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there is no God.

      His answer— and he gets it from Augustine, who says that God would not allow any evil; God doesn’t do it, but he allows it through human free will. God would not allow any evil, unless his wisdom and power were such as to bring out of it an even greater good. The fairy-tale answer. We are not yet in the happily-ever-after; we are struggling toward it.

      Q: I think that one of the most difficult problems that many of us have in dealing with the problems of suffering is not how we deal with them individually, but how other people deal with suffering, as we perceive it. At the end of the movie that is now certainly drawing an awful lot of comment, The Hours, one of the lead characters describes her choice that has to do with leaving her children with a very familiar phrase. Of course, in the movie you never really understand that she’s having a problem with this child; it’s revealed only at the end. The movie is about suicide, if you haven’t seen it. That is not the ending, which is much more dramatic; this is just a piece of it.

      She says, “I chose to leave because I chose life.” Now, that is not ordinarily the application of that phrase— that a mother would leave her children in order to choose life. There really is a whole lot more to the film, if you haven’t seen it. I was just absolutely struck by the application of that phrase to what, to me, on the surface of it would be someone struggling to overcome evil as a very bad choice.

      A: I think it’s a fake. I haven’t seen the movie, but her mistake is that she is thinking only about her own life. Life is like a tree, and it has many branches, many leaves, many roots. It is one. The idea of human solidarity, both in sin and in suffering, is rather hard for us uprooted, overly self-conscious individualists to understand, but almost any ancient people understood it better than we do. You can’t really be happy and fulfilled and alive without those to whom you are deeply connected being the same.

      Q: I see you wrote a book on Socrates and Jesus. In First Corinthians, the Apostle Paul says, “We preach Christ crucified . . . foolishness to the Gentiles.” Apparently, Paul had some experience of talking to the Greeks, and as he talked to them, they said, “You are a fool.” Now, what is it about Greek thinking that makes Paul a fool in their eyes?

      A: Most people are fools. The percentage of non-fools is very small everywhere. I believe Paul wrote that epistle to the Corinthians after he had visited Athens. In Acts 17, he goes to Mars Hill, where Socrates actually philosophized, and addressed the philosophers. They said, “What is this strange saying?” Now he has the opportunity to talk to philosophers. Athens and Jerusalem are coming together.

      I have never been to Athens, but I have been told that Mars Hill is at the top of a long road called “the Way of the Gods.” There were statues to all of the gods, not just Greek gods, but gods of many other cultures, because people would come to Athens from many places and make sacrifices to their many gods. Paul refers to them in the first part of his sermon to the Athenians, when he says that, as he was walking up this road, he noticed that they are “very religious.” That is sarcastic, because before that, he said that his heart burned within him, because of the idolatry. You would expect he is going to say something similar to what he had said to the Corinthians: “What fools you are.” Astonishingly, instead, he says, “But one of these inscriptions I noticed was dedicated to an unknown God.”

      Socrates was, in fact, a stonecutter, and there were two kinds of stonema-sons in ancient Greece. One just cut altars and letters, which was easy. Then there were the sculptors who had to do rounded human figures, and not too many people could do that. If you could do that, you got rich, but Socrates was very poor. So, Socrates cut things like altarpieces and inscriptions. As you know, if you read any of Socrates, you know that he worshipped the unknown God. He would not name this God, and he lost his life, because he couldn’t name him Zeus or Apollo or any of the gods of the state. So, it may be that Socrates literally cut this very altarpiece that Paul refers to: To the unknown God.

      What does Paul say about it? “The God that you are already worshipping ignorantly, I will now declare to you.” I think that’s the other side of the foolishness. Yes, there is Greek foolishness. Socrates is not a fool, because he knows that he is a fool. He will not name the God he knows he doesn’t know. He is searching— and according to rather high authority, those who seek find. I would be very surprised not to find Socrates in heaven.

      Q: I think that the apostle Paul ends First Corinthians, chapter 1, by saying, “of him we are in Christ Jesus,” that is, it is God’s choice who goes to heaven.

      A: And it is also ours; it is not exclusive.

      Q: That is true.

      A: That is a paradox of predestination and free will, both of which are very clearly taught. That is the paradox of every great novel. Show me one novel without predestination by the author; show me one novel without free will by the characters.

      Q: Well, I don’t understand. It seems to me that you are involved in a self-contradiction. On the one hand, you are saying that Socrates is in heaven. On the other hand, the apostle Paul says that the debaters of this age did not know God. Now, are you saying that people who do not know God are going to heaven?

      A: No, but I don’t think Socrates is one of those people. I don’t think he was a mere debater. He was a seeker.

      Q: Paul does say the Greeks have called him a fool.

      A: The Greeks is a vague term, like the Jews. To stereotype a whole people or a whole race is silly.

      Q: I guess to make it a long story short, I would think you would have to introduce the question of regeneration.

      A: Yes, but my very conservative and traditional belief that Jesus is not just a human being but the Logos, the eternal second person of the Trinity, justifies my rather liberal expectation that a lot of non-Christians will be in heaven. That is because John says in his gospel, chapter 1, verse 9, the Logos enlightens everyone who comes into the world. So, even though Jesus is the universal savior, you don’t have to know him in his thirty-three-year-old, six-foot-high, Jewish-carpenter body. There are other ways to know him, and maybe Socrates did.

      Q: I wish I could agree with you, but I don’t.

      A: All right, some other day.

      Q: My question has to do with the nature of God. The Scripture said, “Jacob I loved, and Esau I hated.” How do you defend to someone how a good and loving God can hate?

      A: I don’t know Hebrew, but I would bet on the fact that the word hate there means the same thing that the Greek word for hate means in one of Jesus’s strange sayings: “Unless you hate your father and your mother, you cannot be my disciple.” Hate means “turn your back on, when necessary”— put second, rather than first.

      So, it’s not that God was burning with hatred for Esau, because Esau didn’t exist yet. This is talking about predestination. Before they were even born, God said, “Esau is going to be the villain; Jacob is going to be the hero,” like a novelist. That doesn’t mean they don’t have free will. The novelist gives them the free will to choose heroism or villainy, but he knows what they’re going to choose.

      Q: First of all, thank you for sharing your wisdom with us. Once, in a philosophy class, I heard the statement that evil is not part of creation but is the absence of good or goodness. I was wondering, first of all, if you could expand on that, and secondly, could you give me some background on where it originated, stated in that concrete manner?

      A: That is probably referring to a great discovery Augustine made. He talks about it in The Confessions. He couldn’t solve the problem of evil, so he became a Manichean for eleven years. The Manicheans believed that evil; is explained by the fact that there is an evil God and a good God and that they are equal and fighting and nobody is winning forever. The evil God made matter, and the good God wants to liberate

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