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.
Even though the poisonous waters of self-love
ultimately flow from egocentricity, it at times passes through the channels of
altruism. Both are grounded in a humanistic way of living that is antagonistic
to the ways of the Spirit. They resist partaking of the divine nature of agape by rejecting participation in the
intimacy of the God-relationship through Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of God.
Egocentricity puts its perceived self-sufficiency, selfish needs, and carnal
desires above the good of others, who exist as means to one’s self-serving ends.
Egocentric aims are determined by what is perceived to increase pleasure and
fortune for oneself. Kierkegaard discusses this self-seeking love by describing
how it tries to find its good outside of the God-relationship and sacrificially
living for others. He describes how it often turns to the “heightening of
self-esteem,” such as a person getting married for not “being lonesome” or just
for sexual pleasure (473-474). In erotic love, this person proclaims that “one cannot
live without the beloved” (7). This, however, is only because one is infatuated
with the beloved. They think that their relationship can fill the relational
void only the God-relationship can fill. Once this illusion fades, such love
will soon be exposed as “self-seeking” “self-love” that only cares about
promoting one’s own happiness (126, 264). This selfish pursuit of individual
happiness unfolds even at expense of those who were once objects of its love. Its
selfish love is prone to variability and emotional upsets. Here in America,
this self-love often promotes a consumeristic, materialistic, and carnal
lifestyle. This lifestyle places the good of the self on consuming from the
world to be fulfilled. It seeks immediate pleasure as the highest good or the
accumulation of objects and affluence to promote one’s security,
self-sufficiency, fame, etc. Such a selfish person lives for themself and only
loves others with preferential self-love. This love conditions itself based on
hedonism. The object of love is only a means to one’s own ends, and this
exposes one’s genuine “unlimited devotion” as rooted in “relating oneself to oneself
in self-love” (53-55). Basically, this represents being possessive, controlling,
and manipulative, as one becomes a god, and the world its play things, existing
for their self-defined purposes. Such, possessive hedonistic love, contrary to
some prominent humanistic theologies that resemble the Greek gods, is alien to
the divine self-emptying agape revealed
throughout Scripture, for this agape-love seeks to make free the object of love
to whatever end.
The other person or object in
relationships of self-love is seen as something to be controlled and an object
of self-fulfillment on one’s own terms. Similarly, a person often thinks their
own body is theirs to use chiefly for the sake of self-seeking pleasure. The
mentality is, “I exist for myself;” “It is my body, I can do with it what I
want;” “If it feels right, then do it”. The other is seen as the other-I existing
to promote one’s selfish ambitions and inclination, or else the other is deemed
to be an inferior self, a mistake, un-elect for one’s purposes, as an obstacle
to one’s self-rule. Accordingly, the self takes pleasures when the other, who
is gone-wrong according to their self-love, falls prey to misfortune and
self-destruction, for the other is ultimately an obstacle to the unfolding
aspirations of self-love. As long as the other promotes one’s selfish agenda
then this love remains, for the other glorifies the self-centered I (56). Self-love
sees as good whatever glorifies its possessive domineering spirit of control
and power to create the best possible world that revolves around the self.
Self-love wants the world to bow to
them, rather than to lay down their lives for the world. But
once the beloved begins to undermine the perceived self-seeking goods of the
self-lover, then this love can quickly turn to hate, bitterness, and resentment,
as they no longer promote one’s happiness (53-56). This other was just a
temporary source of satisfying the desires of the self that seeks what only the
God-relationship can satisfy. Accordingly, this love often becomes embittered,
resentful, and even malicious. This self-willfulness habitually wants to put
itself first, along with its own conception of good. This self-centeredness tends
towards leaving out the self-emptying of the God-relationship and replacing it
with a self-seeking “it is all about me” mentality (55). For instance, the
self-seeking person at times vies wickedly for providentiality over others to
manipulate them into the image they imagine for them. They unconsciously or
consciously will to declare with pride in view of their creations, “it is my
image, it is my idea, it is my will” (270). This happens by “domineeringly
refusing to go out of oneself, domineeringly wanting to crush the other
person’s distinctiveness or torment it to death,” for the sake of one’s own
selfish ends of playing god (270-271)[iii].
Hence, such self-love strives towards “self-deification,” for it seeks to rule
without the temperance of agape-love
but with self-love instead, as a form of self-idolatry that idolizes insatiable
self-love and one’s own self-centered ingenuity (57).
Ultimately the demands of self-love can
never be met. For this reason, its incessant demands breed all sorts of
suffering in vain efforts to satiate insatiable desires of all-consuming
selfishness, i.e. rape, murder, abuse, etc. (349).[iv] The
inherently egotistic bent of the human will of anti-agape shapes the will of a person to live life seeking after
self-serving interests of a happy pleasurable life[v].
Tyrants are the chief expression of the egoistic bent of the will when applied
to living life in this world. They expose how, when circumstances permit selfish
inclinations unbridled reign, it leads to havoc of seemingly unstoppable evil.
They use their power to seek out the realities of their self-seeking fantasies
and pursuit of vain glory. The tyrant seeks ever more “exciting” ways of
self-gratification that breed more “wickedness and perversity” that display the
wanton insatiable desires of the heart, e.g. Nero burning Rome, a tyrant’s
harem, or genocide.
This position makes sense, according to Schopenhauer’s
affirmation of an eastern view of the human situation. This eastern view
interprets human will of self-love breeding suffering. This suffering stems
from behavior flowing from the insatiable nature of creaturely desires that
base human flourishing on self-seeking agendas that brings about detrimental
wickedness and suffering on the self and others. These desires seek in the realm of creaturely
goods a gratification that only truly comes from the God-relationship, and so
nothing created can fill the void. In pursuit of such fulfillment the self
exhausts the realm of possibilities searching for what cannot be found, like a
thirst that makes a lake into a desert but is still not appeased. Living for
self-gratification only leads to an insatiable consuming drive that eats away
at oneself and others by taking and not giving, using others and the world as
merely a means to one’s own self-serving ends.
Gracious giving and not self-centered consuming
can satisfy a self made in the image of the One who is agape-love. Giving the
gift of oneself is likeness to the Divine. Nevertheless, the self only becomes
a self that can be given, when it is an agape-shaped
self that truly gives what is most beneficial: a life flowing from partaking of
the life of agape within Divinity.
Hence, for a created self to exist as a temple of the God of Agape-love is to be a self that is truly
free to be a gift-giving self that gives the gift of the divine life. When we
give our lives as a free gift to the Creator in response to His free gift of
Himself, then we can truly give others the gift of a self that bears the fruit
of the divine life of agape-love.
Humanity often denies its intrinsic
kinship with God, as those created to be His neighbors in bringing agape-love to completion. This response
to the free gifts of the Creator to open up the door of opportunity to truly be
a free self not controlled by desire is nothing short of rebellion against God.
It involves “people determining the Law’s requirement (of human oughtness) instead
of God” and “contributes their share to the mutiny’s gaining the upper hand” against
God in determining human destiny over and against the God-relationship. Even
still, each person remains culpable for not seeing their creaturely obligation
to be reconciled to their Creator and to fight with Him in stopping such mutiny
that is the cause of all the suffering in the universe (117). One chief
rebellion is denying hope to others, the possibility of good, in spite of such
widespread suffering caused by self-love (252). In this way the nations rage
against divine hope of the God who laid down His life for the world as the hope
of the world (252; 1 Cor. 2:8).
The refusal to acknowledge and take part
in agape or to offer it to others is
to ultimately promote this rebellion against the purposes of agape. This is because earthly dissimilarities
lead people to deny the possibility of good for one another, as one says to
another, “there is no hope for you,” or over oneself, there is no hope for me
(252-254). This person has fallen prey to the deception of the annulled
possibility of good for an individual in this fallen world, which is a
deception of despair (254). As Kierkegaard points out such tragic hopelessness
in relation to the human situation should never happen: “To give up on another
as hopelessly lost, as if there were no hope for them, is evidence that one is
not oneself a loving person and thus is the one who despairs who gives up
possibility” – possibility of what the God of agape can accomplish to restore what anti-agape has broken (255). Such a person seeks to murder, spiritually,
another or themselves by hurling another or themselves into the abyss of
hopelessness, which is demonic and set completely at odds with the will of the
God of love (257).[vi]
In contrast God declares, “Do I actually delight in the death of the wicked,
declares the sovereign Lord? Do I not prefer that he turn from his wicked
conduct and live? Why should you die… For I take no delight in the death of
anyone, declares the sovereign Lord. Repent and live (Ezek 18:28, 30-32)!
Anti-agape
enjoys tearing down with an insatiable appetite, such as thirst for
vengeance. It rejects the calling of the Creator to embrace the building-up
(edifying) lifestyle of agape that
seeks to ground even the most hateful person in agape-love (219). In the fallen world of anti-agape, individuals often
resort to mistrust as an excuse not to pursue love for neighbor. This shows
that one has fallen far from true unconditional agape that does not demand reciprocal love, for they care about not
wanting to be cheated out of love (226-227). Hence, love becomes merely
something that is bartered, as Kierkegaard puts it, “he makes a love deal; he
barters his love, but if he did not receive reciprocal love in exchange – well,
then he has been deceived” (237).
Suffering either directly or indirectly
comes from the self-love of humanity and fallen angels and not God. “The
God-forsaking worldliness of earthly life shuts itself within itself in
complacency, and this confined air develops poison in itself and by itself” –
the poison of the soul that produces all sorts of destructive behavior (246).
All suffering is bred by closing the door to agape. Even the one who refuses forgiveness, increases the
multitude of sin in the world. They refuse to be healed by agape-love and reconciled to their calling to let-go of self-love
and acknowledge that their self was created to be God’s neighbor in the forgiving
power of agape love that requires
dying to find true life (297). Without
offering or receiving forgiveness, sin abounds and tearing down increase, as
one does not open the door to agape
to remedy anti-agape. Both sinning
against another and not forgiving the perpetrator are both against the will of
God, for He is willing to forgive and set free even the most destructive self
enslaved by self-love (297). Hence all this “evil” comes down to a “lie and
deception” that “has no shape,” for it comes down to becoming an antithetical
self void of its true identity of agape.
It is the bondage of the lie that each person does not exist as a neighbor of
God and with every individual of the human race, there is a possibility to be
set free by the communion of agape-love
(298).
God offers all the potential for
reclaiming freedom, to not be ruled and destroyed by self-love, nor to live as
a destroyer of the godlike potential of other selves created to abide in agape-love. He offers to put an end to
their suffering at the hands, whether external or internal, of anti-agape love, and to set free one from
their lifestyle of self-love that causes suffering to increase in the world. This
freedom requires the self-emptying decision to acknowledge and repent from their
condition of falsification, the life of self-love. This requires that we
realize that no matter how loving in the world’s eye, we have sinned in falling
infinitely short of the paradigm of agape-love,
Jesus Christ. In view of the agape-love
of Jesus, each person realizes how they have loved people too little and have
in fact sinned against agape by
denying it to others, whom Jesus died for in love. Each of us have stood in the
way of the divine purposes of His agape, by
striving to obstruct His business of forgiveness, patience, and longsuffering
to set free every repentant person from the suffering and bondage of self-love (104).
Before we move on to how God puts a stop
to the suffering spawned by destructive and falsifying creaturely self-love, we
should unmask altruism. Altruism is ultimately an alliance in self-love by
which people think they can love others without God. It promotes the deception that
relationships among human beings who are not agape can be the cure of suffering, misfortune, and despair.
Nevertheless, this merely becomes a collective self-love that promotes human
centered goods and insufficient humanistic remedies for anti-agape, but they cannot heal and
liberate the soul and spirit. It promotes the deception that human beings can
be without God in the world and prosper, love, and be free of the enslaving
power and suffering of anti-agape.
Kierkegaard talks about the collective “alliance in self-love” that we can
imagine in the form of Christmas time in America’s culture of self-seeking
consumerism and materialism. This altruism “requires that each person sacrifice
a portion of their own self-love in order to hold together in the united
self-love, and it requires that they sacrifice the God-relationship (true
agape) in order to hold together in a worldly way with the alliance” of
self-love (119-120; 1 John 2:15-17). Moreover, this deception purports that
creatures can truly love one another and be the remedy of anti-agape without the intervention of divine
grace, yet only divine grace flows from the hands of the only being that is truly and completely Agape-love. Only God is the source of
the sunlight of agape-love, and no creaturely source can replace the sun of agape-love. Therefore, even in altruism
one seeks to have another give themselves away to them, as they attempt to
subjugate the place of God as the true First Love of a person. Alternatively,
they deceive another into thinking they are the cure of anti-agape or that the cure can be found in the
created world. One altruistically, yet selfishly thinks they can love in the
way another truly needs to be loved, which God alone can do, seeing how human
love is always prone to mutability and self-servingness even in the most loving
of human relationships (264-265).
[i]
For God this independence always means being self-giving for this is simply His
to-be as one who is agape: “I AM AGAPE for that is WHAT I AM”.
[ii]
Doing so required the potential for them to not choose freedom of self-emptying
but to choose the slavery of self-love that is the ultimate source of all
suffering and evil, not the agape-love of God (405) [Yet we will have to
address how it is still not God responsible for giving free will in the first
place, which will be addressed in glory of grieving God by a God who takes all
suffering in Himself and mitigates it].]
[iii] Those
who promote earthly advantage and dissimilarity are like ravenous wolves
devouring those who do not meet their expectations (73). Such dissimilarities
like “worldly honor and power, wealth and happiness” are mere “vapors,” and the
one “intoxicated in these vapors proudly thinks that he has grasped the very
highest – he has really grasped a cloud and a figment of the imagination”
(163). This person wastes the human potential to be loving as God is loving in
seeking to find a perfect object to love that will give him all the reciprocal
love that he wants in the way that he wants it, but in the end finds no one but
himself ultimately to love (163, 237-238). Fallen human beings become
“crippled” and “deformed” yet clings to external dissimilarities whereby one
attempts to promote one’s own advantage at expense of others (88). This
self-love complains about not being happy in the world and blames others for
undermining one’s happiness that is conditional upon self-seeking interests
that are never certain (122). This person ultimately denies who is his true
neighbor and limits it to those who join with him in mutual self-love, and so
is partial and discriminatory in choosing who should be loved and not loving
the others who are not worthy, which says I am the only other all the rest are
alien, I am the only one worth loving my honor alone matters (74, 85-86).
[iv] All
these merely created loves are not only not agape but they stifle true agape
from permeating the world, as those who were originally intended to be
neighbors in bringing agape-love to completion have forfeited this calling and
instead have become neighbor-killers in anti-agape, such that God grieved and
regretted creating mankind who had fallen away from agape and into anti-agape,
“the Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind had become great on the earth
(264-265). Every inclination of the thoughts of their minds was only evil all
the time. The Lord regretted that he had made humankind on the earth, and he
was grieved… for the earth was ruined in the sight of God; the earth was filled
with violence” (Gen. 6:5-11).
[v] The
inherent human drive of a sinful nature is antagonistic to a self-emptying
disposition of love that considers the good of another over their own (I Cor.
10:24; I Jn. 3:16). If the standard of human oughtness is defined by loving our
neighbor as ourself, then the inherent disposition of the will runs contrary
what is befitting of human existence. The human will as long as it remains
directed towards this worldly (temporal) life instead of something higher
brings about suffering and keeps man from reaching the true telos of his existence.
The cravings of the flesh represent egotistical drives that pilot the will in
self-seeking pursuits of self-gratification, and this fleshly drive over human
willing cannot be fixed by human effort. This is why Schopenhauer and eastern
religious emphasize self-denial to the point of self-resignation, because the
self is not capable of correcting this subjective bent of the soul and so the
self must attempt to objectively transcend this subjectivity to reach states of
altruism and ultimately of self-expiration. Only when the self becomes
crucified can humanity reach its true telos. Biblically speaking, human nature
is of no help, for only the Spirit can sanctify (circumcise) the heart that
enables a self-emptying drive of the will (Jn. 6:63; Rm. 2:29, 5:5). This is
why we read, “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of
death?” & “We know that our old man was crucified with him so that the body
of sin would no longer dominate us, so that we would no longer be enslaved to
sin” (Rm. 7:24, 6:6). Likewise, Christianity teaches that the self dominated by
egotistical drives must be put to death by a resignation of the selfish desires
that dominates apart from the sanctifying power of the Spirit.
[vi] In
view of the God who “freely gives all things,” that even fallenness will work
together for good for those who bind themselves to agape in self-denial, and
every breath gives the opportunity for self-denial even in the most hate filled
person and fear filled person, because agape-love can sanctifying the most
hardened heart or cast out fear in the most fearful person, for this is the
power of agape if one in self-denial
will only believe even against their own ingrained habits (Rom. 8:28, 32). Even
Christ says that those who have been forgiven much, will love that much greater
in return (Luke 7:47). To give up this possibility of good for another is to
fall further from agape which demands that one loves one’s neighbor even one’s
enemy and to that end will the possibility of good for them that they might be
sanctified by agape-love, they who have been polluted by the anti-agape of this
world that taints the even most seemingly loving person (160). To will
another’s downfall is part of anti-agape, and this fails to understand that
apart from the God-relationship one cannot accomplish true works of agape and
therefore has become a slave of sin, and to not show mercy on a slave is to not
show the mercy of Christ who forgave those who spat on Him, the very one who
came to save them, for he knew they did not know what they were doing (257).
Anti-agape ultimately dehumanizes individuals, such that with one’s tongue one
“curses people made in God’s image” and this is bitter water that comes from
what was meant to give living water even to the most wretched like the sexually
immoral woman at the well (James 3:8-11). When one does not love one’s enemy
then one forfeits agape, and treats them worse than they would treat a wild
animal, which is truly demonic under the false pretense of justice (169,
470-471).
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