A Theodicy of Kenosis: Eleonore Stump and the Fall of Jericho

Abstract

When Joshua came to Jericho and encountered the captain of the LORD’s host, his stance appears much like the theodicist, who, facing the awful prospects of suffering, evil, or death, seeks assurance from God, asking, “are you for us or our adversaries?” (Jos 5:13). Yet the angel’s reply is not “yes,” as typical theodicies seek to answer on God’s behalf, but “No; rather I indeed come now as captain of the host of the LORD.” (Jos 5:14) The implication is political: the angel seeks to alter Joshua’s stance from one ordered to his own purposes to one ordered to the LORD’s. Like traditional theodicies, Eleonore Stump’s Wandering in Darkness (2010) does not sufficiently establish why a theistic God must create a world where, to preserve our capacity to freely love God, suffering is caused or permitted. I avoid this problem by finding a “kenotic” aspect in the action of signs in which the perennial problems of suffering and evil do not arise, and which is available to direct experience, making it empirically falsifiable in principle. Like the angel’s reply to Joshua, this invites a change from a speculatively grounded stance representing the hopes of a theodicist, to one formed from real interactions that transcend discourse.

Keywords

• metaphysics
• theodicy
• problem of evil
• sign action
• kenosis
• problem of suffering
• john poinsot
• eleonore stump
• real relations
• franciscan knowledge