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Theology and Science

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The creative suffering of the triune God: An evolutionary panentheistic paradigm

Gloria L. Schaab Online Publication Date: 01 November 2007 To cite this Article: Schaab, Gloria L. (2007) 'The creative suffering of the triune God: An evolutionary panentheistic paradigm', Theology and Science, 5:3, 289 - 304 To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/14746700701622032 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14746700701622032

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The Creative Suffering of the Triune God: An Evolutionary Panentheistic Paradigm

GLORIA L. SCHAAB
Abstract In view of the ubiquity of pain, suffering, and death, inicted and inherent in the cosmos and its creatures, how shall we speak rightly of God? This essay proposes that the only morally coherent response to this question is that God suffers in, with, and under the creative processes of the cosmos. It discusses scientic insights from evolution and from quantum physics that support the proposal of the suffering of the Christian God from a Trinitarian, panentheistic approach to God in relation to the cosmos and its creatures. Key words: Theology; Suffering; Evolution; Trinity; Panentheism

Introduction
Auschwitz. Hiroshima. Rwanda. Sudan. 9/11. Iraq. Indonesia. Katrina. How shall one speak rightly of God in view of the suffering and death that echoes from this litany? How shall one speak rightly of God in view of the suffering and death inherent and inicted in the cosmos and its creatures? Clearly, the reality of suffering that attends innocent, existential, and inicted pain and death has demanded a reasonable and authentic theological response in every era and has persistently impelled theological debate concerning the relationship of God to suffering and the conceivability of the suffering of God. However, the global consciousness, scope, and impact of existential and inicted pain and death in the twentieth and twenty-rst centuries have often driven this debate to an acute pitch. Atrocities committed through multinational and multicultural conicts and terrorism, aberrant human relations, and environmental devastation relentlessly provoke the question How can God rule over a world of such suffering and be yet unmoved?1 While in a former age, some may have looked to an omnipotent and impassible deus ex machina to provide a solution to worldly distress, the contemporary worldview directs many twentieth- and twenty-rst-century theologians to a powerless and suffering God, a God who allows himself to be edged out of the world and on to the cross . . . weak and powerless in the world, and that is exactly the way, the only way, in which he can be with us and help us . . . only a suffering God can help.2

ISSN 1474-6700 print/ISSN 1474-6719 online/07/030289-16 2007 Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences DOI: 10.1080/14746700701622032

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Profoundly affected by the immensity and inexorability of such suffering, many twentieth-century theologians have advanced a broad spectrum of proposals addressing the mystery of Gods relation to the barbarous excess of unmerited and senseless suffering witnessed in this last century.3 This problem of suffering and evil moves some theologians to theodicy, to the defense of an omnipotent, immutable, and all-loving God whose nature, attributes, and purposes must somehow be justied or justify the presence and purpose of suffering in response to pain, death, and evil in the cosmos. It causes other scholars to ascribe the presence of evil to other factors, such as human freedom or nitude.4 However, the presence of such suffering and evil persuades many others to re-think the classical attributions that have been applied to God in relation to the world. As John Haught has observed, The cruciform visage of nature . . . invites us to depart, perhaps more than ever before, from all notions of a deity untouched by the worlds suffering.5 Moved to a departure from all notions of a deity untouched, I join my voice with those who say that understandings of God as immutable, impassible, and unlimited in power are no longer viable in a cosmos beset by suffering and death. With a cohort of theologians from diverse hermeneutical perspectives, I propose that the most viable response to the travail of the cosmos is the recognition of the Christian God as so intimately and immanently related to creation as to participate in the very sufferings of the cosmos itself. While theological proposals toward the suffering of God often seem to present compelling arguments for the renunciation of the impassible, omnipotent God of classical theism, other contemporary interpretations caution against too ready an attribution of suffering to God or too uncritical an afrmation of suffering in God. These cautions rise from a diverse chorus of voices representing feminist liberation theologies, with an incessant basso profundo from the classical Catholic tradition. While by no means harmonized in their conclusions, a chorus of feminist theological voices concurs that, as interpreted and developed within the patriarchal tradition of Christianity, the image of the crucied Christ, the suffering servant of God, tends to glorify violence, torment, and abuse and to commend freely chosen suffering as an example to be emulated. Moreover, classical Christologies of sin, atonement, and redemption communicate the message that suffering is salvic in itself and that self-sacrice effects the salvation of the world. A forerunner in the feminist critique of such interpretations is theologian Mary Daly, who indicts the image of the crucied Christ as a scapegoat image who bears the guilt and the blame for the failures of the dominant societal group.6 Building on Dalys foundation some twenty years later, Rebecca Parker and Joanne Carlson Brown mount a critique of the notion that Jesus suffered in accord with Gods will. They indict such a notion as an example of divine child abuse perpetrated by a divine sadist in which death is lauded as salvic and the suffering child represents the hope of the world.7 Rather than taking their critical approach through Christology, many Catholic theologians have charted a course through the classical theological tradition concerning the divine nature and attributes. Such theologians maintain that the attribution of suffering to God only exacerbates the problem of evil by entangling

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God in time, inhibiting divine freedom, and subjecting the Creator to the created order, which leads to an eternalization and universalization of suffering that may militate against resistance to injustice. They note that afrmation of divine suffering radically contests assertions of divine immutability and impassibility, as well as attributions of omniscience and omnipotence that relate logically within that system. Hence, the assertion of suffering in God looms as a potential liability to every classical Christian doctrine that considers these philosophical and theological predicates axiomatic. Mindful of these critiques, I nevertheless contend, in the words of Arthur Peacocke, that for any concept of God to be morally acceptable and coherent . . . we cannot but tentatively propose that God suffers in, with, and under the creative processes of the world with their costly unfolding in time.8 To support this position, I set myself within the theology and science dialogue. Employing the science of evolutionary cosmology and biology to ground a theological afrmation of the suffering of God supports the aims of this project in several ways. First, it extends the compass of its theoretical basis beyond the revelation, philosophy, and metaphysics employed by the bulk of classical and contemporary theological thought. Second, this wider scientic compass permits an approach that is expanded to an inclusive cosmocentric perspective, rather than narrowed by a largely anthropocentric viewpoint. Third, a scientic approach provides a basis for its proposals in observable, empirical, experiential, and emerging data concerning the entities, structures, and processes of the cosmos, rather than dependent upon essentially metaphysical or logical principles. Finally, the use of the understandings of evolutionary science increases the theoretical defensibility of its proposals for persons who live in an age in which science as much as religion, theology, or philosophy shapes the personal and social consciousness of humanity concerning itself and the cosmos of which humanity is an integral part. The theological model I use for expressing the relation of God to the cosmos is that of panentheism, which suggests that the being of the cosmos is in God and the Being of God is in the cosmos, but that the Being of God is not identied with nor exhausted by the cosmos. With a myriad of those engaged in contemporary systematic theology and the theology science dialogue, I contend that panentheism best exemplies Gods creative relationship to the evolutionary world observed by the sciences.9 Furthermore, I conceive this panentheistic relationship in Trinitarian terms that lead to a triune distinction in the One God as personally Transcendent, personally Incarnate, and personally Immanent in relation to the cosmos.10 Three consequences of this panentheistic theology of God as trinity deserve emphasis with regard to the notion of a suffering God. First, if the triune God as Transcendent, Incarnate, and Immanent is understood in panentheistic terms, then no aspect of God is detached from the God world relationship. Consequently, the being and becoming of the cosmos is integral to the Being of the Divine. Therefore, all events in the life of the cosmos, including events of pain, suffering, and death, are events in the life of God. All that is created is embraced by the inner unity of the divine life of the CreatorTranscendent, Incarnate, and Immanent.11

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Key evolutionary concepts in the afrmation of divine suffering

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Having situated my afrmation of the suffering of God within the context of an evolutionary panentheistic paradigm of a God world relationship, I now ask what insights of evolutionary science might support this inference. While evolutionary perspectives offer a number of possible approaches, three key concepts ably support this proposal: the costliness of the evolutionary process, the existential reality of cosmic unpredictability, and the whole part interaction of God and the cosmos. I bring each of these three movements into dialogue with the panentheistic paradigm and the Christian tradition to afrm an evolutionary theology of the creative suffering of the Triune God.

The costliness of evolution

The rst movement toward the proposal of divine suffering is rooted in understanding creation as a costly process. While creation through the interplay of chance and law elicits a kaleidoscopic diversity of life forms, this process also results in a pervasiveness of pain, suffering, and death in the cosmos and its creatures. In the evolutionary process, however, pain, suffering, and death appear to be necessary conditions both for the survival of life and for the transition of life to novel and emergent forms. The presence of pain in the sentient creatures of the cosmos not only accompanies death but also functions as a warning signal for danger and disease. The emergence of new forms and patterns within a nite universe can occur only when the death of old forms and patterns make way for them. Thus, as Arthur Peacocke observes,
There is a kind of structural logic about the inevitability of living organisms dying and of preying on each other for we cannot conceive, in a lawful nonmagical universe, of any way whereby immense variety of developing, biological, structural complexity might appear, except by utilizing structures already existing, either by way of modication (as in biological evolution) or of incorporation (as in feeding).12

For Christian paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the presence of pain, suffering, and death is not just structurally logical in an evolving universe, but statistically necessary. To comprehend this claim, one must grasp Teilhards understanding of what it means to create. For Teilhard, the primordial nature of matter is multiple and unorganized. Through the evolutionary processes in which God is immanent, the multiple is unied and organized, converging gradually toward unity in God. Therefore, Teilhard suggests, if to create is to unite (evolutively, gradually), then God cannot create without evil appearing as a shadow.13 According to Teilhard, pain, suffering, and death in an evolving universe are woven into the creative process itself. They are not solely experiences that sentient beings inict upon one another by necessity or by choice. Rather, they are inherent aspects of a universe in the process of unication and transformation toward God. In Teilhards own words,

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By virtue of the very structure of the nothingness over which God leans, in order to create he can proceed in only one way. He must under his attractive inuence arrange and unify little by little . . . But what is the inevitable counterpart of the complete success which is obtained by following a process of this type? Is it not the payment of a certain amount of waste? It involves disharmony or physical decomposition in the pre-living, suffering in the living, and sin in the domain of liberty.14

Free as it is, creation cannot progress toward unity without giving rise to . . . some evil here or there and that by statistical necessity.15 Hence, so long as disorder, disunity, and disorganization endure within the creative movement toward God, Teilhard suggests, so long do pain, suffering, and death endure as inherent, inescapable elements of the process. For those in the Christian theological tradition, this scientic insight of the costliness of evolution resonates with the theological insight of Gods vulnerable, self-emptying, and suffering love revealed in creation and incarnation. Nevertheless, in the Christian tradition, the prevailing theistic paradigm of God as existing in a space distinct from that of the world, implies a detachment from the world in its suffering.16 However, a panentheistic paradigm suggests no such separation and yields no implied detachment. Hence, the panentheistic model evokes an insight into the suffering of God in the very processes of creation. God is creating the world from within and, the world being in God, God experiences its sufferings directly as Gods own and not from the outside.17 In transcendent, incarnate, and immanent relation to the evolutionary cosmos, God envelops, engages, and enters into those events of pain, suffering and death that constitute the costly processes of evolution, as well as those events that represent moral evil. However, pain, suffering, and death do not have the last word. As evolutionary science demonstrates, life is dynamically sustained by and emergent from the death or transformation of entities and structures that already exist in the cosmos. This dynamic of divine creativity that transforms suffering and death to new life in the cosmos represents a dim reection of the divine creativity that raised Jesus from the dead. Therefore, both the evolutionary process and the paschal mystery reveal that pain, suffering, and death, though pervasive in a cosmos of free process and free will, are nonetheless within the transforming and creative love of God. God may be said to both suffer and save in the costly evolution of the cosmos, even as God suffered and saved in Christ.

The existential reality of cosmic uncertainty

A second movement toward the proposal of divine suffering occurs with scientic developments related to the inherent open-endedness and unpredictability of the cosmos. Despite the virtual demise of the Newtonian mechanistic model of the universe, science still assumes and depends upon a level of predictability in its discipline. Such predictability seems to be obvious at the macro-level of cosmic events, that is, at the level of the operation of necessity or natural law. However, biological observation of the emergence and evolution of life in the cosmos and

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quantum experiments with subatomic particles reveal that there seems to be an intrinsic indeterminacy and unpredictability at the micro-level of the cosmos. This is the level associated with the operation of chance in cosmic creativity and with the apparent unpredictability in measurement of particle position and movement at the quantum level.18 This process of eliciting cosmic potential through chance is what Teilhard termed tatonnement or groping. For Teilhard, however, tatonnement is not mere chance, but directed chance, directed by God who is panentheistically immanent in the cosmos itself.19 Admittedly, the idea of directed chance seems somewhat of an oxymoron. Nonetheless, the concept is reminiscent of the response of chaos theorist Joseph Ford to Albert Einsteins famous question of whether God plays dice with the universe. According to Ford, God plays dice with the universe. But theyre loaded dice. And the main objective of physics now is to nd out by what rules were they loaded and how can we use them for our own ends.20 In Teilhards own elaboration of the notion of directed chance, he explains, The divine action . . . cannot limit itself to enclosing and molding individual natures from outside. In order to fully dominate them, it must have a hold on their innermost life;21 must, in a word, be panentheistically related to the life of the cosmos. Hence, God enters into the very life of the cosmos; every quark, every particle, every aspect of matter and energy is connected to Gods desire and hope for the world.22 Nonetheless, such manifestations of cosmic unpredictability in the process of creation pose challenges to theistic notions of divine omnipotence, immutability, and impassibility in relation to the cosmos. If there is irreducible autonomy, freedom, and unpredictability evident in the cosmos from its microto its macro-levels; if such autonomy and freedom express themselves in the God-given self-creativity of the cosmos through the interplay of chance within law and the indeterminate events of quantum physics; and if such autonomy and freedom are intended by and disclosive of a rational and loving Creator, one might conclude that God imposed limitations upon Godself in order that the cosmos might unfold its potentialities in free self-creativity. Christian theologians like Arthur Peacocke, John Polkinghorne, Keith Ward, and Denis Edwards, among others, have suggested that such divine self-limitation is actually the denitive demonstration of the understanding of God as Love. If, in Gods nature as Love, God created both the cosmos and humanity as free and autonomous, then God, in Gods nature as Love, has chosen not to exercise coercive power over the cosmos and its creatures. Rather, in order to achieve his purposes, [God] has allowed his inherent omnipotence . . . to be modied, restricted, and curtailed by the very open-endedness that he has bestowed upon creation.23 In preserving this open-endedness, a balance is struck between the freedom and autonomy of the Creator and of the created. According to Ron Higheld, this balance protects Gods deity while giving . . . freedom to the world and autonomy to science. God . . . allows an evolving universe to explore its own possibilities through indeterminate quantum events and random mutation and natural

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selection.24 However, this balance is not without cost. In its God-given freedom of process, evolution unavoidably makes mistakes, enters blind alleys, and produces much suffering25 that is borne by the cosmos. Furthermore, in a panentheistic model, these costs and risks are borne by God as well, through a self-inicted vulnerability to the very processes God had himself created.26 In this vulnerability, God opens Godself to and involves Godself in the pleasures and pains, joys and sufferings, life and death inherent in all levels of the cosmos in its costly unfolding. Moreover, in the Trinitarian panentheistic model I propose, this vulnerability is borne in a triune manner. God as Transcendent encompasses and embraces the cosmos in its costly unfolding; God as Incarnate eneshes divine love, life, and purpose by becoming one with the cosmos in its costly being and becoming; and God as Immanent creates and transforms the cosmos within its perilous process of evolution. The invocation of cosmic uncertainty and of the self-limited omnipotence of God, nonetheless, leads in turn to poignant questions of the pastoral efcacy of such assertions. Does the attribution of self-limitation and suffering in God solve the problem of suffering? Does the hyphen have the power to reconcile Creator and created or is it, in Highelds term, simply theology-by-punctuation?27 Can one build trust in a Creator in the face of divine self-limitation, suffering, and risk? In the effort to redress past theological imbalances, has the pendulum swung too far?28 Is it enough to claim that suffering is natural and that God suffers with human beings? A viable response to these questions must return to the understanding of God as triune creator and liberator of the cosmos in panentheistic relation to creation. While plainly afrming the self-limitation and suffering of God, the Trinitarian panentheistic approach also strongly asserts the omnipotence and omniscience of the Divine Being of God as transcendent Creator. While clearly acknowledging the pervasiveness of divine and cosmic suffering, this evolutionary theology maintains that suffering in the cosmos is not static, but inexorably moves toward new or transformed life. While the freedom and the autonomy of creation in general and of humanity in particular sometimes hampers Gods insistent urging toward life in cosmic history, the dynamism of redemption, liberation, and transformation toward new and abundant life is nonetheless the essential and indisputable dynamic of the Christian God.

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Whole part interaction of God and the cosmos

A third movement toward the proposal of suffering in God concerns an understanding of Gods interaction with the universe. A fundamental understanding maintained by those who engage the insights of both theology and science is that the God who sustains the laws of nature does not simultaneously intervene to abrogate them. Hence, such scholars insist that Gods interaction with the cosmos is not interventionist, but must be conceived in ways that do not suggest a violation of natural processes. While in response to this position some use models based on information input29 and others based on the principle of

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quantum indeterminacy discussed above,30 a particularly persuasive proposal and one that is consistent with a panentheistic paradigmis the model of divine interaction through whole part inuence.31 In this model, the system-as-awhole inuences its constituent parts and, conversely, the constituent parts inuence the system-as-a-whole. The movement of inuence in this model, therefore, is bi-directional. The realities that exist at higher levels are causally interactive, in both directions, with the realities that exist at the lower levels. Based on the top-down aspect of this model, God genuinely inuences events and behaviors at all levels of creation in a whole part fashion. However, based on the bottom-up aspect of this model, the parts of the cosmos in their nitude and freedom also exert a part whole effect and even constraint on inuences of its personal Creator. Hence, it is conceivable that Gods capacity to inuence the cosmos may encounter resistance and rejection in the creaturely realm, most especially in that of the human. Moreover, it is conceivable that in divine freedom God may refuse participation in the free activities of the cosmos that are inimical to divine intentions. In either case, within the model of whole part interaction between God and the cosmos, the cosmos clearly has the capacity to inuence and affect the Divine, even to the point that cosmic processes cause God to suffer in, with, and under the entities and structures of the cosmos in its costly unfolding in time. Because of this dynamic, the understanding of God in whole part interaction with the cosmos provides a critical element in the afrmation of the creative suffering of the Triune God. If God, transcendent, incarnate, and immanent, is vivifying, sustaining, and transforming the cosmos through whole part inuence, then God has entered into the very life of things . . . every aspect of matter and energy is connected to Gods desire and hope for the world.32 However, since in a panentheistic model this relationship is bi-directional, the realities of the cosmos can exert effects upon God. If this is the case, God does not remain unaffected by cosmic realities, even those that include pain, suffering, and death. When the natural world, with all its suffering, is panentheistically conceived of as in God, it follows that the evils of pain, suffering, and death in the world are internal to Gods own self: God must have experience of the natural. This intimate and actual experience of God must also include all those events that constitute the evil intentions of human beings and their implementation.33 Hence, in transcendent, incarnate, and immanent relation, God embraces and permeates the cosmos in all its pain and suffering, false starts and dead ends. But in Gods gracious doing so, these very events become the means through which God draws near and passes by, disclosing Godself as present and active in the travail of cosmic history. On this point, critics contend that if God is understood panentheistically in transcendent, incarnate, and immanent relation to the cosmos, then God must be conceived as actively and receptively participative in the suffering of the cosmos, a conclusion associated with process theology.34 Nevertheless, while a panentheistic model clearly implies the receptivity of God to all manner of existential reality, its afrmation of the principle of cosmic indeterminacy and the dynamics of whole part inuence allow it to reject Gods active or volitional involvement in cosmic travail in favor

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of attributing such travail to the free process and free will of the cosmos and its creatures.

Evaluating the proposal of the creative suffering of God

Having identied and analyzed the key concepts that contribute to an evolutionary theology of the suffering of God, I now move to an evaluation of my proposal by means of three criteria: (1) t with data, (2) fecundity, and (3) pastoral efcacy.35 The data with which such proposals must t are threefold: the broad features of the entities, structures, and processes of the evolving cosmos; the fundamental insights of the Christian tradition; and the panentheistic paradigm of the God world relationship. The fecundity of a proposal requires that it have generativity, a vitality about it that has the capacity to foster new ideas and creative responses regarding God and the God world relationship regarding suffering. Finally, these ideas and responses must demonstrate pastoral efcacy, the capacity to inspire, transform, and liberate human persons and the universe in ways that promote the full ourishing of all manner of being in the midst of a suffering world.

Fit with data

As indicated above, the criterion of t with data addresses three elements with which an evolutionary theology of the suffering God must show coherence. These elements are the insights of evolutionary science, the Christian theological tradition, and the panentheistic paradigm of the God world relationship. Evolutionary science. The three particular insights of evolutionary science upon which the afrmation of divine suffering is predicated in this essay were deliberately selected because of their support for the postulate of God as suffering and Triune Creator. One begins with the free and autonomous evolution of the cosmos as a costly process that inherently entails the death of old forms for the emergence of new forms of life. This costly process may be a consequence of the fundamental indeterminacy of cosmic processes at the quantum level, or of cosmic self-creativity operating freely and autonomously through law and chance. It may also be a consequence of human persons operating freely and autonomously through action and intentions that have results deleterious to persons and purposes other than their own. When coupled with the panentheistic understanding of the Triune God as transcendent, incarnate, and immanent in whole part or top-down relation to the cosmos, these two realities of evolutionary unfolding become situated within the very life of God-qua-Creator. In this bidirectional relation, one can conceive of God as suffering all the pain, suffering, and death ubiquitous in the cosmos through the free will of human persons and the free processes of cosmic unfolding. Hence, any serious consideration of Godqua-Creator in whole part relation to the cosmos that unfolds by means of the

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costly process of evolutionary creativity under the sway of cosmic indeterminacy is inexorably led to face the fact of death, pain, and suffering in that process and so come to an understanding of God as the suffering Creator.36 The Christian tradition. While the introduction of this essay made much of the fact that the afrmation of the divine suffering often conicts with the classical theological tradition of Christianity, the discussion has demonstrated the compatibility of several central Christian concepts with an evolutionary theology of a suffering God. It has incorporated Christianitys core theology of the Triune nature of God; its long-established belief in the transcendence, incarnation, and immanence of God in relation to the cosmos; and its central doctrines of creation and incarnation into its afrmation of divine suffering. However, the most powerful argument for consonance between the suffering of God in the cosmos and the Christian tradition continues to center on the paschal mystery of Jesus the Christ. This paschal mystery dramatically discloses the innite creativity of divine Love that ultimately overcomes nite pain, suffering, and death. This realization, in fact, redeems the mystery of the cross for Teilhard de Chardin. No longer solely a symbol of the dark retrogressive side of the universe, the paschal mystery of cross and resurrection becomes the symbol of progress and victory won through mistakes, disappointments, and hard work, the very dynamic of evolutionary unfolding.37 Based on his own re-visioning of the paschal mystery from an evolutionary perspective, Arthur Peacocke grasps a further insight, one that concerns the very nature of God in relation to this evolving and suffering universe. If Jesus is indeed the self-expression of God in a human person, Peacocke contends, then the tragedy of his actual human life can be seen as a drawing back of the curtain to unveil a God suffering in and with the sufferings of created humanity and so, by natural extension, with those of all creation. From this perspective, The cry of dereliction [of Jesus on the cross] can be seen as an expression of the anguish of God in a suffering cosmos.38 Despite these resonances, the afrmation of the self-emptying and suffering of Godwhether creative in nature, Triune in attribution, or loving in purpose does not escape the variety of existential, philosophical, and theological critiques raised by Christian theologians concerning suffering in God discussed at the beginning of this essay. In fact, to some extent, it exemplies them. The association of suffering with the divine does tend to entangle God in time, to inhibit Gods freedom, and to subject the Creator to the vicissitudes of the created order. Moreover, divine suffering does radically contest the assertions of divine immutability, impassibility, omniscience, and omnipotence that are characteristic of classical theism. Indeed, the assertion of suffering in God does loom as a potential liability to every classical Christian doctrine that considers these philosophical and theological predicates axiomatic. Nevertheless, I submit that a clear emphasis on the transcendence and immanence and incarnation of God in relation to the cosmos serves to mitigate the force of these critiques. Because of the radical balance that Trinitarian relations to the cosmos represent, God remains both temporal and atemporal, both free and freely self-restrained, both subject to and Subject beyond the vagaries of the

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created order. As to further criticism of the concept of suffering in Godthat it eternalizes or universalizes suffering, that it glories and commends suffering, or that it militates against action for justice and liberationone can look to the insights of evolutionary science for response. These insights make it clear that the suffering that attends pain and death is an inherent, existential aspect of a cosmos created by God in autonomy and freedom, through chance within law, with the capacity for self-creativity and the emergence of sentience and consciousness. Moreover, suffering is a given in a cosmos in which the ultimate emergent of that cosmos, a being who possesses self-consciousness and personal subjectivity in addition to sentience and consciousness, has the autonomy and freedom not only to assent to participation in the loving and creative purposes of the Creator of the cosmos, but also to dissent from participation in these intentions. Hence, given the existential reality of pain, suffering, and death that subsist as inevitabilities in a cosmos that evolves through free processes and free will, the attribution of suffering to God does not glorify or commend suffering in the cosmos and in its creatures. Rather, it seeks to offer a morally acceptable and coherent response to the suffering of the cosmos and its creatures in their existential situation. Moreover, although God does not prevent the occurrence of the inherent and inicted evil that results from the freedom and autonomy of the cosmos and its creatures, neither does the evolutionary creativity of Gods suffering love intend that pain, suffering, and death endlessly endure or eschatologically triumph. The panentheistic paradigm. The theological afrmation of the transcendent, incarnate, and immanent Triunity of God, coupled with an emphasis on the doctrines of creation and incarnation, leads to the afrmation that the panentheistic model of the God world relation is the most appropriate to exemplify a God-qua-Creator in relation to creation. Furthermore, as demonstrated above, this model also possesses an especially ne t with the notion of the suffering of God. By using the panentheistic paradigm with the concept of the Triunity of God as transcendent, incarnate, and immanent in relation to the cosmos, one possesses a means by which to afrm the suffering of God in all aspects of divine relation to the cosmos. Despite the critiques of classical theology, there is neither need nor justication to preserve the Being of God from being scathed by the experience of suffering. To do so would be a morally incoherent response to the ubiquitous suffering of the cosmos. Nevertheless, the panentheistic paradigm of the Triunity of God in relation to the world provides a model that adequately offers the moral and coherent response to suffering that this essay proposes, while simultaneously preserving the transcendence of God that assures that such suffering need not have the last word. In the panentheistic paradigm of divine transcendence, incarnation, and immanence, God embraces, participates in, and permeates the cosmos in its costly unfolding. As God does so, God freely suffers any and all things that the cosmos itself endures and willingly suffers any and all things in a continuous creativity that incessantly brings the cosmos to new and abundant life.

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Fecundity
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One of the most signicant features of evolutionary theology in general, and of the theology of the suffering of God in particular, is the fecundity of such proposals. By situating its theology within an evolutionary worldview and within the panentheistic paradigm, this essay generates a myriad of new perspectives and possibilities for contemplating and symbolizing God, the cosmos and its creatures, and the God world relationship. The concept of the Triune nature of God as personally Transcendent, Incarnate, and Immanent in, with and under the creative processes of the cosmos; of the cosmos as freely and autonomously self-creative, as characterized by kaleidoscopic fecundity and ubiquitous suffering, and as evolving through free process and free will; of the world as within God and of God within, but not exhausted by, the worldeach and all of these images of God and of the cosmos are pregnant with the promise of deeper and broader theological insight and discourse. Moreover, such a theology expands the settings in which the symbols of God, the cosmos, and their interrelation function, especially the symbol of God as suffering Creator. God does not suffer solely for creations human emergentsfor the atonement of human sin, or for the salvation of human souls, or for ransom from human bondage, or even for the liberation from human oppression. God suffers in, with, and under the creative processes of the cosmos for the healing, the salvation, the transformation, and the liberation of the whole of the cosmos itself. Consequently, this theology of the suffering of God addresses not only the obstacles that hinder classical theology in its efforts to respond morally and coherently to the ubiquity of pain, suffering, and death in the cosmos and in its creatures, but also the concerns of those served by liberation theology and ecological theology. It does so not only by addressing morally and coherently the sources of suffering visited upon and experienced by the oppressed and by the cosmos, but also by lifting the burden of philosophical and theological paradigms of God and suffering that have only added weight to their experience of oppression. Furthermore, it does so in a way that respects the insights of science that reject an interventionist model of God world interaction and that respect the core elements of the Christian tradition concerning the God who is self-emptying and vulnerable Love disclosed in Jesus the Christ. By afrming the concept that God suffers transcendently, incarnately, and immanently in, with, and under the inherent and inicted pain, suffering, and death of the cosmos and its creatures, the theology proposed here offers to all who suffer the promise of a God who is not only a companion in their suffering, but also a God who is an incessantly creative impetus and catalyst for the transformation of pain, suffering, and death into new and emergent life.

Pastoral efcacy
In the earlier examination of the effect of cosmic indeterminacy on the concept of the suffering of God, signicant questions arose concerning the pastoral efcacy of such a concept to alleviate the experience of existential suffering endemic in the

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cosmos. These questions concerned whether the attribution of self-limitation and suffering in God served to solve the problem of suffering and whether a selflimited and suffering Creator was worthy of human trust. In the perspective I seek to set forth in this essay, it is not the afrmation of the suffering of God that renders the Divine impotent and unworthy of trust. Rather, it is the denial of suffering in God that renders the Divine ineffective and irrelevant in the face of the existential reality of suffering in human and non-human creation. If one is left with theodicys dilemma of attempting to defend either the omnipotence or the benevolence of God or of trying to reconcile the two by means of divine omnisciencein other words, left with the understanding that God arbitrarily can intervene but refuses to do so for some reason known only to Godthen Christians are the most pitiable people of all.39 However, in the proposals of this essay, there is no such dilemma. Rather, through the integration of the insights of evolutionary science and the Christian tradition, one obtains a pastorally efcacious understanding of a Triune God who, in transcendent, incarnate, and immanent vulnerability, is familiar with suffering and bears cosmic grief. Moreover, this integration identies a God who in transcendent, incarnate, and immanent creativity moves toward life and offers healing liberation. In the words of the Christian liturgy, an evolutionary theology of the creative suffering of God assures those who suffer that Life is changed, not ended. As I have continuously noted throughout this work, the evolutionary process of the emergence of new life and novel forms in a closed universe frequently entails the death, the passing, or the transformation of old forms of life in order for the new to appear and develop. This dynamic process varies. At times it involves the death or extinction of species through natural selection or through the natural process of aging; at other times, it involves the incorporation of more rudimentary forms into more complex forms through the process of eating. Sometimes this process takes place through geologic or atmospheric eventsthrough earthquakes, through volcanic eruption, through inclement weather conditions, and through tsunamiswith often calamitous results. In contrast, there are ubiquitous occasions when pain, suffering, and death are not part of natural evolutionary processes, but are inicted by the exercise of human freedom and autonomy upon the otherthrough starvation, through violence, through genocide, through warfare, and through despoilation. Hence, whether the source is inherent in the natural evolution of the universe or inicted by iniquity of humanity, in a cosmos characterized by free process and free will, pain, suffering, and death happen. The essential question is what the juxtaposition of this evolutionary insight concerning cosmic reality with the paschal mystery of Jesus the Christ has to tell humanity about the responsiveness and potency of God in the face of such existentials in the cosmos and in human experience. I suggest that what the cosmos reveals is thoroughly consonant with what the paschal mystery of Jesus the Christ reveals: that pain, suffering, and death are within the liberating and transforming embrace of the creative Love of God and that this creative Love of God has the capacity to bring forth from the most deleterious of events in cosmic and human history new and emergent modes of life. Fundamentally, the evolutionary process and the event of Jesus the Christ remind human beings that, ultimately, life is changed and

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not ended. Moreover, a theology of the suffering of God discloses that the efcacious, creative, and salvic Love of God has the potential to be all the more effective because of its incarnate and immanent suffering in, with, and under cosmic history, a suffering that communicates to conscious and self-conscious creatures not separation, but companionship; not apathy, but empathy; not absence, but intimacy; not arbitrariness, but steadfast love. In addition, a theology of a suffering God can disabuse Christians of the perilous notion that God is the source of cosmic or personal suffering and, conversely, can reveal that suffering in the cosmos and in its inhabitants grieves the Creator as it grieves the created. Furthermore, a panentheistic theology of the suffering God afrms that the Creator God is immanent and incarnate within suffering creation and at the same time innitely transcends it. Hence, the Creator and creation do not remain mired in pain, suffering, and death, but, in innite creativity, possess the capacity to move continuously toward transformation, liberation, and new life. In addition, because it is the cosmos and not just humanity that participates in the being, life, and creativity of the Divine in the panentheistic model, this theology can inspire an ethics of care and justice that is not only personal and communal, but also ecological. As Christians grow to contemplate and to emulate the God that embraces, permeates, and suffers with both human being and cosmic being, action for transformation and liberation will extend not only to all manner of abused and violated persons, but also to all levels of the abused and violated cosmos itself. In so doing, these insights can bear fruit toward the transformation and emergence of life for the cosmos and its creatures that bear the sufferings and death of Christ in their being and becoming even to this day.

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Endnotes
1 Ronald Goetz, The Suffering of God: Rise of a New Orthodoxy, The Christian Century, 103 (April 1986): 387. 2 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, trans. Reginald H. Fuller (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 219 220. 3 Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord, trans. John Bowden (New York: Crossroad, 1999), 725. 4 Kenneth Surin, The Impassibility of God and the Problem of Evil, Scottish Journal of Theology, vol. 35, no. 2 (1982): 103 104. 5 John Haught, God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2000), 46. 6 Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon, 1973). 7 Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker, God So Loved the World?, in Violence Against Women and Children: A Christian Theological Sourcebook, eds. Carol J. Adams and Marie M. Fortune (New York: Continuum, 1995), 36 59. 8 Arthur Peacocke, The Cost of New Life, in The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, ed. John Polkinghorne (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2001), 37. 9 See Michael W. Brierley, Naming a Quiet Revolution: The Panentheistic Turn in Modern Theology, in In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reections on Gods Presence in a Scientic World, eds. Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004), 1 15. Brierley lists nearly seventy theologians who ascribe to the God world relationship in panentheistic terms.

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10 Throughout this essay, I acknowledge the insights of Arthur Peacocke, whose Trinitarian formulation has greatly inuenced my thinking on the subject. See Arthur Peacocke, The New Biology and Nature, Man and God, in The Experiment of Life: Proceedings of the 1981 William Temple Centenary Conference, ed. F. Kenneth Hare (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto, 1983), 27 88. 11 Ibid., 35. 12 Arthur R Peacocke, The Challenge and Stimulus of the Epic of Evolution to Theology, in Many Worlds, ed. Stephen Dick (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation, 2000), 88 117, 106. 13 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Christianity and Evolution, trans. Rene Hague (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 134. 14 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Comment je vois, in Georges Crespy, From Science to Theology: An Essay on Teilhard de Chardin, trans. George H. Shriver (New York: Abingdon Press, 1968), 99. 15 Ibid. 16 Arthur Peacocke, Paths from Science Towards God: The End of all our Exploring (PSG) (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001), 141. 17 Ibid., 142. 18 E.g., Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle. 19 Theodosius Dobzhansky directly disputes this notion in his essay Teilhard de Chardin and the Orientation of Evolution: A Critical Essay, Zygon, 3 (1968): 242 258. According to Dobzhansky, what directs the operation of chance is not God, but the anti-chance process of natural selection. 20 James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 314. 21 Teilhard de Chardin, Christianity and Evolution, 27. 22 Jeffrey C. Pugh, Entertaining the Triune Mystery: God, Science, and the Space Between (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity, 2003), 53. 23 Arthur Peacocke, Theology for a Scientic Age: Being and Becoming: Natural, Divine and Human (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993), 121. 24 Ron Higheld, Divine Self-Limitation in the Theology of Jurgen Moltmann: A Critical Appraisal, Christian Scholars Review, vol. 32, no. 1 (2002): 49 71, 63. 25 Ibid. 26 Peacocke, Theology for a Scientic Age, 124. 27 Higheld, Divine Self-Limitation, 61. 28 See this discussion in Jonathan Doye, Ian Goldby, Christina Line, Stephen Lloyd, Paul Shellard, and David Tricker, Contemporary Perspectives on Chance, Providence, and Free Will, Science and Christian Belief, 7:2 (1995): 117 139. 29 See, for example, John Polkinghorne, Science and Theology: An Introduction (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 84 95 and Science and Providence: Gods Interaction with the World (West Conshohocken, Pa.; Templeton, 2005), 23 42. 30 See, for example, George Ellis, The Theology of the Anthropic Principle, in Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature: Scientic Perspectives on Divine Action, eds. Robert J. Russell, Nancey Murphy, and C. J. Isham (Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory/ Berkeley, Calif.: CTNS, 1993), 367 405; and Nancey Murphy, Divine Action in the Natural Order: Buridans Ass and Schrodingers Cat, in Chaos and Complexity: Scientic Perspectives on Divine Action, 2nd ed., eds. Robert John Russell, Nancey C. Murphy, and Arthur R. Peacocke (Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory/Berkeley, Calif.: CTNS, 1997), 325 357. They have also co-authored the work On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology, and Ethics (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996). 31 Peacocke, Theology for a Scientic Age, 53 61 and 157 160. Peacocke bases his insights on the work of D. T. Campbell, Downward Causation in Hierarchically Organized Systems, in Studies in the Philosophy of Biology: Reduction and Related Problems, eds. Francisco J. Ayala and Theodosius G. Dobzhansky (London: Macmillan, 1974), 179 186; and R. W. Sperry, Science and Moral Priority (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).

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32 Pugh, Entertaining the Triune Mystery, 53. 33 Arthur Peacocke, Articulating Gods Presence in and to the World Unveiled by the Sciences, in In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reections on Gods Presence in a Scientic World, eds. Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004), 151. 34 John Polkinghorne, Creatio Continua and Divine Action, Science and Christian Belief (1995): 102 103. 35 These criteria were inuenced by the insights of Ian Barbour, Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 109 110; B. G. Mitchell, The Justication of Religious Belief (London: Macmillan, 1973); and D. Pailin, Can the Theologian Legitimately Try to Answer the Question: Is the Christian Faith True?, Expository Times, 84 (1973): 321 329. In his work Axiomatics and Dogmatics (Belfast: Christian Journals, 1982), J. R. Carnes employs the alternate terms existential relevance (t), adequacy (cogency), and economy (simplicity). Peacocke himself presents two somewhat different lists within Theology for a Scientic Age, 15 and 91. The criterion of pastoral efcacy relates to the theological aims of this present work. 36 Arthur Peacocke, Creation and the World of Science: The Bampton Lectures 1978 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 200. 37 Teilhard de Chardin, Christianity and Evolution, 217. 38 Peacocke, The Cost of New Life, 42. 39 Cf. 1 Corinthians 15: 19. The quote itself concerns resurrection: But if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some among you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then neither has Christ been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then empty too is our preaching; empty, too, your faith. Then we are also false witnesses to God, because we testied against God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all. See 1 Corinthians 15: 12 19 (NAB).

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Biographical Notes
Gloria L. Schaab, Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology and Director of the Master of Arts in Practical Theology, is a Sister of Saint Joseph of Philadelphia, Pa. Schaab gave the keynote presentation Evolutionary Theory and Theology: A Mutually Illuminative Dialogue for the Arthur Peacocke Symposium at the Zygon Center for Religion and Science in February 2007. Her recent publications include Midwifery as a Model for Ecological Ethics (Zygon 2007) and A Procreative Paradigm of the Creative Suffering of the Triune God (Theological Studies 2006). Her book The Creative Suffering of the Triune God: An Evolutionary Theology was published by Oxford University Press, September 2007.