קאווע שטיבל

[left]One criticism of it raises a question about the relation between creaturely freedom and God’s activity as creator. J. L. Mackie has argued that if God is truly all-powerful, he ought to have been able to create creatures who possessed free will, but who never did wrong (1955, 209). If that were possible, then we would have had a universe free of moral evil, even though it contained creatures with free will. Perhaps the sinful populace that presently inhabits the world would have lost out on such a scenario: maybe God would have had to create an entirely different crowd. Still, moral evil would have been banished, and the condition of the world doubtless vastly improved. But could God have exerted such control over creation? Proponents of the free will defense have tended to think not. In order for God to provide creatures with meaningful freedom, they argue, God must relinquish control over how that freedom is exercised. Were it not so, libertarian freedom would be destroyed: our decisions and actions would not finally be up to us, but would instead be manipulated by God (Plantinga 1974, 41–42; Flint 1998, 84–90). Even if they were exempt from natural causation, they would still be determined by God’s will, and so would be unfree. Indeed, the argument runs, it would be logically impossible for God to create creatures possessed of libertarian freedom, and at the same time have the operations of their will fall under his creative fiat. Now it is not usually considered a failure of omnipotence for God to be unable to do what is logically impossible. We need not, therefore, relinquish the claim that God is all-powerful. Rather, the theist concludes, Mackie is simply mistaken in thinking such a God could create free creatures with a guarantee that they would never sin[/left]

[left]It is fair to say that philosophers responding to these difficulties have been more concerned to preserve God’s omniscience than his sovereignty. Perhaps this is in part because philosophy is itself a matter of pursuing knowledge, so that philosophers are led to value omniscience more highly. Were we generals, say, or politicians, our priorities might be quite the opposite[/left]

[left]Theologians have always agreed that the greatest evil they sustain is final and irremediable separation from God. Nothing could be worse than to be cut off from the love and friendship of a father whose power extends to every detail of the universe, and who invites us to a share in his very life. But if this is the greatest evil of damnation, then no one who ends that way is treated unfairly, for this separation is precisely what one chooses by insisting on a life of rebellion rather than seeking reconciliation with God. Indeed, having once created beings destined to be lost, it is hard to see how a loving God could do anything but honor their choice in the matter (Kvanvig 1993, ch. 4). What is troubling, rather, is that he should create such beings at all, much less will their performance of the very actions through which they reject him. It may be argued, however, that even here God’s love is at work. He cannot, of course, directly intend the rebellion of sinners, nor the destruction of the finally unrepentant. But the lost are full participants in securing their tragic destiny; and while a life ruined by final rebellion is morally indefensible, it is still morally meaningful. Through their actions, the lost carve out for themselves a character which, though not upright, represents a real option for a free creature. Thus, the argument runs, to the extent that moral autonomy is a good it can be willed for a creature by God even when it takes this form. Furthermore, it is claimed, it is a mistake to think that God is not lovingly involved in the lives of the reprobate, or that he would have been more loving had he not created them. On the contrary: what is meaningless is to suppose that God would have shown greater love toward the lost by omitting them from creation. What is not there cannot be loved. Equally, it is meaningless to think the lost would be better off had they not existed. What does not exist is neither well nor poorly off, nor anywhere in between; and it is as good for the reprobate to have life, the opportunity for salvation, and an autonomous choice as to whether to accept it, as it is for the saved. What is not good for them is the use they make of the opportunity, in choosing to be without God. But that is fully their decision, and its consequences are fully earned

If the sort of view outlined above is correct, there is ample reason for God to create a universe in which there is moral evil, for only through the presence of moral evil is it possible for creatures like us to develop a legitimate moral identity, and make an informed and responsible choice to accept or reject God’s offer of friendship with us[/left]

[left]As usually formulated, the argument from evil is based on what appears to be a false presumption. It imagines that the ideal world for a loving and compassionate God to create must be what John Hick describes as a hedonistic paradise: a place devoted to human enjoyment, in which comfort and convenience are maximized, and pain and deprivation have little or no place (1966, 292–93). If not banished completely, they must be held to the minimum necessary to guarantee to God’s creatures the most pleasant existence possible. Now obviously, that is not the sort of world we have. The amount of suffering is immense — far more, certainly, than it would be if God’s aim were to maximize worldly joy. But the appropriate conclusion, the theist may argue, is not that the universe is not the creation of a provident God. For consider how we react to people whose lives have little to distinguish them except that they appear — perhaps deceptively — to be filled with enjoyment. There is a tendency, when we suffer one or another of life’s ills, to envy such people: to wish our own existence could be as theirs seems to be, rather than the painful drudgery of the moment. But the truth is that we seldom admire those who appear to have a life of ease, nor are we likely to consider that kind of life very well spent. What we admire are lives of courage and sacrifice: persons who overcome hardship, deprivation, or weakness to achieve some notable success; who stand, perhaps not even successfully, against some great evil; or who relinquish their own happiness to alleviate the suffering of others. How would such lives be possible if natural evil did not exist? (For a related view, see Swinburne 1978

Still less would we respect an entire world devoted to nothing but enjoyment. Imagine a society in which everyone has an electrode implanted in their brain, which, when a current is passed through it, causes intense euphoria, unmatched by any other pleasure. One simply needs to be attached to a power source, and the simple push of a button yields ecstasy. And that is all anyone cares about. Agriculture, commerce, government, and social institutions are organized toward but one goal: to maximize the time each person can spend plugged in, lost in self-stimulation. Individual lives are conducted with the same aim. Work is still necessary, but it is held to a minimum, and contact with fellow human beings has no purpose other than to keep things running smoothly, so that the pleasure of all can be maximized. Now if the antitheist ideal of creation were correct, this type of society ought to represent a high order of human existence — better by far than the world in which we presently find ourselves. In fact, however, it is beneath contempt, a level of existence so low as to be barely human. The enterprises we value most would shrivel to near nothingness in such a world: there would be no art or culture, no important public works, little technology and science — above all, no real human fellowship, no caring, no sacrifice (Hick 1966, 359–61). Perversely enough, in fact, all we have to add to a world like this is war, and we get a situation not at all unlike Hobbes’s state of nature, the very antithesis of anything we could value. Clearly, says the theist, we wish more for ourselves than this. A life without challenge is a life without interest.

If theism is correct on these matters, then a God interested in creating the best of worlds cannot have as his top priority the maximization of creaturely pleasure. Rather, a significant part of the enterprise of creation itself ought to be the confrontation and defeat of evil — an accomplishment far greater than merely guaranteeing the unperturbed pleasure of all. And if human beings are created in God’s image, and called to friendship with him, it is to be expected that they will have an important share in this enterprise[/left]

[left]Perhaps the main fault which I find with the overall line which Weisberger takes lies in her appeals to the burden of proof. It seems to me that the right method here is to formulate the competing views – i.e. theistic and non-theistic theories of the world – and then to ask which one is best supported by the total available evidence. If theists can reasonably suppose that they have lots of evidence which supports the claim that God exists, then they may reasonably believe that there is a solution to ‘the problem of evil’, even if they do not know what that solution is. To insist, that theists have to provide a satisfactory theodicy or else abandon their theism, is to fail to pay proper regard to ‘the principle of total evidence’. Of course, this is not to say that non-theists cannot reasonably suppose that ‘the problem of evil’ helps to sway the weight of total evidence in favour of non-theism – indeed, I started out by claiming that this will very likely be the case – but that seems to me to be a very different issue[/left]

[left]But often enough these adequate solutions are only almost adopted. The thinkers who restrict God's power, but keep the term 'omnipotence', may reasonably be suspected of thinking, in other contexts, that his power is really unlimited. Those who say that evil is an illusion may also be thinking, inconsistently, that this illusion is itself an evil. Those who say that "evil" is merely privation of good may also be thinking, inconsistently, that privation of good is an evil. (The fallacy here is akin to some forms of the "naturalistic fallacy" in ethics, where some think, for example, that "good" is just what contributes to evolutionary progress, and that evolutionary progress is itself good.)[/left]

[left]First, it sets a limit to what God can do, saying that God cannot create good without simultaneously creating evil, and this means either that God is not omnipotent or that there are some limits to what an omnipotent thing can do. It may be replied that these limits are always presupposed, that omnipotence has never meant the power to do what is logically impossible, and on the present view the existence of good without evil would be a logical impossibility. This interpretation of omnipotence may, indeed, be accepted as a modification of our original account which does not reject anything that is essential to theism, and I shall in general assume it in the subsequent discussion. It is, perhaps, the most common theistic view, but I think that some theists at least have maintained that God can do what is logically impossible. Many theists, at any rate, have held that logic itself is created or laid down by God, that logic is the way in which God arbitrarily chooses to think. (This is, of course, parallel to the ethical view that morally right actions are those which God arbitrarily chooses to command, and the two views encounter similar difficulties.) And this account of logic is clearly inconsistent with the view that God is bound by logical necessities -- unless it is possible for an omnipotent being to bind himself, an issue which we shall consider later, when we come to the Paradox of Omnipotence. This solution of the problem of evil cannot, therefore, be consistently adopted along with the view that logic is itself created by God.[/left]

[left]Not long ago I was sleeping in a cabin in the woods and was awoken in the middle of the night by the sounds of a struggle between two animals. Cries of terror and extreme agony rent the night, intermingled with the sounds of jaws snapping bones and flesh being torn from limbs. One animal was being savagely attacked, killed and then devoured by another.

A clearer case of a horrible event in nature, a natural evil, has never been presented to me. It seemed to me self-evident that the natural law that animals must savagely kill and devour each other in order to survive was an evil natural law and that the obtaining of this law was sufficient evidence that God did not exist. If I held a certain epistemological theory about "basic beliefs", I might conclude from this experience that my intuition that there is no God co-existing with this horror was a "basic belief” and thus that I am epistemically entitled to be an atheist without needing to justify this intuition[/left]

[left]Consider a world where the laws of physics, rather than being laws that admit of no exceptions, are instead probabilistic laws. Effective human action would still be possible in such a world, provided that the relevant probabilities were sufficiently high. But if so, then effective human action would be no less possible in a world with non-statistical laws where there were occasional miraculous interventions[/left]

[left]Finally, the religious theodicy that we are considering also involves a number of very problematic moral claims. First, we are asked to believe that there is nothing morally problematic about a morally good deity making it the case that if one of the first two humans disobeys some command, all of the many billions of descendants of that human will, as a consequence, be subject to suffering and death to which they would not otherwise be exposed

In short, the religious theodicy that we have been considering in this section is very implausible, not only on scientific and historical grounds, but on moral grounds as well[/left]

[left]The problem of evil may be described as the problem of reconciling belief in God with the existence of evil. But the problem of evil, like evil itself, has many faces. It may, for example, be expressed either as an experiential problem or as a theoretical problem. In the former case, the problem is the difficulty of adopting or maintaining an attitude of love and trust toward God when confronted by evil that is deeply perplexing and disturbing. Alvin Plantinga (1977: 63-64) provides an eloquent account of this problem:

The theist may find a religious problem in evil; in the presence of his own suffering or that of someone near to him he may find it difficult to maintain what he takes to be the proper attitude towards God. Faced with great personal suffering or misfortune, he may be tempted to rebel against God, to shake his fist in God’s face, or even to give up belief in God altogether… Such a problem calls, not for philosophical enlightenment, but for pastoral care

By contrast, the theoretical problem of evil is the purely “intellectual” matter of determining what impact, if any, the existence of evil has on the truth-value or the epistemic status of theistic belief. To be sure, these two problems are interconnected – theoretical considerations, for example, may color one’s actual experience of evil, as happens when suffering that is better comprehended becomes easier to bear[/left]

[left]Being finite beings we can’t expect to know all the goods God would know, any more than an amateur at chess should expect to know all the reasons for a particular move that Kasparov makes in a game. But, unlike Kasparov who in a chess match has a good reason not to tell us how a particular move fits into his plan to win the game, God, if he exists, isn’t playing chess with our lives. In fact, since understanding the goods for the sake of which he permits terrible evils to befall us would itself enable us to better bear our suffering, God has a strong reason to help us understand those goods and how they require his permission of the terrible evils that befall us[/left]

[left]The open theist therefore encourages the rejection of what has been called “meticulous providence” (Peterson 1982: chs 4 & 5) or “the blueprint worldview” (Boyd 2003: ch.2), the view that the world was created according to a detailed divine blueprint which assigns a specific divine reason for every occurrence in history. In place of this view, the open theist presents us with a God who is a risk-taker, a God who gives up meticulous control of everything that happens, thus opening himself up to the genuine possibility of failure and disappointment – that is to say, to the possibility of gratuitous evil

Open theism has sparked much heated debate and has been attacked from many quarters. Considered, however, as a response to Rowe’s [traditional] theological premise, open theism’s prospects seem dim. The problem here, as critics have frequently pointed out, is that the open view of God tends to diminish one’s confidence in God’s ability to ensure that his purposes for an individual’s life, or for world history, will be accomplished (see, for example, Ware 2000, Ascol 2001: 176-80). The worry is that if, as open theists claim, God does not exercise sovereign control over the world and the direction of human history is open-ended, then it seems that the world is left to the mercy of Tyche or Fortuna, and we are therefore left with no assurance that God’s plan for the world and for us will succeed. Consider, for example, Eleonore Stump’s rhetorical questions, put in response to the idea of a “God of chance” advocated in van Inwagen (1988): “Could one trust such a God with one’s child, one’s life? Could one say, as the Psalmist does, “I will both lay me down in peace and sleep, for thou, Lord, only makest me dwell in safety’?” (1997: 466, quoting from Psalm 4:8). The answer may in large part depend on the degree to which the world is thought to be imbued with indeterminacy or chance[/left]

[left]A problem concerns the worship-worthiness of the sort of deity being proposed. For example, would someone who is not wholly good and capable of evil be fit to be the object of our worship, total devotion and unconditional commitment? Similarly, why place complete trust in a God who is not all-powerful and hence not in full control of the world? To be sure, even orthodox theists will place limits on God’s power, and such limits on divine power may go some way towards explaining the presence of evil in the world. But if God’s power, or lack thereof, is offered as the solution to the problem of evil – so that the reason why God allows evil is because he doesn’t have the power to prevent it from coming into being – then we are faced with a highly impotent God who, insofar as he is aware of the limitations in his power, may be considered reckless for proceeding with creation[/left]

[left]Consider W4. Is it possible? Yes! Most people are tempted to answer “No” when first exposed to this description, but think carefully about it. Although there is no evil and suffering in this world, it is not because God causally determines people in every situation to choose what is right and to avoid what is wrong. In this world God has given creatures morally significant free will without any strings attached. If there is nothing bad in this world, it can only be because the free creatures that inhabit this world have — by their own free will — always chosen to do the right thing. Is this kind of situation really possible? Yes. Something is logically possible just when it can be conceived without contradiction. There is nothing contradictory about supposing that there is a possible world where free creatures always make the right choices and never go wrong. Of course, it’s highly improbable, given what we know about human nature. But improbability and impossibility, as we said above, are two different things. In fact, according to the Judeo-Christian story of Adam and Eve, it was God’s will that significantly free human beings would live in the Garden of Eden and always obey God’s commands. If Adam and Eve had followed God’s plan, then W4 would have been the actual world[/left]

[left]God created the universe, but out of a pre-existent uncreated matter, which stubbornly resists God’s not wholly successful attempt to impose order and goodness upon it.  There is thus evil in the world, and it is not just an absence of good (as Maimonides and countless others would have us say), but real, thumping evil even if controlled and minimized by God to the greatest extent possible[/left]

אמר להו דהוה יתיב עמי הקב"ה ואמרי ליה עד מתי אצטער בהאי עלמא ואמר לי אלעזר בני ניחא לך דאפכיה לעלמא מרישא אפשר דמתילדת בשעתא דמזוני אמרי לקמיה כולי האי ואפשר? אמרי ליה דחיי טפי או דחיינא א"ל דחיית אמרי לקמיה א"כ לא בעינא אמר לי בהאי אגרא דאמרת לא בעינא יהיבנא לך לעלמא דאתי תליסרי נהרוותא דמשחא אפרסמון דכיין כפרת ודיגלת דמענגת בהו אמרי לקמיה האי ותו לא אמר לי ולחברך מאי יהיבנא אמרי ליה ואנא מגברא דלית ליה בעינא

[left]With righteous indignation, Sam Harris
condemns
the “boundless narcissism” of those who survive a disaster only to “believe themselves spared by a loving God, while this same God drowned infants in their cribs” (p. 54[/left]
‏ועיין כאן.

[left]In a world where evils strike indiscriminately, where villains prosper while children die of cystic fibrosis, anyone who credits an omnipotent God for their earthly fortune, as if God had selectively intervened on their behalf while leaving others to languish, is implying that God plays favorites in a decidedly pernicious way. The god of these faithful is no God worth worshipping but just another variant of the god of superstition

But is it even possible to believe in a God worth worshipping in a world where billions survive on less than two dollars a day?

This is just another way to pose the theological problem of evil. The problem is hardly new. Hume was paraphrasing the Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus when he stated the problem as follows: “Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?” (p. 84

It’s a question no theist should ignore: Whence then is evil?

But it’s also a question that should be juxtaposed against a related one. We live in a world in which all of us are implicated in what Marilyn McCord Adams (1990, 2006) has called “horrors”: crushing evils that seem to strip the lives of those caught up in them of any positive meaning. In such a world, is it possible to view life as worth living without believing in a transcendent good that redeems the world?

It may be possible for those of us lucky enough not to have experienced horror or witnessed it firsthand and callous enough that we can ignore its pervasiveness and our own complicity. But what about the rest of us?

What we have here are two interwoven problems. The theological problem of evil is, of course, no problem for atheists; it’s simply an argument against God’s existence. They call it the “argument from evil.” The problem is faced by theists who want to reconcile their belief in God with the world’s evils

But one reason why theists want to defend their faith is because of the second problem, sometimes called the existential problem of evil. This problem isn’t about how to reconcile God’s existence with the world’s evils but how to find positive meaning in life despite them. And for many, the only viable solution comes from the promise of a transcendent good that fulfills our ethico-religious hope – in other words, from God[/left]

[left]The argument from evil is a challenge to the existence of God traditionally conceived as omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. But I have defined God less precisely – as a transcendent being who fulfills our ethico-religious hope.

To fulfill that hope, God would have to be good, and He would have to be greater than any evil (in the sense that, given God’s existence, evils would cease to have ultimate significance). But this isn’t the same as being all-powerful. So why can’t we just sidestep the problem of evil altogether by admitting that God isn’t omnipotent?

Unfortunately, the problem won’t evaporate so easily. Even if we accept that God is not all-powerful, we may still ask: Why does evil look so significant if it isn’t? If reality is fundamentally on the side of goodness, why don’t we all have a clear sense of God’s redemptive work, an awareness that evils are fleeting while the good eternal?[/left]

[left/]For what it’s worth, my own view is that, insofar as everything in the world depends absolutely on the creative and sustaining work of the creator, the world’s integrity as a separate reality, something in its own right apart from God, may depend on a radical abdication on God’s part. The act of creation may be inseparable from an act of radical divine self-restriction. Self-imposed limits on what God can legitimately do in relation to the world may constitute the very condition for the world’s existence as a reality separate from God. And this may be especially true for the independent existence of free beings. If so, then when moral horrors are perpetrated, God may be constrained so radically that all He can do is look on and weep[/left]

[left]God’s goodness may not demand that He prevent all evils; but it may well demand that He redeem them all, so that evil will never be the final word in any human life – an insight which leads Hick as well as others (such as Marilyn Adams 2002 and 2006, and Thomas Talbott 2001) to insist that a doctrine of universal salvation is essential to any successful theodicy[/left]

[left]It may well be that many of the atheists who pose the argument from evil are envisioning the evils of the world as they look from an atheist perspective. In other words, they are begging the question: they are assuming that God does not exist, attaching to the evils of the world the significance they would have, given that assumption, and then demanding a reason why God would permit evils which have such overwhelming significance. But if a redeeming God exists, they do not have such overwhelming significance after all[/left]

[left]To say that God defeats horrors is to say that God responds by making them an integral part of something valuable – which, I should note, is nothing like claiming that horrors were never really bad at all. It is one thing to say that God is so resourceful He can turn a monumental evil – say the Holocaust – into an element of a greater whole that gives positive meaning to the experiences of its victims. It is something else to say that the Holocaust is part of the “best of all possible worlds,” and that the Nazis were therefore agents of the good. The latter is appalling. The former – which says that God can take the worst that we can throw at Him and find a way to turn it to the good – is not[/left]

Other evidence also suggests that the first mention of 'they stoned him with stones' is a later addition to the text. While "sakal" is used four times in Deuteronomy and seven times in the deuteronomistic history, "Ragam" is used only once in Deuteronomy and aside from Josh. 7.25, only one other time in the deuteronomistic history. Who added the phrase with "Ragam" and why is an interesting question. The restricting of the punishment to Achan alone could be an attempt by a very late hand to remove the theological difficulty that one encounters if Achan's children and livestock are executed together with him. This position is advocated by B.S. Jackson, Theft in Early Jewish Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 62 n. 1. But it is possible that this addition is simply a gloss that crept into the text explaining that the older term "sakal" is equivalent to the newer term "ragam". If a later editor had wanted to change the story and have only Achan killed by stoning, one wonders why he did such a poor job of editing

[left]It has been suggested that this story was temporarily suppressed
because it portrayed David in a bad light, or because it tells of child sacrifice (Arvid Kapelrud), an institution that was condemned by the first redactor(s) of the deuteronomistic history. It has further been suggested that the material between 2 Sam. 20.23 and 2 Sam. 24.25 "is neither part of the Deuteronomistic history nor related to the earlier literature it embraced'. If this story proved to be alien to the deuteronomistic history, then one could object to any attempt to use it to as an example of corporate thinking by the deuteronomistic historian. It could be posited that this narrative was dropped out of the original edition precisely because it contained ideas of divine retribution that were seen as untenable to the deuteronomistic historian[/left]

[left]Kapelrud looks to the connection between royalty and fertility to
explain the nuances of this narrative. Obviously, David would have very good reasons to eliminate Saul's descendants, as they were rivals to his throne and as long as they lived they were a continuing threat to the stability of his dynasty. But if David purged them because they were a threat to the stability of his throne, it would reflect badly on him. As Kapelrud notes, the king in the ancient Near East was responsible for the general fertility of his country (Ps. 72). When fertility failed, it called into question the legitimacy of the ruler and often forced the ruler to take extraordinary measures. These measures might include human sacrifice or, if things were particularly bad, royal human sacrifice (2 Kgs 16.3). By killing Saul's progeny, David could accomplish two ends with a single action: he would restore the kingdom's fertility by offering a royal sacrifice and would eliminate several other legitimate claimants to the throne at the same time.

The greatest weakness in this explanation is that it ignores the logic of the narrative which informs us that the famine is due to the improper treatment of the Gibeonites by Saul. Clearly there are elements of Canaanite mythology in the background of this passage (they both point to factors such as the time of the year in which the execution occurred, the connection between the mourning rights of Rizpah and the rites surrounding Baal's death, the exposure of the corpses until the rains arrive, and that the particular form of execution may be a type of dismemberment related to the way Anat deals with Mot), but Kapelrud gives them too great an emphasis. Kapelrud's conjecture calls for one to read motives into the text that are not explicitly there, and at the same time to disregard the rationale that the text supplies to explain these executions[/left]

ושמתי אני את פני באיש ההוא ובמשפחתו (ויקרא כ ה) ותניא אמר ר"ש אם הוא חטא משפחתו מה חטאת לומר לך אין לך משפחה שיש בה מוכס שאין כולה מוכסין ושיש בה לסטים שאין כולה לסטים מפני שמחפין עליו

[left]The Hebrew [Israelite], it may be suggested, realized as well as we do that, if a particular person commits a crime, he is responsible for it, in a way that even those closest to him, his wife or his son, really cannot be. But his basic recognition was qualified, as far as the operation of the law was concerned, not so much by ideas of 'corporate personality', as by the notion that a man can possess persons in much the same way that he possesses property and by early religious beliefs about the contagious nature of blood, holiness, sin and uncleanness. That we do not share these concepts no doubt makes our recognition of individual justice more equitable than it often could be in practice in Old Testament times[/left]

[left]apologists cannot accept that ancient Israelite religion would advocate the idea that God may have an amoral or capricious dimension. Heschel argues that 'there is no belief in divine arbitrariness, in an anger which consumes and afflicts without moral justification'. Heschel, The Prophets, p. 77. Eichrodt similarly states 'that in the case of God there can never be any question of despotic caprice striking out in blind rage'. Eichrodt, Theology, p. 265. While I agree that in many instances of divine retribution, the Hebrew Bible does make a strong connection between God's punishment and the specific misdeeds of those who receive the punishment, I find it difficult to assent to the argument that there are no cases in the Hebrew Bible in which God's action is either completely inscrutable to those being punished, or is vastly out of proportion to the human error that released the punishment. Additionally, it should be noted that this is only one of several texts that speak about God as a dangerous power who is apt to strike out at those who are around him in a highly volatile manner (Lev. 10.1-7; 1 Sam. 6.19-7.2; 2 Sam. 24). The severity of God's reaction does not always match the deed that set it in motion; thus the language of divine dread and terror (Isa. 63.2-6[/left]

[left]It is patent from many passages in the Old Testament that this wrath has no concern whatever with moral qualities. There is something very baffling in the way in which it is kindled and manifested. It is, as has been well said, 'like a hidden force of nature', like stored-up electricity, discharging itself upon anyone who comes too near[/left]

[left]With the prophets of the eighth and seventh centuries [mainly Jeremiah and Ezekiel] there is a transition from primitive collectivism to moral individualism[/left]

[left]Certainly, exact retribution in an afterlife or a resurrected existence in which accounts are set right is an excellent way in which to balance out the injustices apparent in this life, and thus to justify God. But instead of developing a concept of individualized resurrection or of an individualistic afterlife in which the injustices of this world could be set aright, much of the literature of this period, including eschatological texts that are particularly concerned with the problem of evil, are focused upon God's intervention for the community as a whole or for a purified remnant. The few texts that speak of a resurrection of the dead (e.g. Ezek. 37) portray it as a communal concept. It is not until 400 years later that the idea of resurrection is applied in a more individualistic fashion (Dan. 12) and even here it still occurs in a text that is concerned with the fate of the people Israel. Even rabbinic Judaism, which fully accepted the resurrection of the dead and also the immortality of the soul, continued to stress that communal aspects still operated within these notions that might at first glance appear to be radically individualistic[/left]

[left]One should also be aware that the prophets were not systematic theologians and that they tailored their oracles to specific situations and therefore their messages were bound to vary from situation to situation. And finally one might ponder the question of whether teaching people about the way in which God operates in the world inherently involves the use of contradiction. (Note the way in which Maimonides, in his introduction to The Guide of the Perplexed, explains that certain types of contradictions are necessary in order to teach obscure philosophical and/or theological matters

. . .

Theologians often affirm two premises that are in contradiction with each other, and they label this affirmation of contradictory notions with the rather benign term paradox. (A classic example of the way a religion might openly affirm two mutually exclusive theories about the way in which the world operates is: 'Everything is foreseen [by God], yet freewill is granted; the world is ruled with grace, and yet all is according to the number of [man's] deeds[/left]

[left]This doctrine [merits of the fathers] plays an important part in Jewish theology, and has its counterpart in the belief that under certain conditions one person has also to suffer for the sins of another person. We have thus in Judaism both the notion of imputed righteousness and imputed sin. They have, however, never attained such significance either in Jewish theology or in Jewish conscience as it is generally assumed. By a happy inconsistency, in the theory of salvation, so characteristic of Rabbinic theology, the importance of these doctrines is reduced to very small proportions, so that their effect was in the end beneficial and formed a healthy stimulus to conscience[/left]

[left]That in the case of a man who is righteous, his wicked posterity is not liable to suffer for their own sins so quickly, the punishment being suspended for a time by the merits of their fathers; but in the case that a man is wicked, the visiting of his sins upon his wicked posterity will hasten the judgement of God, so that his children will at once be punished for their own evil deeds. In no case, however, will they suffer for the sins of their fathers[/left]

[left]While not as systematic as Marcion, some Gnostic authors similarly sought to denigrate the Old Testament God by highlighting His injustices. For example, the author of Testimony of Truth, a Coptic Gnostic text found at Nag Hammadi, states: “Surely, he [the biblical God] has shown himself to be a malicious envier. And what kind of a God is this? For great is the blindness of those who read, and they did not know it. And he said: “I am the jealous God; I will bring the sins of the fathers upon the children until three and four generations” (Exod. 20:5). This anonymous Gnostic author criticizes the biblical God for the Decalogue’s unjust principle of punishing children for the sins of the parents “until the third of fourth generations.” Because of this doctrine, God is described as a “malicious envier.”[/left]