Abstract
Ross McCullough’s theodicy cleverly navigates tortuous historical arguments about God, freedom, and evil in Christian sources (the Bible and the Fathers of the Church) and Christian Platonist metaphysics (especially Aquinas, Scotus, and their interpreters). He proposes a novel explanation of evil acts as due not to misuse of free will, but to flaws in rational agents’ self-creation. He argues for an “indeterminist compatibilism” to reconcile humans’ responsibility for their acts with God’s determination of them. His work is a sort of analytical scholasticism, interacting with analytical philosophers and theologians, and draws key insights form various contemporary Thomistic authors.
God is the (primary) efficient and final cause of everything that exists, including our acts. We are the (secondary) causes of our acts. “God can work good in us infallibly, with no possibility of our defection, but sometimes does not” (9). He gives no indication as to “why not?” when God does not work good in us infallibly. This makes the predestination M. argues for later an inexplicable mystery.
Sins are the defective acts of not acting for the goal God wants for us. Such defects are privations. So, God is not the cause of that deficiency because privation has no being. “God causes our acts in all their being . . . but . . . we can impede these acts to make them less than, worse than God wills them to be” (35).
M.’s account is that “our sinful choices consist less in an exaggerated love of a particular object than a minimization of our love for other relevant goods” (60), an imbalance in our perceptions and/or desires. Whether we misperceive or misdesire, we fail to act effectively to reach the aims that God has for us, ultimately refusing the infinite goodness animating those goals. “Sin is not fertile; it goes nowhere; it does not generate” (71).
If one has such a privative account of evil, defective acts alone do not generate. But M. ignores the significance of the parasitical power of evil. This is a problem I have identified as intrinsic to theodicies: their blindness to “social sin” and its power over individuals (both cultural evils like heterosexism and white privilege, and structural evils such as policies of real estate red-lining as well as economic systems that increase social stratification; see my The Evils of Theodicy, Georgetown University Press, 1991). What is God’s relation to social, economic and political constructs? Where do they get their power? How has nonbeing been so destructive? M. doesn’t say.
Adapting the distinction between God’s “formal features” (simplicity, limitlessness, unchangeability, unity) and God’s “attributes” (e.g., wisdom) drawn by David Burrell (135), M. analyzes the accounts of analogy in Thomas and Scotus, to conclude that “perhaps there is less at stake in taking sides than either side has taken there to be” (150), an argument I find plausible, but one that needs a dyed-in-the-wool scholastic to evaluate adequately.
This distinction opens the door to considering the “hard-won-ness” of our perfections, like our wisdom: we create “these goods in ourselves by not negating God’s gift of them to us” (153). Our finite wisdom is not God’s infinite wisdom, but approaches it as wisdom in a human, not divine, mode which we win through our self-creation. But our self-creation, our acting to “participate in God’s creation as rational secondary cause subordinate to the primary cause” (153), may well be deficient. Sin, then, is not the result of the abuse of freedom, but of the failure to become the creatures God wants us to be.
While this move is provocative, and the insight, analysis, and argument impressive, I wonder why “creativity” is not construed as an attribute of the whole of creation that only becomes actualized in all sentient creatures proportional to their various levels of sentience? Is a resolution of the problem of animal pain possible in such an emergent approach? Would it link Christ and us more clearly with the creation from which humanity has evolved and which is groaning for redemption? This alternative notion of creativity would fit better with claims he makes about Christ, the mystical body, and creation (e.g., 79–80, 171–73). M. does not offer an argument for his limitation of creativity to rational agents. And the problem with social evils identified above is ignored: we create our social structures. How can a privative account recognize the real destruction they wreak on many in cultures and structures “procreated” by us and created by God? Or are social evils not real?
The final chapter offers a supralapsarian Christology in which Christ (not Adam) is the type for humanity, is the “exemplar of our natural goods: not just paradigm but pattern” (188), Christ also is “an instrument, as meritorious cause, and as an inspiration” (190) of being fully human. M. insightfully recognizes that philosophers and theologians who are incompatibilists fail to see that freedom to do evil does not have the same ontological status as freedom to do good: doing good frees, doing evil enslaves (206). The “Patristic contrast of the bestiality of the sinner with the beatitude of the righteous is more apt than competing bondages” (207) or competing free choices, I would add. This results in the remarkable possibility of an account of a form of single divine predestination (through irresistible gracious determination for some) while others receive resistible grace and do win or fail to win redemption (211–14).
The text is difficult, despite winsome paragraphs and copious citations of Scripture. In addition to problems discussed above, it seems to entail a strict probabiliorism in moral theology, a difficult standard to apply graciously. And the level of abstraction is so very far removed from concrete moral and social sins and sufferings that, despite its real insights and interesting moves, those outside of M.’s camp will find this exercise quite challenging.