ON TAKING EVIL SERIOUSLY Gijsbert Van Den Brink

SHOULD WE DROP THE FALL? ON TAKING EVIL SERIOUSLY

Gijsbert van den Brink

‘The Fall Above All is the Place Where Biology and Theology Conflict’1

Van de Beek on Creation in the Light of the Cross “The roaring lion and the lethal bacteria are God’s creatures, as is the laboring human being with his deadly suffferings. That is the way God created the earth, not as a world that was alien to Him, but as his own world, with which he was as familiar as with the cross on which He was nailed.”2 Viewing creation through the lens of the cross of Jesus Christ, Bram van de Beek offfers an account of creation which is sensitive to the fact that the natural world we inhabit has been a world “red in tooth and claw” (Alfred Tennyson) from the very beginning of its existence. Rather than being at odds with what might be expected from a loving God, the myriad forms of predation, waste, sufffering and death in the natural world are reflected in the sufffering and death of Jesus at the cross—which according to the Christian faith tradition is at once a shocking cruelty and the supreme revelation of God’s love. Van de Beek’s doctrine of creation is very much in line with theological accounts of Christian science-and-religion thinkers who take seriously the ramifĳications of evolutionary theory. Many of them—among others, Arthur Peacocke, John Haught, George Murphy, Niels Henrik Gregersen, Christopher Southgate, and Celia Deane- Drummond—resort to Christol- ogy and especially to the cross of Christ in an attempt to come to terms with the problems of theodicy with which an evolving creation con- fronts us.3 As far as I know, however, Van de Beek nowhere in his work

1 R.J. Berry, “Did Darwin Dethrone Humankind?,” in: R.J. Berry & T.A. Noble (eds), Darwin, Creation and the Fall. Theological Challenges (Nottingham: IVP, 2009), 72. 2 Bram van de Beek, Toeval of schepping? Scheppingstheologie in de context van het mod- erne denken [Incident or Creation? The Theology of Creation in the Context of Modern Thought] (Kampen: Kok, 2005), 183. 3 Cf. e.g. Arthur Peacocke, “The Cost of New Life,” in: John Polkinghorne (ed.), The Work of Love: Kenosis as Creation (London: SPCK, 2001), 21–42; Niels Henrik Gregersen, “The Cross of Christ in an Evolutionary World,” Dialog 40 (2001), 192–207; George L. Murphy, The Cosmos in Light of the Cross, (Harrisburg: Trinity Press, 2003); John F. Haught, God after Darwin, 2nd ed., (Boulder: Westview Press, 2008), 49–60; Christopher Southgate, The 762 gijsbert van den brink interacts with any of these authors except Peacocke. Apparently then, it was his keen theological intuition (and probably his conscience as a biologist as well) which led him to a vision that closely resembles that of leading experts in the science-and-religion debate. However this may be, being a theological maverick in many respects, Van de Beek appears to be quite an ‘ordinary’ modern theologian in his doctrine of creation. Perhaps we should even say that he is at the forefront of where Christian theology is heading in the wake of the discoveries of contemporary evolutionary science. On closer inspection, however, Van de Beek’s main argument for his view of creation as imbued with evil, sufffering and sin is intriguingly dif- ferent from that of his peers. In fact, Van de Beek hardly appeals to the current state of the art in the evolutionary sciences. Rather, his argument is that we should not attribute all forms of sufffering that we encounter in creation to some kind of historical Fall. That is not because this notion has been falsifĳied by evolutionary history, but because it would turn human sin into a merely accidental and accessory phenomenon—thus not taking it seriously enough. “What concerns me is that we humans are sinful rather than just having sins. One may connect this with a historical Fall, but usually things don’t work that way. Rather, the idea that humans have been created well and that only then sin came in is used as an argument to underline the goodness of present-day human beings, with their human possibilities and talents.”4 In short, Van de Beek rejects the notion of a historical Fall because according to him it implies an overly opti- mistic anthropology that fails to take evil seriously enough. Instead, we should consider the many evils and suffferings of our world as inherent to God’s creative purposes, although we do not know why God created such a world.5 But is that true? Does the traditional notion of a historical Fall indeed detract from the seriousness of sin and evil, so that we should rather admit that creation was ‘fallen’ right from the beginning? Van de Beek’s

Groaning of Creation. God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil (Louisville: WJK Press, 2008), 48–52, 56–59, 75–77 (but cf. the caveats on 50); Celia Deane-Drummond, Christ and Evolu- tion (London: SCM Press, 2009), 170–185. 4 Bram van de Beek, “De vrije gunst die eeuwig Hem bewoog” [The Free Grace that Eternally Moved God], Reformatorisch Dagblad, September 24th 2010. 5 “Christ brings to light the truth of the world: the truth of the cross, of sufffering, guilt and death. We don’t have to close our eyes for these things in the world. For they are real. This is God’s world. Why this is so? I can’t give an answer. I can only observe it.” Van de Beek, Toeval of schepping?, 236.