heresy that develops is always an imbalance -- an exaggeration. So we need a kind of balance about this. So that yes, it's true, on the one hand, that without him we can do nothing --
that every desire after him is really his initiative of grace in our hearts. That attitude, I think, is very necessary for us to have today. But along with that, the idea that God has given me no faculties and no abilities to desire after him can be so debilitating and destructive. Now I don't know
whether that really answers your point, but I think that it's far better to try and steer between a false optimism about what man can be -- I mean there are people today who will talk about the Kingdom of God is within us -- that we've all got a little Christ that just needs to be activated and banged and played, which is of course certainly non-biblical. But on the other hand, this total depravity has been, I think, gloomily exaggerated.
Yes?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 7: So this is related to a debates [Tur?] and I (inaudible) debates Tur and I have been having, because he's talked about total depravity, and I say, "Well, I don't believe in total depravity." I believe that man is depraved -- and if you want a rational explanation, I'll say 95 percent -- but he thought that the doctrine of total depravity was in the Bible, and what -- I think what I
was trying to point out to him is that it's not -- that what's in the Bible is that man is depraved. And, you know... Would you say that the Bible simply supports that view that man is depraved, and that we're to walk with fear and trembling? Because I know that many people, as you said, do use total depravity to say, "Well, the fine arts are worthless..." So...
HOUSTON: I know. And, of course, we won't resolve this because in the history of the church we have Tertullian telling us, "How can Jerusalem and Athens really consort? What merit does culture have? How one should therefore shun the world, and live with the sense of extreme gloom about it all." And then there's the other mentality that is too
optimistic about the world. And I think they're both wrong. I agree with you, I don't see that the Scripture -- for one thing doesn't use the phraseology -- but I think the exaggeration of total depravity really belongs to a certain kind of temperament that lives in the celtic twilight, where the world's in ruins, and it's a wilderness wild, and everything's pretty grim.
And one questions whether it isn't a temperamental, rather than a theological affirmation. And yet, on the other hand, of course, we have to take sin very seriously and realize that in man's fallenness that without God, and without His initiative, without His grace, we cannot do anything. We cannot save ourselves. Yes?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 8: Well, I think the point of balance is what is so important in that, because I did not mean by total depravity that there is no value to be gleaned from the arts or anything that man can do, but rather that -- well, I think Isaiah one speaks quite definitely to man's total sinfulness. And the whole plan of salvation seems to assume that man is totally fallen, because it's not a matter of renovating man or making something good out of something which has fallen into decay, but it's a putting to death of the old self. And a total remaking -- a rebirth.
HOUSTON: I think we do find that the greatest saints are those who have the greatest sensitivity to sin. And that the more we recognize the wholeness of God and the presence of God and our dependence upon God, the more we learn to realize
how little we can trust ourselves, and how totally unclean we are as Isaiah was in the holy of holies. Yes, the one in the back, and then... Yes?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 9: In relation to this question, a verse that's always puzzled me has been, oh I don't know, either Paul or Peter, one or the other, where he says, "There is not one to seek after Him" -- Him being God -- "no not one." Which has always puzzled me because I felt -- I mean, looking back on my Christian days -- that I, you know, was looking for something. Now, I don't know whether it was really -- I was looking for, you know, the God of the Scriptures, or whatever... But it puzzled me,
and I wondered if you had any comment on that in relation to this (inaudible; overlapping dialogue).
HOUSTON: Well, just -- yes. Just simply that, I think it is our experience of God as we know His grace that we do realize, as the hymn puts it, "every thought of holiness is His alone." There's a sense in which one realizes the more one grows in dependence upon God that all our desires and stirring of Spirit and inquiring of God are God's gifts to us, and that therefore we can attribute everything that is God-ward
to God. And everything of desire in our hearts, of hungering and thirsting after righteousness, is itself a gift of God. Every awareness about inadequacy whereby we realize how we have to relate and depend to Him -- depend upon Him -- is of God. And so one rejoices in weakness and brokenness and sinfulness, and that everything that we have that is God-seeking is really
His gift to us. So that attitude I find very important and meaningful.