Suffering is one of the most difficult issues to face the Christian faith today. One important issue that confronts theologians as they delve into the understanding of God and God's relationship to the world is the relationship of true freedom and eschatology. Paul Sponheim, in The Pulse of Creation, analyzes this conundrum of theology. In reacting to a statement by Wolfhart Pannenberg, who advocates cinfidence in what Sponheim terms a "sure grasp of a decisive end," by wondering how this "sure grasp" of things to come could allow for true freedom on the part of creatures. Sponheim then connects this idea of freedom with the need for ambiguity. I wonder whether this connection is completely warranted. Is there a difference between the existence of "freedom" and the existence of "ambiguity"? (Or put differently, does genuine creaturely "ambituity" need to require genuine "ambiguity" from God's perspective?)
I believe it is of first importance to emphasize the idea of kenosis in considering God's relationship to the world. As Sponheim writes, "Theologians have let the highly particular word of Jesus illumine the God of all creation." Just as God limits God's self in relationship to the world through Jesus Christ, so God's self-limitation can be seen through God's act of creation of humanity as genuinely other than God, and with genuine freedom. Up to this point, I have in no way departed from Sponheim's argument. But the question now turns to the relation of the creaturely freedom to the foreknowledge of God. To return to Sponheim's lanugage, is "ambiguity about the end inevitable" if genuine freedom exists? Here is where I would say yes and no. Yes, ambiguity is inevitable because humans are temporal, and not able to see the future. We don't know what the "end" will be. On the other hand, no ambituity is not inevitable for God, who is able to see the future, even with free choice. In The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis talks of an "unbounded Now" in which the eternal God is able to see creation, unbounded by time. The question, then, is Does God "foreseeing" (as humans perceive it in time) our decision make it any less free? I believe that God is able to know the result of our free decision before we make that decision, without removing that freedom. As C. S. Lewis so simply puts it in Mere Christianity, "You never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less free because God knows what you are doing. Well, He knows your tomorrow's actions in just the same way."
In answer to Sponheim's assertion that the "relational character of life in the middle must be recognized even in the end," I would say that it is. God's knowledge of the future takes precisely that relational character into account due to God's faithful self-limitation, as true in a future "now" as it is in the current "now" as it was in the past "nows." Therefore, God is able to speak of the decisive end, revealing some of it to humans, without in any way removing freedom in the process. I believe God's knowledge of our "free" future, as well as God's knowledge of the divine actions that will occur as God's kenosis is brought to an end in a divine "refilling" are useful in educating the Christian present. Thus, I believe that God not only has a purpose in mind and is working to fulfill it, but that God's purpose is manifest, in a veiled and kenotic way now, and in a definitive revealed and "filled" way in the future, and this is my hope as a Christian. |
