(Ir)religiosity

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I’ve been doing a lot of Moltmann reading in preparation for the Moltmann Conversation in Chicago next month.  Today I read Religion, Revolution, and the Future, an early collection essays and lectures.  I ran across a passage in the last article, “Hope and History,” that is very poignant given John Piper’s latest snafu.

The cosmological proofs for the existence of God, in which the divinity of God and his presence were brought into an analogical relationship to the experience of the world accessible to everyone, have lost their persuasive power, since modern man no longer understands himself as a part of the cosmos, but has placed the world as material of his scientific and technical possibilities over against himself. He no longer lives in the house of ordered being but in the open history of a technical transformation of the world. The old cosmological-theistic world view which spoke of God in relationship to the cosmos of the natural world is antiquated and is experienced as mythical by man who has become the master of his environment. But it is naive pathos of the enlightenment to discard the fundamental question which was to be answered by the old world view. Behind the cosmological-theistic world views lies the real misery of man which expressed itself in the manifold forms of the theodicy question: Si deus, unde malum? (If God exists, whence evil?). The old world view answered this fundamental question in the vision of the orderly and wisely steered cosmos and used the image of the divine cosmos in order to do battle against chaos threatening everywhere. Even though this answer no longer persuades today, since we experience reality as history and no longer as cosmos, the fundamental theodicy question is still with us and is more pressing than before.

The core problem with Piper’s view — aside from the outdated cosmology — is theological determinism.  Such a view makes things very simple to understand:  X happened because God caused it and thought it should happen, there is a moral reason for everything that happens in the cosmos so we shouldn’t worry too much, it will all work out in the end.  It is an easy way to make sense of tragedy but I must effectively excuse myself from wrestling with the moral ambiguities of reality.  Not to mention that must ascribe to a premodern cosmology and assume that God is, at best, amoral.

The point of theology (and philosophy), in my view, is not to offer simple answers — which always posits certainty — but to continually wrestle with the questions and to learn to live with the inherent ambiguities of reality.  Piper, in suggesting that the tornado was a “firm but gentle warning,” not only singles an entire group of people for blame and judgment or supposes a vengeful and angry God beholden to an antiquated cosmology, but also claims to be certain about the nature of reality.  It is an easy answer to a complicated problem and, as I and others have pointed out, it presents disturbing problems of its own.

So, according to Moltmann, Piper’s answer for why the tornado happened is no longer persuasive; however, the core issue is still just as pressing as it ever was.  My question is this: how do we respond?  For those of us who do not ascribe to theological determinism or a premodern cosmology, what is our alternative, our “answer?”  Or, better yet, how do we wrestle with the question?

UPDATE: Drew has published a great post discussing Barth’s answer to this very question.  And at almost the exact same time I published mine!