is inexcusable.1 He is a hero, not a villain. However, reading Martin Buber— I think it was I and Thou— convinced me that I was utterly wrong. Buber is commenting on God’s pronouncement of judgment at the end of Job; the three friends of Job, who are perfectly orthodox theologians, say, in tedious repetition, “God is great and God is good, let us thank him for our food. Amen.” They utter no heresy, yet they are condemned.
Job, on the other hand, who flirts with heresy and blasphemy— “God, you are an arbitrary despot. I hate you. Get off my back”— is approved. God says— I think the words are “I am angry at you and your three friends. . . .” He blames “Bildad the Shuhite,” the smallest man in the Bible, “for not speaking rightly about me, as my servant Job has.” But they had spoken perfectly rightly about God, and Job had spoken wrongly.
“Wrong,” says Buber. Since God is the Thou who can only be addressed and not expressed and since God’s divinely revealed name is I Am, not It Is, therefore, Job, who talks to God, pleases God, unlike the three friends, who never talk to God, never pray, and never talk about him and thus do not please God.
I said, “That’s right.” Suppose I was teaching a class, and two of my students interrupted my lecture by breaking out into loud, animated conversation about the professor: “Do you think Professor Kreeft is crazy?” “No.” “Yes, he is.” “No, he isn’t.”
“Wait a minute!” I would say. “Hello, I’m here.” I wouldn’t be offended that they thought I was crazy. That is quite reasonable, but not that you would talk about me in front of me without realizing that I’m here. Well, that’s what we’re doing to God all the time.
“God this, God that.” “Hi, troops, I am here. Why aren’t you talking to me?” Talking— that’s what Job did. That’s what God wants. I think that is very profound.
Q: Are you saying that you think evil exists or possibly exists so that we will pay better attention to God, so that we will engage God?
A: We are such fools that I have to admit that’s true. C. S. Lewis puts it this way in The Problem of Pain: “God whispers to us in our pleasures, but shouts to us in our pains.” It is this megaphone that rouses a deaf world.
Q: If you accept a theistic framework, is asking, “Why?” tantamount to a lack of trust in God’s sovereignty?
A: Just the opposite.
Q: To make it practical, to give an example, one that I have wrestled with, is Eric Liddell. Eric Liddell, as you know from Chariots of Fire, ran and won the Olympic gold, and then what most people forget is that afterward, he left and went to Shantung Compound, which is the title of another great book by Gilkey. He suffered and died there. So, overlaying your framework of suffering on top of that, is all we are left with that God will have a greater purpose or is there another answer to that question?
A: If you weren’t deeply connected with God, you wouldn’t be asking him, “Why?” If you had left him, there would be no concern. The question “Why?” if asked from the heart, presupposes a relationship. It wants to add reason to faith. There is some faith there— faith, not just as thought but as personal trust. Then, that faith is ignorant. Since it is accompanied by love, it wants to know more. We want to know more about him; so we keep asking God, “Why this and why that?” That is very good. Jesus never once discouraged that kind of question. That is just intellectual honesty.
Q: Coming from the seat of Northern philosophy in Boston, can you give us New Yorkers, who experienced 9/11, some philosophical reference and reflection?
A: Can you be more specific so that I can be?
Q: Many people have lost a chance of hope. Many people have found a chance of hope, and many are still looking for that chance of hope.
A: I think great good and great evil, great pleasure and great pain, always give us a choice. We can be more wise and hopeful and good in the presence of either one, or we can be less. Let’s first take great good. A wonderful thing happens, and we can say, “Oh, now I can relax; everything is all right; no more questions.” No, no, no, a wonderful thing happens: “Where did this come from? Thanks be to God. Wow. This is a message from heaven.” It is a pointing finger that points beyond itself.
Similarly with evil. Evil just happens. I have a picture on my office wall; maybe some of you have seen it. It’s about something that happened, I think, toward the end of the nineteenth century in Paris. There is a two-story railroad station, and a locomotive plunged through the second story and fell down into the street, and there it is at an angle. A great, big steam locomotive and a single word on it— shit. That is not blasphemous; it is only obscene. It is an offense against good taste but not against good religion. That is one answer to evil, and that is counterproductive. It doesn’t do any good. But, on the other hand, what happened on 9/11 is evil. It shows me that evil is real. I am now wise. It shows me that I must have solidarity with my brothers and sisters in fighting it. So, I become more courageous.
The response in uniting New York and America, and even the world, certainly did an enormous amount of good. I won’t say it did more good than the thousands of lives that were snuffed out, but evil always rebounds. Evil always has some good fruit. I think of God as something like a French chef who uses decayed vegetables to flavor foods wonderfully. The evil always has some good purpose.
Q: I have a question about evil and suffering and the difficulty of taking a perspective on it in a culture that’s gripped with fear— which I see America as being at present. Do you think that could at all skew a perspective that you might take on evil and suffering? In other words, to the extent that you might even gather together in a really nice place like this and start talking about it as if it were something definitely real, as opposed to what somebody else might say it has been. The undercurrent of what I am asking is, is there a concern that there is an exclusion of a nontheistic perspective, of a nonphilosophical perspective? A perspective that takes into account psychological data, which I noticed you kind of pooh-poohed.
A: Not data; don’t fault the data. The theories.
Q: There is a lot of data and support of the contention that reminders of mortality actually lead to strengthening of bonding to cultural worldviews, for instance. So, do you think that there is some degree of relativity, and do you think that your view is colored by your worldview and your biases and perhaps even by your own development?
A: Of course it is.
Q: I am just wondering if you see how that colors your perspective on suffering.
A: That’s what a worldview is. A worldview isn’t a factual detail. It’s a picture of the whole. It’s a map that puts the details in a certain order, and everybody has one. Nobody can avoid one, even those who oppose worldviews. That is itself a worldview.
Q: So, how does that affect your perspective on suffering and evil?
A: It gives me light. It’s a flashlight. The data are the same. You and I both know the data. We interpret the why. There are two different reasons why two different people interpret the same data very differently.
One of them comes from the person— your character, your personality, your proclivities, your fears, your desires, your opinions. The other might
