Page 2- The Predicament of Belief
This picture of the UR, however, invites the objection traditionally conceived as the problem of evil: why doesn’t the UR intervene in order to alleviate innocent suffering such as occurred in the 2004 tsunami that hit Sri Lanka (Chapter 3)? Their response is that God cannot arbitrarily intervene and override the laws of the physical universe without a) rendering the universe non-law-like and unstable, which would then disallow beings such as ourselves – autonomous and rational selves – to evolve; and b) making God morally obligated to intervene every time such innocent suffering was to occur. This they call the “not-even-once-principle” (49ff.). While this does imply that “miracles” do not occur (51-2), the authors go on to argue that this does not mean that the UR does not intervene at all within the universe. Indeed, the UR interacts with the universe in a mental way, and according to the “emergentist theory of mind” – wherein “mind” has arisen out of more and more complex physical systems, yet is not itself subject to the laws governing those lower physical systems – this kind of interaction does not entail the overthrow of any natural laws (58-9). This view of divine action constitutes the authors’ most fundamental argument, which they call the “participatory theory of divine-human agency” (62). For them, “God is always luring, and humans are always responding, although the responses may not be conscious” – yet the UR does not ever physically intervene (63). And this account, according to the authors, gives a plausible answer for the problem of evil.
But this is still only minimally personalistic theism (MPT), a view that many religions assume (Chapter 4). The “Christian” part of “Christian minimalism” comes in Chapters 5 and 6, where the authors discuss the particular claims of Christianity about Jesus, especially his resurrection. Here we move from arguments based on general reason to ones dependent upon more particular historical and experiential data. Thus they affirm: “We cannot claim the same kind or degree of rational justification that we claimed in the case of our metaphysical arguments or our answer to the problem of innocent suffering” (82).
They advocate at least two possible ways of making sense of Jesus’ resurrection. First, the “participatory theory,” wherein Jesus’ participation in the divine reality was so strong that even after his death his disciples found it possible to relate to the UR in a completely new way (87). Paul, who admittedly believed in Christ’s physical resurrection, suggests such an interpretation when he speaks of the “Spirit of Christ” or believers’ participation in the “mind of Christ” (88-9; cf. Php 2.5). This language points to the “religious significance” that outlasted Jesus’ earthly life, a view much more congenial with MPT because it does not require belief in a literal resurrection (89). Chapter 6 advances a “Spirit-centered theory of the resurrection,” that Jesus’ participation in the self-giving love of the divine actually makes the person of Jesus present to those who follow him in that participation, through the Spirit (106ff.). To believe in the resurrection is not merely to believe that Jesus is a good example, but that he, perhaps even uniquely, is personally (though non-physically) present in the most robust human-divine experiences. He is in this sense “risen.”
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