Where Human and Divine Intimacy Meet: an Insight into the Theodicy of Marilyn McCord Adams
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Where Human and Divine Intimacy Meet: an Insight into the Theodicy of Marilyn McCord Adams Ionut Untea 1 # Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract Marilyn McCord Adams’s perspective on the intimacy with God as a way of defeating horrendous evils in the course of a human being’s existence has been met with a series of objections in contemporary scholarship. This is due to the fact that the critiques formulated have focused more on the debilitating impact of suffering on the sufferer’s body and mind, on intimacy as mere intermittent relationships between God and humans, or on what is lost or gained from the presence or absence of this intimacy with the divine being. Focusing on Adams’s appeal to esthetic arguments in theodicy and on her reflection on practical issues in theology, the article presents Adams’s perspective on intimacy as a relation initiated objectively by God at the creation and at Christ’s incarnation and continued subjectively throughout history by both God and every human being. Given its combining of objective and subjective features, this kind of intimacy is not to be understood as an exclusively private relationship of each individual with God, but rather as a process of communal advancing in rehabilitation and mutual healing that is initiated in the antemortem career and fulfilled in the postmortem existence. Keywords Theodicy . Esthetics . Intimacy . Vantage point . Antemortem career . Post-
mortem existence One of the chief goals in the theodicy of Marilyn McCord Adams (1943–2017) consists in securing a compatibility of a world containing horrendous evils with the existence of a Creator perceived by human beings not only as an omnipotent but rather as an omniloving being. Adams’s argument is based on her conviction that, in spite of the evils affecting moral ties, in this life ‘most everyone values (although perhaps too few
* Ionut Untea [email protected]; [email protected]
1
Department of Philosophy and Science, School of Humanities, Southeast University, Room 507, Wenke Building A, Jiulonghu Campus, Nanjing 211189 Jiangsu Province, China
I. Untea
enjoy) intimate personal relationships’ so that attitudes like ‘mutual love, support, and appreciation’ (1999, 144) that stem from the intimacy between morally autonomous beings are universal, or at least nearly universal desiderata. Attempting a critique of Adams’s approach to reconciling the existence of an almighty and benevolent Creator and the existence of evil in the world, Earl observes that Adams’s answer to the problem of evil ‘involves some sort of “intimacy” with God on the part of the sufferer of horrendous evil’ (Earl 2011, 18). Earl is not convinced that this ‘sort of intimacy’ proposed by Adams stands as a path toward understanding the coherent connection between power and love in God’s attitude toward the world affected by evil, since in his view, God’s power, as great as it may seem, cannot offer sufficient comfort to those that have been affected by horrendous evils (21). Moreover, omnipotence itself is an attribute prevent
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