Paper Title:the Pastoral Theology of Rabbi Harold S. KushnerAuthor:
McCartney, James J.Institutional Affiliation: Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, VillanovaUniversityThis paper was prepared for “Science and Religion: Global Perspectives,” June 4-8,2005, in Philadelphia, PA, USA, a program of the Metanexus Institute(www.metanexus.net).Abstract:W. Norman Pittenger and Rabbi Harold Kushner are strange bedfellows. The former isone of the greatest Christian process theologians of the twentieth century, and the latter isa Jewish Rabbi with a congregation in Natick, Massachusetts. What they both have incommon is a profound insight into the problem of evil, derived by Pittenger through hisprocessive understanding of the Divine, and reflected on by Kushner after the untimelydeath of his son Aaron from ‘progeria’ (rapid aging). In this study, I would like tocompare and contrast the insights of these two authors as they try to deal with the issue of‘God and the problem of evil,’ a problem that has vexed some of the greatest minds ofhistory. Both Pittenger and Kushner have the advantage of having a contemporaryunderstanding of science which greatly assists them in developing their thought, and,although Pittenger’s approach is sort of from the top down, and Kushner’s from thebottom up, they arrive at very similar understandings and conclusions.W. Norman Pittenger’s processive understanding of the Divine is primarily indebted tothe philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. For Pittenger, God is ‘pure unbounded love,’‘Love-in-act,’ which is disclosed in a threefold quality of the experience of the Divineactivity in the world, a triunity. But if God is the ‘lure of Love,’ how can we account fortsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, children dying of cancer or other anomalies, or otherplanetary ills? If God is Love-in-act, why are there madness, disease, natural violence,and destructive natural force? It will be the task of the paper to provide Pittenger’sanswer to these questions.Rabbi Kushner states at the outset of his book that this is not an abstract book about Godand theology. He says that it is a very personal book, written by someone who believesin God and in the goodness of the world, someone who has spent most of his life trying tohelp other people believe, and was compelled by a personal tragedy to rethink everythinghe had been taught about God and God’s ways. He then recounts the short life and deathof his son Aaron, and says that he wanted to write a book that could be given to theperson who has been hurt by life, and who knows in his heart that if there is any justice inthe world, he deserved better. Thus Rabbi Kushner’s book is aptly titled, When BadThings Happen to Good People and it is here that he develops his insights into theproblem of evil that are remarkably similar to those of Norman Pittenger and which I willunfold in this study.
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Biography:The Rev. Dr. James J. McCartney is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophyof Villanova University near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He teaches courses in ethics,health care ethics, bioethics and the law, the philosophy of medicine, and the philosophyof law. He received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Georgetown University in 1981 and alsohas graduate degrees in cell and molecular biology (M.S., The Catholic University ofAmerica) and theology (M.A., Washington Theological Union). He has co-edited twobooks, Health, Disease and Illness: Concepts of Medicine, Georgetown University Press,2004, and Concepts of Health and Disease, Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Addison-Wesley, 1981. He has authored numerous articles and a book, Unborn Persons: PopeJohn Paul II and the Abortion Debate, Peter Lang, 1987. Two of his most recent articlesdeal with stem cell research: "Recent Ethical Controversies About Stem Cell Research"in Stem Cell Research, pp. 87-119, edited by James M. Humber and Robert F. Almeder,Humana Press, 2004 and "Embryonic Stem Cell Research and Respect for Human Life:Philosophical and Legal Reflections," Albany Law Review 65:3 (2002):597-624.Paper:Dr. W. Norman Pittenger and Rabbi Harold Kushner are strange bedfellows. Theformer was one of the greatest Christian process theologians of the twentieth century, andthe latter is a contemporary Jewish Rabbi with a congregation in Natick, Massachusetts.What they both have in common is a profound insight into the problem of evil, derivedby Pittenger through his processive understanding of the Divine, and reflected on byKushner after the untimely death of his son Aaron from ‘progeria’ (rapid aging).Dr. Pittenger is known by many for his profoundly Christian and deeply sensitivereflections on human sexuality, but in this paper I wish to focus on Pittenger'sprocessiveunderstanding of the Divine, and God's relationship to the reality of natural evil. I willattempt to show through the theology of Pittenger that a processive understanding ofreality, including the Divine reality we call God, deals with the problem of evil in a verycoherent way, and provides hints for a pastoral practice that is much more compassionateand Christian than those approaches which see natural evil in some way as "the will ofGod."Rabbi Harold S. Kushner states at the outset of his book, When Bad Things Happento Good People 1 , that this is not an abstract book about God and theology. He says that itis a very personal book, written by someone who believes in God and in the goodness ofthe world, someone who has spent most of his life trying to help other people believe, andwas compelled by a personal tragedy to rethink everything he had been taught about Godand God’s ways. He then recounts the short life and death of his son Aaron, and says thathe wanted to write a book that could be given to the person who has been hurt by life, andwho knows in his heart that if there is any justice in the world, he deserved better. Thus 1 Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. New York: SchockenBooks, 1981.
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Rabbi Kushner develops his insights into the problem of evil that are remarkably similar tothose of Norman Pittenger.W. Norman Pittenger has written or edited more than seventy books in an academiccareer in Christian theology which has spanned most of the twentieth century, from 1939 tohis death in 1997. His ‘slant’ on the Christian faith is that of a process theologian, 2 anapproach to theology which he used for more than forty years of academic life. 3 Pittenger's processive understanding of the Divine is primarily indebted to thephilosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Pittenger is especially touched by an observationof Whitehead in Process and Reality that the Galilean origin of Christianity does notemphasize the “ruling Caesar, or the ruthless moralist, or the unmoved mover” as images ofGod. Rather, God'sself-disclosure in Jesus of Nazareth “dwells upon the tender elementsof the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love; and it finds purpose in theimmediacy of a kingdom not of this world. Love neither rules, nor is it unmoved; also it isa little oblivious as to morals.” 4 For Pittenger, God is ‘pure unbounded Love’, ‘Love -in-act,’ which is disclosed ina threefold quality of the experience of the divine activity in the world, a triunity:For the triunitarian doctrine of God... is based primarily on theliving experience of men and women who believed that they wereresponding to God's activity in the world. They were familiar with theJewish faith that through nature and history the one God of the universe isactively at work. They knew also that in Jesus Christ they had been intouch with a particular and decisive activity of God. And then in theirresponse to that activity, first in Jesus Christ and then more generally to thatwhich “God is up to” in the whole world, they knew a reality greater thanthemselves which impelled them to such a new life of loving concern that itmust (they were convinced) be more than their own human doing. 5 Pittenger claims that “the divine Lover whom we call God” is revealed by the factthat “in and behind this mysterious cosmic process of which we are a part there is anabiding reality, supremely worshipful, entirely unsurpassable by anything else, and utterlydependable in action --- a reality who for Christian faith has declared himself in one of ourown kind.” 6 Pittenger borrows from Whitehead the insight that, “as primordial, God is 2 W. Norman Pittenger. God in Process. London: SCM Press, Ltd., 1967, p. 7. 3 W. Norman Pittenger. Becoming and Belonging: The Meaning of Human Existenceand Community. Wilton, CT: Morehouse Publishing, 1989, p. 1. 4 Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press, 1969, p. 404. 5 W. Norman Pittenger. The Divine Triunity. Philadelphia: United Church Press, 1977, p.17. 6 W. Norman Pittenger. Making Sexuality Human. New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1979,
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the continuum of all possibilities, the treasure-house of potentiality to be applied to thecreation; that, as consequent (or affected by that creation), God is the recipient of all valueof good achieved in the creative advance; and that, as superjective, God ‘pours back intothe world’ that which has thus been received from it but is now harmonized within thedivine life that is ‘the Harmony of harmonies.’” 7 Pittenger holds that God is committed to the creation with all its openness,indeterminacy, and freedom, is active in it as the ‘Lure of love’, and works “from the past,in the present, toward the future.... God is both active and passive; he or she initiatespossibility, lures toward realization and is therefore ‘modified’... by that movement and itsresults.” Thus, “we can speak meaningfully of a divine enrichment by accomplished goodin creation, and we can also allow for what might be called a divine sadness because ofwrong creaturely decisions and what they bring about. God shares in the anguish of theworld; God suffers with the world without being overcome by the wrong in it.” 8 Perhaps a meditative reflection on the first chapter of Genesis can illustrate theseideas of Whitehead and Pittenger in a more poetic, less technical way. In that chapter, thepriestly authors first assert that God is the primal source of all reality. But God first createsa vast waste with darkness covering the deep (chaos, possibility, potentiality). And thenthe Spirit of God (ruah) hovered over the surface of the water, light was created, and Godsaw that the light was good. (Good for God as well as good for creation!) Thus God is therecipient of the value of the creative advance (darkness to light) and pours back into theworld what has been received from it (the light of Love --- God's hovering Spirit) in afurther creative advance with the creation of sun, moon, and stars. “And God saw all thatGod had made, and it was very Good,” (i.e., harmonized with the divine life.) 9 We must also remember that for Pittenger as well as for Whitehead, creativeadvance occurs within a quantum mechanical understanding of the physical world, inwhich a succession of indeterminate but statistically predictable matter-energy eventsconnect and relate all future happenings with the present and the past in a way that isimpossible to measure or accurately predict by the laws of Newtonian physics, and isimpossible to conceptualize in any essentialist metaphysics. In this twentieth centurymodel of how the universe unfolds, discontinuity, interrelatedness, attractive (andrepulsive) forces, and decision (both conscious and preconscious) all play a very importantrole. Pittenger is one of only a few twentieth century theologians who have taken thesepp. 4-5. 7 Becoming and Belonging, p. 5. 8 Ibid., p. 6 9 All Biblical paraphrases and quotations in this section are taken from The RevisedEnglish Bible, Genesis: Chapter 1.
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aspects of quantum physics and applied them to an understanding of God and reflections onChristian faith. 10 As mentioned earlier, Rabbi Kushner’s starting point is a much more concrete eventthan Pittenger’s theological musings. His son Aaron had stopped gaining weight at aboutthe age of eight months and his hair started falling out after he turned one year old.Eventually. Aaron’s condition was diagnosed as ‘progeria’ – rapid aging. The Rabbi wastold that his son “would never grow much beyond three feet in height, would have no hairon his head or body, would look like a little old man while he was still a child, and woulddie in his early teens.” 11 What Rabbi Kushner felt that day was “a deep, aching sense ofunfairness. It didn’t make sense. I had been a good person. I had tried to do what wasright in the sight of God. More than that, I was living a more religiously committed lifethan most people I knew, people who had large, healthy families. I believed that I wasfollowing God’s ways and doing His work. How could this be happening to my family? IfGod existed, if He was minimally fair, let alone loving and forgiving, how could He do thisto me?” 12 Kushner points out that while he and his wife were wrestling with their faith as wellas their grief, friends tried to help but really couldn’t, and the books he turned to were“more concerned about defending God’s honor, with logical proof that bad is really goodand that evil is necessary to make this a good world, than they were with curing thebewilderment and anguish of the parent of a dying child.” 13 Unlike Pittenger, Kushner isnot a formally trained philosopher but rather a religious man who has been hurt by life andwanted to share with others how one could still find God in the face of seeming injusticeand blind fate.I now return to Pittenger. How does his triune experience of divine activity andbecoming deal with the problem of physical evil? If God is the ‘lure of Love’, how can weaccount for tsunamis which kill hundreds of thousands of people, earthquakes, hurricanes,mudslides, children dying of cancer, or other assorted planetary ills? If God is Love-in-act, why is there madness, disease, natural violence, and destructive natural force? CanPittenger'sChristian theology of process provide an explanatory model for natural evil?Although Pittenger touches on the problem of evil in several of his books, it is inone of his most recent books, Becoming and Belonging, that he deals with evil in the mostsustained way. In fact, Chapter Two of this book is entitled “The Loving God and the Fact 10 For a further discussion of these issues, see Christopher F. Mooney, S.J., "Theologyand the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle," Unpublished Manuscript. 11 When Bad Things…, p.4 12 Ibid., pp. 4-5 13 Ibid., p. 8.
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of Evil,” much of which I will summarize here. First of all, Pittenger asserts that evil “isnot willed by God, either directly or permissively, as if things might have been otherwise,but God allows evil to happen.” We might recall that in Genesis, Chapter 1, when the‘ruah’ of God creates light, there is still plenty of chaos left, which God in a sense allowsby allowing creation, but the spirit of God only wills that which can be called ‘good’.“Only insofar as there a world at all, with its necessary freedom, can God be said thus to beresponsible.” 14 God's limitation is sheer goodness. In that goodness God grantsfreedom to the creation with the result that decisions, conscious orunconscious, may and in fact do produce evil that God neither wills norwants.... We should be realistic, facing the fact of evil in all its forms butready also to see that the infinite resourcefulness of the divine Love-in-actcan find ways of handling such evil, so that a positive good may result inthe end. 15 We can see examples of this in the outpouring of assistance, compassion, and generositythat generally follows in the wake of natural or humanly caused disasters such as the recenttsunami in Southeast Asia or the compassionate response, still being expressed, in theaftermath of the destruction of buildings and lives on September 11, 2001. Pittenger pointsout that most people generally lead reasonable happy lives and avoid dwelling on what iswrong with creation. “But there are also the moments of tragedy --- someone we love diesof cancer, there is an appalling airplane crash, we hear about a devastating earthquake or atidal wave, famine strikes some part of the world --- when any man or woman who is at allsensitive will admit that this is not ‘a nice world’ but rather is filled with tragedy, sadness,and pain.” 16 And sometimes we observe the violence in the struggle for survival in variouslife species and wonder what ‘God is up to.’Rabbi Kushner spends a great deal of time discussing what people think ‘God is upto.’ Some think of evil as necessary in the short run so that God’s justice will prevail at theend. Kushner rejects this explanation. Some think that God has God’s reasons for makingbad things happen to them, reasons that they are in no position to judge (the image of theDivine tapestry is brought to mind, where we only see the underside of the tapestry, not thebeautiful pattern on top). Kushner rejects this explanation. The possibility of suffering aseducation, to repair that which is faulty in a person’s personality, is also considered.Kushner rejects this explanation as well. Many consider physical evil as Divinepunishment but, in the Rabbinic tradition, Kushner presents stories to show how thisunderstanding in incompatible with a loving and reconciling Divinity in whom we believe.Finally, Kushner discusses the possibility that physical evil is a ‘test’ and claims that thiswould make God the inventor of sadistic ‘games’ with his most faithful followers, trying bytorture to see how much they really love Him. All these explanations and more assume 14 Becoming and Belonging, p. 7. 15 Ibid., pp 7-8. 16 Ibid., p. 17.
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that God is the cause of our suffering, and they try to understand why God would want usto suffer.There may be another approach. Maybe God does not cause our suffering.Maybe it happens for some other reason than the will of God…. Could it bethat God does not cause the bad things that happen to us? Could it be thathe doesn’t decide which families will give birth to a handicapped child, thathe did not single out Ron to be crippled by a bullet or Helen by adegenerative disease, but rather that He stands ready to help them and uscope with our tragedies if we could only get beyond the feelings of guilt andanger that separate us from Him? Could it be that “How could God do thisto me?” is really the wrong question for us to ask? 17 Pittenger believes that we must “reconcile these appalling facts (of natural evil)with the belief that God is good and caring. Only so can we make sense of the world andourselves in that world.” Christians especially must deal with the issue of evil, but theyhave done so over the centuries with indifferent success. This is because Christians haveoften used an inadequate or mistaken ‘model’ or concept of God --- a “model of deity as‘despotic ruler’ who is in complete control of everything that happens in the creation, andhence, must be responsible for all that takes place within it.” We get a sense of this falseimage of deity at work when natural disasters are referred to as 'acts of God'in insurancepolicies and the law. But, “if the great central Christian affirmation is indeed that the clueto God's‘nature and activity’ is the event of Jesus Christ, then it is imperative to see andsay that ‘God is love’ and that God never acts in such a fashion that deity may correctly beregarded as responsible directly or even permissively... for anything and everything thattakes place in creation. God's nature and God's activity are always caring and loving,persuading and luring, never sheerly coercive and never imposed arbitrarily on thatcreation.” 18 The corollary of this conviction that God is ‘sheer Love’ is “that creation has itsfreedom, its causative capacity, and its necessary accountability for what occurs in thatfreedom.” 19 In Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II is close to this approach when heasserts that “some threats (to life) come from nature itself,” but does not attribute this forceto divine activity and in fact states that “they are made worse by the culpable indifferenceand negligence of those who could in some cases remedy them.” 20 Pittenger argues that“the world is not some sort of object that God shoves around, intrudes into, andmanipulates. To the contrary, it is there as a given fact with its specific characteristics thatGod respects and with which God deals.” 2117 When Bad Things…, p. 46. 18 Becoming and Belonging, pp. 17-18. 19 Ibid., pp. 18-19. 20 Pope John Paul II. Encyclical Letter Evangelium Vitae, paragraph 10. 21 Becoming and Belonging, p. 19.
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If the model of the deity as ‘despotic ruler’ is abandoned in favor of the belief thatthe ‘brief Galilean vision’ is our best intimation of God, then omnipotence, omniscience,and omnipresence must be redefined:Omnipotence is the strength of the divine Love-in-act in a world that...possesses its own independence and freedom. Omniscience means thatLove, God as Love, is all-knowing about what in fact happens and of thevarious possibilities that the creation may actualize --- but without dictatingthem. Omnipresence tells us that the divine love is everywhere and alwayspresent and at work to augment the good, often in very surprising places --aChristian would point especially to a humble human life, to a man born in amanger, and to that same man rejected and put to death, as the place wheresuch active presentness is most clearly seen. 22 Thus Divinity offers the unlimited and constant possibility of love, creativity, andgoodness to a creation which often, but not always, accepts this lure of Love in creativeadvance. But even at the electronic level, ‘decisions’ sometimes bring significant anduntoward results as the relatively new field of chaos theory is now bringing to light. Theprocess of creation has been taking place for billions of years, with evolutionary groping,mistakes, and dead-ends. “Ours is an ‘unfinished world’.... We cannot expect, if that istrue, to find everything perfectly accomplished. On the contrary, what we are bound to findis a continuing work in which the aim is to create something splendid and beautiful -- butthat final end is not achieved.... Christian faith would insist that God is actively engagedand working toward that end, not remote from and unconcerned with what takes place, butgenuinely and vigorously acting toward it and in it with respect for and use of creaturelyfreedom and accountability.” 23 Rabbi Kushner expresses the same ideas in similar words (without the references toChristianity):It may be that Einstein and the book of Genesis are right. A system left toitself may evolve in the direction of randomness. On the other hand, ourworld may not be a system left to itself. There may in fact be a creativeimpulse acting on it, the Spirit of God hovering over the dark waters,operating over the course of the millennia to bring order out of the chaos. Itmay yet come to pass that, as “Friday afternoon” of the world’s evolutionticks toward the Great Sabbath which is the End of Days, the impact orrandom evil will be diminished.Or it may be that God finished His work of creating eons ago, andleft the rest to us. Residual chaos, chance and mischance, things happeningfor no reason, will continue to be with us, the kind of evil that MiltonSteinberg has called “the still unremoved scaffolding of the edifice ofGod’s creativity.” In that case, we will simply have to learn how to live 22 Ibid., p. 20. 23 Ibid., p. 22.
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with it, sustained and comforted by the knowledge that the earthquake andthe accident, like the murder and the robbery, are not the will of God, butrepresent that aspect of reality which stands independent of His will, andwhich angers and saddens God even as it angers and saddens us. 24 One final reflection of Pittenger on natural evil is important; namely, “that aconsiderable part of ‘natural evil’ is called that only when and as human life is involved.” 25 Thus, the formation of continents, continental drift, volcanic and tectonic activity,glaciation, even the extinction of the dinosaurs are all considered important geologicalevents but not natural evils, unless one of the tectonic events happens to be a contemporaryearthquake which kills thousands of people. In this regard I am reminded of theobservation that we call Dutch elm disease ‘disease’ precisely because we value Dutchelms more than the parasites which feed on them. Otherwise we would say that Dutchelms were ‘fodder’ for these important bacteria. Assessment of ‘physical evil’ is related tothe capacity of human being to create values, even the value of biological life, and then toapply these values to experiences and events. When we experience joy and endure painand suffering, when we dwell in the hope of divine love and creative advance rather than inthe shadow of death, we are celebrating the revelation of the Divine through the humanmanifested in the Incarnation.In that event, with a distinctive clarity, God is seen to be actively present...and thus genuinely a sharer in creaturely existence at our human level. Thisconviction may then be taken as a clue for the reading of all that God does.This God will be seen as a suffering God who shares in the anguish of thecreation yet is not overcome or destroyed by that sharing.... The variousstories that tell of Jesus’ ‘resurrection’... tell us that Love expressed in theworld, sharing the world's pain, and knowing from ‘inside’ its anguish,cannot be holden of death. 26 Thus, for Pittenger, Christian faith in the face of evil is “a call to action, and part ofthe action is for us to serve as God'sagents in overcoming evil wherever we see it and towork with God and with our fellow humans so that the divine purpose of God for creationmay be more effectively realized.” 27 Rabbi Kushner shares a similar point of view. Although he acknowledges that a‘suffering God’ is central to the Christian belief system, he also holds that the notion of a‘suffering God’, “a God who weeps” 28 is not that foreign to postbiblical Judaism.“I 24 When Bad Things…, pp. 74-75 25 Becoming and Belonging, p. 22. 26 Ibid., p. 26. 27 Ibid., p. 28. 28 When Bad Things…, p. 115.
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would like to think that the anguish I feel when I read of the sufferings of innocent peoplereflects God’s anguish and God’s compassion, even if His way of feeling pain is differentfrom ours.” 29 In a Chapter entitled “God Can’t Do Everything, But He Can Do Some ImportantThings,” Rabbi Kushner considers the efficacy of prayer in relation to physical evil. Heholds that we cannot pray for the impossible, or the unnatural – he would considerunnatural the attempt to ward off physical evils by means of prayer. “We cannot pray outof a sense of revenge or irresponsibility, asking God to do our work for us.” 30 But prayerdoes put us in touch with others, people who share the same concerns, values, dreams andpains that we do. Ritual brings people together – it is one of the things that religion doesbest! Letting people into our grief when we are afflicted by physical evil is exactly whatwe need. Sharing our concern with others who have suffered is a way of sharing their painand helping them to heal. We go to a religious service not to find God (we can do that inthe privacy of our rooms) but to find a congregation. Kushner quotes a famous storytellerwho once asked his father, “If you don’t believe in God, why do you go to synagogue soregularly?” His father answered, “ Jews go to synagogue for all sorts of reasons. Myfriend Garfinkle, who is Orthodox, goes to talk with God. I go to talk to Garfinkle.” 31 But Rabbi Kushner argues that prayer also puts us in touch with God. When weask God to make us less afraid, by letting us know that He is at our side, whatever the nextday might bring we will be able to handle it because we won’t have to face it alone. “Thatis the kind of prayer that God answers.” “People who pray for courage, for strength to bearthe unbearable, for the grace to remember what they have left instead of what they havelost, very often have their prayers answered.” 32 Kushner holds that the God he believes indoes not send us the problem; he gives us the strength to cope with the problem. Hebelieves that God gives us strength and patience and hope, renewing our spiritual resourceswhen they run dry. “We need only turn to Him, admit that we can’t do this on our own,and understand that bravely bearing up under long-term illness is one of the most human,and one of the most godly, things we can ever do.” 33 Rabbi Kushner summarizes hisreflections thus:How does God make a difference in our lives if he neither kills nor cures?God inspires people to help other people who have been hurt by life, and byhelping them, they protect them from the danger of feeling alone,abandoned, or judged. God makes some people want to become doctorsand nurses, to spend days and nights of self-sacrificing concern with an 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., pp. 159-160. 31 Ibid., p. 164. 32 Ibid., p. 168 33 Ibid., p. 172.
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intensity for which no money can compensate, in an effort to sustain lifeand alleviate pain…. Human intelligence has come to understand moreabout the natural laws concerning sanitation, germs, immunization,antibiotics, and has succeeded in eliminating many… scourges. God, whoneither causes nor prevents tragedies, helps by inspiring people to help. 34 In both these men of God, one Jewish and the other Christian, we see a remarkableconvergence of ideas and insights in dealing with the problem of physical evil. Both mendeny that God is the source of evil and use materials from their respective traditions todemonstrate this truth. Both see creation as ongoing, and see Divine activity as bringingorder from chaos, love from strife, life from death. Both see humans as the partners of theDivine in ameliorating the human estate and in comforting those who have been hurt bylife. Both challenge us, each in his own way, ‘to light a candle rather than curse thedarkness.’ 34 Ibid., pp. 187-188.
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