Last year I read Theology of the Manifest: Christianity Without Metaphysics by Steven Nemes. It was a treat to read, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys philosophical theology. I appreciate Nemes's creative thinking and clear writing; as far as I can tell, he seems to be doing some of the more interesting work in this field.
One of my motivations for reading this work was to learn more about panentheism (or as Nemes puts it, "qualified monism"). His version of this perspective on the God-World relationship is as follows: God is the "absolute Life whose 'body' or visible exterior image of his inner life is the phenomenological World."1 (Since Nemes capitalizes "World" in his book, I will do the same throughout this post for the sake of consistency. An exception is made in a quotation from another author, who does not capitalize the word.)
The term I wish to zero in on here is "phenomenological." The philosophical tools Nemes is working with here are those of phenomenology, which is a tradition that maintains there is "a strict correlation between appearance and being."2 As well, the "phenomenological World" mentioned in the above definition for qualified monism refers to something different than the Earth or the entire cosmos; it instead refers to "the total 'environment' in which objects present themselves."3 The phenomenological World is not only made up of physical objects, but also ideas like geometric truths and possibilities such as danger.4
Having defined qualified monism, it is worth considering the implications this view has for the problem of evil, which is addressed in endnote 28 and section 9 of chapter 3. If the phenomenological World reflects God's inner life, and God is good, how are we to make sense of the evil that appears?
Let us begin with the endnote, where Nemes entertains the idea that God is the source of both good and evil. This is based on Isaiah 45:7–8,5 which says:
I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do all these things. Shower, O heavens, from above, and let the skies rain down righteousness; let the earth open, that salvation may spring up, and let it cause righteousness to sprout up also; I the Lord have created it.
However, this interpretation is questionable. As Gregory Boyd observes, "The context of this passage (see 45:1–6) is specifically about the future deliverance of the children of Israel out of Babylon; it is not concerned with God's cosmic creative activity."6
Moving on to section 9, here Nemes addresses the evidential problem of evil, which is concerned with gratuitous evil. This includes cases of evil that are alleged to have either no purpose whatsoever or where the evil outweighs the good purpose that the former is intended to serve. The idea of a perfectly good God, so the argument goes, does not seem to cohere with the existence of gratuitous evil, thus supporting the belief that God does not exist.7
Nemes makes a forceful point against this argument: "To say that an evil is gratuitous is to say that it is not justified by anything that comes before it, simultaneously with it, or after it in time,"8 which is an impossible perspective to obtain given a person's embodied nature in history.9 He then goes on to suggest that the reasons that God permits evil are a mystery because God's way of thinking are of a higher quality than that of a human. Furthermore, these "gratuitous" evils appear in the phenomenological World (which, remember, is God's body that reflects his inner life), so there is actually reason to doubt that any evil is gratuitous.10 It is not surprising that other minds with a penchant for monism come to similar conclusions. I think here of Spinoza, who wagered that evil is a byproduct of man's finite perspective; if he could see the World in its totality, the apparent evils would disappear, and man would realize that they serve a higher purpose in the final analysis.11
While I appreciate the first point, I find the second unconvincing. Would it not be less hasty to remain agnostic as to whether or not any evils are gratuitous? If we cannot know that evils are gratuitous based on the fact that we do not have God's capacities for knowing such, we should not be able to know that there are no gratuitous evils either, as this knowledge would also seem to require a God's-eye perspective. The limitations of a temporal and embodied existence cut both ways.
It could also be argued that the main ingredient of phenomenology—that appearance and being are strongly correlated—also casts doubt on the notion that there is no such thing as gratuitous evil. Who can read "Rebellion" from The Brothers Karamazov, for example, and not be moved by Ivan's pathos as he speaks about the suffering of children? Some evils appear completely unnecessary and strike at the core of our being with their wickedness. Yet the higher-harmony metaphysics that Nemes advocates does not seem to be sensitive to this.
In his own words, "Despite all evil, the reality of God as the source of everything seen and unseen is never doubted or called into question in the Bible . . . [God's] inner life is constantly making itself manifest under the image of what appears in the World."12
Some material in Scripture renders this metaphysic suspect. Of course, the Bible contains tensions on several issues, but that does not mean that the parts that support monism should run roughshod over the sections that support dualism or pluralism. Take, for example, Matthew 12:22–28:
Then they brought to him [Jesus] a demoniac who was blind and mute; and he cured him, so that the one who had been mute could speak and see. All the crowds were amazed and said, ‘Can this be the Son of David?’ But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, ‘It is only by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons, that this fellow casts out the demons.’ He knew what they were thinking and said to them, ‘Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand. If Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself; how then will his kingdom stand? If I cast out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your own exorcists cast them out? Therefore they will be your judges. But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you.
This does not sound like a World that perfectly represents God's inner life. Here Jesus makes a distinction between the Spirit of God and the kingdom of God on the one hand, and Satan and demons on the other. Passages about spiritual warfare, such as this one, make more sense on a dualistic or pluralistic basis than a monistic one. The scenery of the World does not mirror God's intentions with complete precision. As Gregory Boyd puts it,
While no orthodox first-century Jew or Christian ever doubted that there existed only one Creator, or that this Creator would reign supreme in the eschaton, it seems equally clear that the New Testament authors also never doubted that in this present world the Creator's will was not the only will that was being carried out. Wills, human and angelic, oppose God, and he must fight against them.13
As I compare Nemes's conception of the God-World relationship to Boyd's, I come away thinking that the latter is more cogent. Perhaps I will someday encounter a version of panentheism that I find compelling, but I am not ready to accept the "solution" to the problem of evil that qualified monism offers, nor the determinism that follows from it. Instead, I find the emphasis that a model for God like open theism places on spiritual conflict, free will, and the give-and-take relationship between God and the World to be more attractive.
Notes
1. Steven Nemes, Theology of the Manifest: Christianity Without Metaphysics (Lanham: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2023), 53.
2. Ibid., 15.
3. Ibid., 36.
4. Ibid., 36–37.
5. Ibid., 74–75.
6. Gregory A. Boyd, God At War: The Bible & Spiritual Conflict (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 149.
7. Nemes, Theology of the Manifest, 69.
8. Ibid., 70–71.
9. Ibid., 71.
10. Ibid., 72.
11. William Mander, "Pantheism," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2023, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pantheism/.
12. Nemes, Theology of the Manifest, 69.
13. Boyd, God At War, 185.
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