Contending With the Divine Writer's Block - Ch. 1 of 5

Intro and Ch.1 of My Systematic Theology Master's Thesis

In my systematic theology Master’s degree at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School we had the choice to do a couple capstone papers, which were slightly longer research papers, or we could do a full-blown Master’s thesis. Most people don’t choose the thesis because it’s way more work but at this point in my theological education I had realized I wanted to be a philosopher and not a theologian. So, I decided to end my theological career with a bang and do a MA thesis under Dr. Kevin Vanhoozer and Dr. John Feinberg.

I told Dr. Vanhoozer that I wanted to work on his particular take on the God-World relation, the ‘Authorial Analogy’, which basically says that God relates to the created order in an analogous fashion to how an author relates to their novel. I wanted to flesh out some implications for God’s relation to time based on Vanhoozer’s model. But he told me I should really be thinking about the problem of evil since lots of people think the Authorial or ‘Author’ Analogy exacerbates the problem of evil, i.e., if God wrote the story of reality, why did He include so much evil? Or any evil at all?

So I took Dr. Vanhoozer up on the challenge and got Dr. Feinberg to be the second chair or examiner or whatever language they use for MA theses. Dr. Feinberg got his PhD in philosophy from the University of Chicago and he did his dissertation on the problem(s) of evil in the philosophy of religion, so I had to have him! In my thesis defense they grilled me for a long time, they were really encouraging and said they were treating the defense more like a PhD defense since I had written so much—that felt amazing. In the end they asked me to add just one sentence for clarification and I passed, earning my MAST. It was an immense privilege to work under those two giants.

Over the years I’ve appeared on various podcasts to talk about the work I did in my thesis and in a journal article I got out of it. From those appearances, people will occasionally ask for a copy of the thesis. I’d like to do more work on it and eventually publish it, but ain’t nobody want to publish a work like this from a meager MA and not a PhD. So, I’ll probably have to wait until I have a PhD to add to it. For now, I’ll just publish the thesis here on my Substack in installments for those interested.

Here’s the abstract and introduction for free and the chapter 1 for my paid subscribers behind the paywall:

ABSTRACT

This thesis is an examination of authorial analogies for the God-world relation in general and Kevin Vanhoozer’s analogy in particular. Throughout the course of this study, I examine the nature of analogies, compare and contrast them with metaphors, and pick out the particular form of analogy used in Vanhoozer’s model. I then commend the use of authorial analogies by rehearsing various ways in which they have been used to explicate different Christian doctrines. I then repristinate Vanhoozer’s authorial analogy in order to demonstrate that it does not make God the author of sin and evil, even when faced with contemporary challenges from philosophy like epistemic self-defeat and the manipulation argument. After defending Vanhoozer’s analogy against the charge that it makes God the author of evil, I demonstrate how the tools of Vanhoozer’s analogy can be used to answer the problems of divine neglect, gratuitous evil, and the problem of the amount of evil.

DEDICATION

To my father, Jim Settecase, who passionately taught me to love the Lord and who first raised the problem of authoring evil for me while reading me the story of God and Pharaoh. And to Kevin Vanhoozer, who taught how to solve the problem of authoring evil and taught me that being theologically and philosophically rigorous is no good if you can’t have word play.

Spiritual giants, both of you.

Introduction

There are various ways to depict the God-world relation, but one of the most fruitful depictions comes from viewing God as the Author of the world. That is, viewing the relation between God and His world in an analogous fashion to that of an author and his novel. Call analogies in this category: authorial analogies of the God-world relation, or authorial analogies for short. Proponents of authorial analogies argue that one may employ them as helpful conceptual tools for speaking literally about the Creator-creature relation while maintaining the Creator-creature distinction and avoiding both univocity and equivocation. God relates to the world as an author relates to his novel- not in a univocal fashion—God is not literally writing with pen or quill nor typing the story of reality in a coffee shop one level of reality higher than ours. Likewise, while univocity is preempted, so is an equivocal conception of authorship which would emphasize the Creator-creature distinction so strongly that we would lose our ability to speak literally of the Creator-creature relation. Employing a version of the authorial analogy is an exercise in analogical reasoning and predication. God is analogous to an author; reality is analogous to a novel.

While authorial analogies appear promising at first glance, several questions are immediately raised, and with them, a host of apparent problems. What do we mean by analogy? What positive theological fruits do authorial analogies offer? And even if we may find some theological fruits, is it really appropriate to use analogies which compare the Creator to His creatures in the first place? Might these potential fruits be forbidden fruits after all? And even if they turn out to be permissible and beneficial, whose authorial analogy should we employ? And what of the immediate problem of disanalogy? Is our ontological status really so similar to that of Bilbo Baggins? How can these analogies be beneficial if there is such strong and immediate disanalogy? What of the dauting problem of determinism and freewill which authorial analogies seem to exacerbate? Likewise, what of the problem of epistemic self-defeat- could a character in a novel ever have a self-conscious belief about of their status without destroying the justification for all of their beliefs? Wouldn’t an authorial analogy compound the intractable problems of evil inherited by such a strong view of divine sovereignty, such as the problem of gratuitous evil and the vast amounts of evil, as well as the problem of divine hiddenness? If God is the author of the universe, including the history of earth, why would He “write in” purposeless evil and so much of it, and where is this absentee author when we are suffering or lonely? Worse still, doesn’t an authorial analogy make God the author of evil? These are some of the serious questions facing authorial analogies, and if their proponents do not have plausible answers to them, then any potential conceptual fruit garnered from them will sour and rot.

If authorial analogies have internal defects or lead to the conclusion that God is an evil manipulator, then they should not be lauded as a tool for the God-world relation, perhaps they should even be forbidden from use by Christian theologians. It is my goal in this present work to pick out and explicate the particular authorial analogy of Kevin J. Vanhoozer, and to then commend its use by applying it to the questions above and by defending it from the charge that its appropriation would make God the author of sin and evil in any morally objectionable manner.

With these goals in mind, it will be important that we define our terms (chapter 1). With a firm grasp of our terms in place, we will then move to expound on the potential theological fruit to be gained from using an authorial analogy (chapter 2). From there, we will parse out Vanhoozer’s particular authorial analogy and explain some of the benefits of using this analogy over others conceptions (chapter 3). Once we have a firm understanding of the authorial analogy in question, we will move to face the charge of authoring evil as well as the problems of free will and determinism, the problem epistemic self-defeat, and the charge of manipulation (chapter 4). After dealing with these problems we will move to deal with specific “plot problems” as we present and answer various problems of evil which arise for the authorial analogy, including the absentee author, plotless evil, and authorial logorrhea (chapter 5). Any mistakes in reasoning are mine and are not to be attributed to Vanhoozer’s analogia auctoris. If the present study is successful then we will have vindicated the categories of authorial analogies and theological determinism against the charge that they inherently make God the author of sin and evil.

Chapter 1: What Do We Mean Authorial Analogy?

As we begin our examination of authorial analogies, it is important that we define our terms. In order to defend the authorial analogy against the problems raised in the introduction, we will need a finer grained understanding of authorial analogies in general and of our preferred analogy in particular. For the sake of clarity then, we need to ask two variations of the same question, “what do we mean by authorial analogy?” and “what do we mean by authorial analogy?”.