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The Heart of the Matter

2017; Wiley; Volume: 67; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cro.2017.a783495

1939-3881

Phil Kershner,

Theology and Philosophy of Evil

The Heart of the Matter Phil Kershner Asked in seminary to come up with a personal credo, and wanting to keep it as brief as possible, I finally ended up with “Unconditional love is the most sublime reality we experience.” To the minimalists in the crowd, I apologize. I did toy with shorter versions, but none seemed quite right. For example, the cliché “Love is” not only deserved to be rejected on grounds of being, well, a cliché, but also because it might suggest that love is all there is. Nothing could be further from the truth. Evil does exist. Ask Job. Sometimes it even wins out. I would never want to suggest otherwise—nor does my credo. I merely want to bet my life on the assumption that love is better. I believe that unconditional love is the greatest truth in the universe, the black hole of the human search for meaning, that into which we fall when all else gives way. It is the only love which is an end in itself. Our other loves are for a purpose: to woo a partner into intimacy, to keep a friend, or to make for more joyful living. But only unconditional love has no hidden purpose. It just is. Hence its beauty. I should note that this is not a Christian idea per se, but a human idea. I do not necessarily claim that unconditional love is the most powerful force in the universe, certain to win the day against all opposition (though I certainly hope so). For all we know, there could be a God hiding in the cosmos who is a monster, waiting to show her evil hand. We have no way of knowing, one way or the other. All I can attest to in my credo is the belief that from the evidence I have seen, unconditional love produces more healing, more reconciliation, and more wholeness in life than any other idea that has come down the pike. It is also the vision which, when portrayed by our most creative people resonates with me as more beautiful than anything else. None of this can be “proven.” As Garret Green has pointed out, “In the case of… a claim about the ultimate shape of reality, the only way to prove its truth is therefore to live by it.” My credo plays a role in my thinking not unlike the role played by axioms or postulates in Euclid's geometry. They are the foundational ideas that cannot be proven, but on which all other geometric understanding depends. My credo is my postulate. Euclid's postulates, while not provable, do conform to human experience. I trust that my credo does also. Furthermore, it seems to me that many other people have attested to that experience. What follows in this essay is an exploration of how one of those “others,” the twentieth‐century novelist Graham Greene, has pointed toward the same reality in his writing. Imagination in the Art of Graham Greene When William Placher writes that “…Christians should believe that the picture the New Testament provides of Jesus’ identity gets it right,” I think he is on the verge of something radical and helpful. He seems to be close to saying that what really matters is that the New Testament writers had the vision to imagine Jesus as revealing something true about God and humanity even if in their imagining they lost touch with the historical Jesus. But then shortly thereafter Placher continues, “Find the irrefutable letters in which the apostles describe their conspiracy to invent the whole story and yes, Christians need to concede, that would mean we were wrong.” No! No! No! An invented story can be “true.” It can offer a vision that makes sense out of life, a vision that beckons us to new understandings and insight. Even if the New Testament writers, in fact, created Jesus out of whole cloth, their story still “gets it right” in so many essentials about the meaning to be found in human life. Graham Greene was in the business of creating fictitious characters, though he did not create them so much out of whole cloth as out of the...