Christian doctrine and human suffering

Sir, – Mark O’Connell takes up Ivan Karamazov’s question and asks whether a child’s torture is a morally just price to pay for making heaven a possibility (“Would even paradise be worth the suffering of a single child?”, Opinion & Analysis, April 27th).

The question is put to those who believe that such torture “is in service of a just and necessary cause”, which is a position entailed by the allegedly Christian doctrine Mark O’Connell attributes to Ivan Karamazov, “Such evil, Ivan says, is claimed as necessary by Christians, because it is the price of free will, and of the possibility of goodness. Without evil, there can be no redemption, and no paradise.”

Your columnist follows Ivan Karamzaov in misconstruing Christian doctrine. Christianity does not claim that evil is a necessary entailment of free will, or that it is a necessary price for humans to pay for the possibility of eternal union with God in paradise. As a matter of fact (not necessity) evil has entered the world through human free will, and its consequences are felt at every level of human reality (including our tendency to reject God).

What Christianity claims is the following. In order to restore humanity’s relationship with God, God has subjected Himself to human evil and borne our sins unto his own death. God, through Christ, chooses to pay the price for human evil so we may have eternal life in Him. God’s self-sacrifice is an entirely free choice-made out of love, not necessity. Mark O’Connell and Ivan Karamazov have it almost exactly backwards.

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Mr O’Connell puts the above question to Christians as a challenge to Christian faith. Elsewhere in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov a different character asserts a much stronger challenge, this time to atheism. Dmitri Karamazov asks whether without God all things would be morally permitted. In other words, what universal, timeless standard of moral right and wrong would exist if, it is supposed, the supreme moral law-giver did not exist? It is obviously true that a child’s torture is a great evil. In itself this implies the existence of a moral law. But without a moral law giver and in a world that is purely material and random, by what objective standards can we truthfully judge anything evil or good? If the atheist replies by citing “human reason” they must admit that the response only begins to make headway if it is supposed that human reason is neither material nor random, and is capable of grasping a universal, timeless moral law. And at that point the atheist is on the road away from atheism. – Yours, etc,

Dr THOMAS FINEGAN,

Department of Theology and Religious Studies,

Mary Immaculate College,

St Patrick’s Campus,

Thurles,

Co Tipperary.