Problem of Evil & Agape-Justice Part 5: Freedom Violated and the Disastrous Rise of Self-love

God’s goodness and omnipotence is shaped in accordance with agape-love that He is. Accordingly, the potential for suffering and evil comes about given how He intentionally set the door of opportunity (existential crossroads) before those creatures He created in His image: humanity and angels. The greatest gift He could give us was this likeness to the Divine I AM by possessing existential autonomy.[i] However, unlike our Creator, we human being do not inherently exist according to the agape-nature. Even still, Yahweh created us to be able to partake in the divine-life of agape, so that we could become freely self-emptying in likeness to Himself. For this possibility to exist for us, He had to create us with the capacity for the existential crossroads between self-love and self-denial. If we embrace the former, it leads us into becoming a self shaped according to anti-agape, whereas the latter leads to becoming partakers in the divine-life of agape. Becoming agape-shaped selves grants us an eternal destiny of becoming loving ones in likeness to the Divine. We then truly become co-working neighbors with Yahweh’s immanent omnipresence in the created world.

With these truths stated, let us now turn to the issue of how “God [only] accomplishes the good,” whereas He “permits the evil” (251). This happens given that our Creator allows His originally-intended plan for us becoming His ontological neighbors in agape-love to be rejected by us. This heavenly gift of free agency originates from the possibility of truly being self-emptying like the Divine, yet if rejected, the possibility of self-love becomes actualized when we cease to partake in the divine nature (251).[ii] The problem of evil comes about given that human beings, as well as one third of the heavenly creatures, choose self-love over becoming a self-emptying self. This choice unfolds either by acts of commission or omission. For example, we choose to will to be a self that is a self-loving person. Alternatively, we have chosen life as a self that willfully remains in self-love by not willing to be an agape-shaped self who by partaking in the Divine nature embrace self-denial with their whole being. Only by becoming godlike self-emptying persons do we exist as beings free of the slavery of self-love. Yet due to the fall of humanity’s first parents, all of us human beings are born into self-love, as those not partaking in the Divine nature. Our culpability and guilt, however, ultimately lie in our free agency in not willing what it takes to be free of self-love that comes so natural to us, as evidenced by the discipline required to tame the inner bent of egocentricism. Our chief sin lies in stubbornly and hard-heartedly refusing to embrace divine forgiveness and the divine power that alone leads to the spiritual fruit of self-denial. In other words, we resist the divine arm that seeks to enable us to be free from the bondage of a fading life revolving around self-love. Grace comes to enable us to embrace the eternal life of self-emptying agape. This eternal life represents our originally intended destiny. We can only walk this life path by the Spirit’s work of sanctifying and reconciliatory grace. By the work of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, our Creator personally restores us to our destiny to be immortal partakers of the divine nature of agape. I will now proceed to argue that bad fruit of self-love that plagues our world originally resulted from the bad use of creaturely free will. Ultimately, creatures and not the most-blessed Creator who is agape, is responsible for all the suffering and evil that transpires in our world.

Problem of Evil & Agape-Justice Part 4: The Power & Goodness of the God of Love leads to Human Freedom

In God’s love He sustains all existence, for His love is up-building. He has created this world to be His dwelling place, and so His love is omnipresent within this world (3-4, 301). This means that His power is part of His goodness. His goodness is defined according to His agape, and this means that “goodness [for God] is to give away completely,” therefore, “there is only one who is good – God, who gives all things” (264-265, 405-406). That God gives all things is true, because God, in making this world and humanity His tabernacle, gives all things by giving them Himself, His very own life. He is the Self-Emptying One who freely gives of Himself. Therefore, His power is set to work in promoting this end by promoting His aim to make all people neighbors of agape. This makes sense when considering the context where it says how God will make humanity His temple and part of His family. Here it says that He is all-powerful, given how His power is made manifest by His ability to give us the freedom to be self-giving without imposing Himself by compulsion: love that acts in self-control is the greatest power (2 Cor. 6:14-18).[i]

Now it is true that God uses His power to seek His own glory and honor. Nonetheless, those who cite this biblical truth fail to take seriously the truth regarding Him being love. They fail to recognize that “in seeking His own, which is love, He seeks it by giving all thing… yes He sought his own by giving Himself for all so that they might be like Him in what was His own, in sacrificial giving of Himself” (264-265). Furthermore, God being Good is not a matter of Him necessarily using His omnipotence to ensure that only good things happen to all. In this case, if anything bad would happen (i.e. suffering) to something He has made, then it would mean that He is either all-powerful but not all-good or all-good but not all-powerful. On the contrary, God’s goodness rests in Him giving everything freely, and the highest gift to be given is to give every person the opportunity to be like Him in giving themselves freely. Every moment He gives them the opportunity to receive or reject the gift of His intimate communal presence.[ii]

Problem of Evil & Agape-Justice Part 3: God is Agape-Love

"Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been fathered by God and knows God.  The person who does not love does not know God, because God is love. By this the love of God is revealed in us: that God has sent his one and only Son into the world so that we may live through him... And we have come to know and to believe the love that God has in us. God is love, and the one who resides in love resides in God, and God resides in him. By this love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment, because just as Jesus is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears punishment has not been perfected in love. We love because he loved us first" (1 John 4:7-9, 16-19; NET).

God (Yahweh) is Agape

Now let us turn to the subject of God being agape, since we have come to know what it means to truly God’s neighbors in agape-love.[i] We have just seen how the lives of His neighbors abide in agape, and so it makes sense why God ontologically speaking is agape-love, for those who love like Him are truly like Him as much as a created being can be. Let us turn to a quote by Kierkegaard, “Christianity’s take is humanity’s likeness to God. But God is love, and therefore we can be like God only in loving, just as we also, according to the words of the apostle, can only be God’s coworkers in love” (63)[ii]. According to 1 John chapter 4, God exists as an eternal spring of agape, such that agape-flows naturally flows from His very essence with infinite propulsion from an exhaustible ontological source. This means that in being true to Himself, God cannot help but be self-emptying. After all, manner of existing represents His very to-be, such that He reveals Himself as the ‘I AM, the Self-Emptying One, for that IS what and who I AM’ (187).

Even though water often represents the Spirit in Scripture, so also does fire, and it makes since why God would call Himself a “consuming fire” that is analogous to a baptizing water (Deut. 4:24; Luke 3:16). This is made clear through the narrative of Christ, who is the revelation of the I AM of God. His live is a living testimony that God’s to-be is one in which in being true to Himself, He “spares nothing but in [agape-]love gave everything” (3-4). This leads Kierkegaard to conclude that the “life of love” within God must be “an eternal spring” that infinitely gushes forth love (3-4, 10). In Jeremiah 17:13, we read how God exists as the fountain of life, and Christ revealed how He exists as the source of living water (John 4:10-15). In John 7:37-39, He teaches that this water of divine life represents the Holy Spirit, who is the “life-giving Spirit” (Rom 8:2). Consequently, in order to become the children of God, it makes clear why individuals must be born in water and spirit, for only then can we become neighbors with God in bringing agape-love to completion (John 3:5-6).

The “boundlessness” of the freely self-emptying life of agape rests in it being freely offered without “excluding a single one” (52). He offers all His neighbors made in His image to-be partakers of this life of agape. After all, it is the nature of agape to freely give to all regardless of “accidental” dissimilarities of essence, for they bear similarity of being in which they are Infinite Being’s finite other (52). God is the one “who lovingly gives all things” (271). As Scripture teaches, God is like the sun in freely giving light to all, given how “all generous giving and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or the slightest hint of change”  (James 1:17).[iii] This leads Kierkegaard to acknowledge that “love is indeed devotion and sacrifice,” and this devotedness is ingrained in the very nature of God, for He is holy. With this in mind, we should consider the Scriptures that make clear how misunderstood God’s holiness is by those espousing the Christian faith. For instance, in one place God Himself says, “All my tender compassions are aroused! I cannot carry out my fierce anger! I cannot totally destroy Ephraim! Because I am God, and not man – the Holy One among you – I will not come in wrath” (Hos. 11:8-9)![iv] God made clear to the Israelites through the exodus narrative up to Mt. Sinai that He was devoted to promoting their highest good, and this was for them to possess an intimate relationship with Him who is “slow to anger, and abounding in loyal love and faithfulness” (Ex. 34:6; Deut. 33:3).

Problem of Evil & Agape-Justice Part 2: Agape-love in the realm of Human Actions

Human Works of Agape-Love

The original intent of God was to be intimate neighbors of humanity in being co-workers of agape-love by way of dwelling in and through His divine nature of agape. Moses is an exemplar of this original intention, as “God spoke to Moses face to face, the way a person speaks to a friend (same word for neighbor),” and also consider Christ’s relationship with His disciples whom He called His friends, as well as the relationship between Christians. (Ex. 33:11; John 15:15)[i].  If one truly abide in agape, then it must be given, and it is meant to be given to all creatures created to be neighbors in agape-love, as the spiritual breath of life meant for all earth-dwellers.[ii] True agape is not at all about comparison, but is only about incessant action. It flows by a continual inward direction that derives love from one’s innermost being where one, in the Spirit, relates intimately with God. He is the only source of agape. Agape-love also flows by an outward direction by which one becomes a temple of agape as the living-water of soul incessantly flowing as a fountain sourced by an eternal spring. There is no time for comparison or else one stops abiding in this eternal spring, which is continuously ready to give (187-188, 280). Hence, Kierkegaard concludes that regarding human beings in relation to agape-love, “love for God and the neighbor is the true [agape-] love,” and this summarizes the entire standard of human oughtness as creatures made to reflect God’s likeness (45; Luke 10:25-28).

Kierkegaard points out that in regards to individual human persons, designating a work as a work of agape-love “depends on how the work is done,” and so like the external manifestations of the thought life, they happen to be based on matters of inwardness and not externalities, which thinks loving persons is merely about benefitting their situation in this world (8, 13, 327-329). So, for us our life that manifests agape-love like a real neighbor of agape comes from our innermost being where our likeness to God is found, in our soul and spirit. As we shall see later, we can only be loving as God is loving by inwardly and intimately relating ourselves to God in a communal God-relationship, so that we love by and through this abiding in He who is agape (8-10, 189). Since “no human being is [agape-]love”, humanity’s agape is not completely self-giving as God’s love (264). God’s self-giving is a love that is “giving of oneself” where oneself is the God who is love, whereas man’s self-giving is “helping the other person to seek God,” in this sense one is giving of oneself by getting out of the way to introduce one to God, even as God is being revealed in and through this person (264-265). In this way a person in self-denial becomes one who sacrificially gives of himself, by doing what the Scriptures calls us to do in laying down our lives for one another, that the other might abide in God’s love. In this way, a loving person acknowledges that God’s love should belong to the other, and so they freely promote the reception of this highest gift, which presupposes that God’s love can be given to them (264-265, 268-269; 1 John 3:16; John 15:12).

Agape-love becomes sacrificial love, because it can and often will be taken advantage of in the world without due recompense. What Kierkegaard speaks of truly takes place: “to give everything away without getting the least in return… [to become a] laughingstock in the eyes of the world… the unconditionally injured one…. being sacrificed”, and Christ Himself informed us it would be this way for us, if we followed in the shoes of the one who was crucified by the very one’s He came to save (269; Luke 6:27-36; Matt. 5:38-48). Such sacrificial love can only be given if it is indeed sacrificial in the sense of one freely, delightfully, and willingly laying down one’s life in giving oneself away. This requires a heart that has become pure, and is pure by being a heart that reflects the heart of God by being bound in His, by beating for what His heart beats for, as a circumcised heart (147-150; Rm. 2:29, 5:5; Deut. 30:6-8; Ezek. 36:26). Because of this sacrificial nature, the manifestation of true agape-love is seen according to the world’s hedonistic self-love to be a wasting of one’s self, and often this love is seen as vain and inconsequential; however, this selfish person is as Kierkegaard says, “unwilling to waste any time or energy on asserting himself, on being something for himself in his self-sacrifice is willing to perish… [rejecting to] simply be an active power in the hands of God” (279). Such a person who does not reject this “forgets his suffering,” because they care more about another’s loss, and forgets so-called advantage to promote another’s true advantage, and so he is truly devoted to the other in being delighted to give of themselves so the other can become an ontological neighbor of agape-love (281).

The Biblical Account of the Justice of Agape-Love: A Theological Treatise on the Problem of Evil and God being Agape-Love (Part 1)

A "Kierkegaardian" Biblical Solution to the Problem of Evil based on God being Agape and His Desire to Create Finite Neighbors of Agape

The Power and Goodness of God Redefined through Lens of God being Agape, The Fall into Self-Love of those Creatures created in the image of the Self-Emptying One, and The 'Tragic' Self-Chosen Suffering of the Self-Emptying One who Knew no Suffering to Potentially Eternally Deliver those who Suffer in this Fallen World

Introduction: The Problem of Evil and Approach to be Taken to Resolving It
In this blog series I will seek to start with Kierkegaard’s portrait of what it means for human beings to be loving ones engaged in works of agape-love to ultimately address the problem of evil (suffering)[i]. The working presupposition for this is the following: God created human persons to be loving ones, because He who is agape-love created us in His very own image (Gen. 1:26; 1 John 4:16).  Given that genuine works of truly loving human persons by necessity bear witness to the very nature of God, a study of genuine works of agape-love within the human sphere will shed light upon what it means for God to be agape-love, once the universal characteristics of agape-love have been determined. From this point of departure of the necessary implications of God being love, the concept of God’s omnipotence and His goodness will be defined in harmony with His nature as an Infinite Being who is agape-love. These concepts will then be applied to the creation, fall, redemption, and final judgment of human persons, in order to address the problem of evil (suffering) from a Kierkegaardian perspective, which he believed could “resolve [this problem] quite simply” (Works of Love, 405).

Ultimately I aim to elucidate this solution to the problem of suffering by turning its focus from the scene of creation and onto the Creator, Himself, as the Self-Emptying One. I aim to elucidate how He freely choose to create a world inhabited by finite loving individuals created in His own image required that the actuality of the potential for departure from His vision of no suffering for finitude, an absolute potentiality ingrained in His very nature, was necessary by virtue of His nature. God knew that if our first parents failed this preliminary examination, they would encounter existential cross-roads accompanied with the potentiality according to His desire for us to be co-workers in agape-love. The possibility of this cross-roads required them to possesses the freedom to choose in self-denial to be this agape shaped self, or to not to be this agape shaped self (by willing to be a self-loving self). Even though God’s desire is that they ultimately will to be an agape shaped self reflecting the glory of His personhood as One who is agape, since He gives them the necessary freedom required to achieve this destiny, this came with the potentiality that this desire of His heart would bring temporal suffering on all His most beloved creation. However, such suffering is against His best intentions for them. Nonetheless, this best of intentions was conjoined with the highest gift He gave them which was the freedom that allowed for this existential crossroads to exist in the first place, to choose agape-love or self-love, which leads to all-consuming hate (anti-agape). As the story goes, by the free decision of His most beloved creation experienced the unknown consequences of following the deceptions that holding on to self-love is in their best interest (Temptation of Adam and Eve that led to a world of suffering). Nonetheless in His loving effort to redeem His creation (to permanently put a stop to anti-agape and the suffering it inflicts), He knew that even when He made a way for reconciliation back to this originally intended purpose by those who via grace freely choose self-denial, the potential remained for this suffering to remain indefinitely for those, who against the desires of His heart of agape, do not repent of self-love.