Summary of text [comment] page 45

I continue with page 45, where Schoonenberg accepts that “evil is a statistical necessity” for God’s creation and wonders whether it applies to the realm of freedom and morality, that is, to us.

[So far, blogs 1.6J through 1.6AD wrestled with pages 44 and 45.  They cover a lot of territory.  Every attempt to summarize generated a new twist.  Each new insight reveals an implication of the text.  Of course, this is the nature of the theological treatise.

Consequently, I stand in wonder at the freight that Schoonenberg tried to pack within a single paragraph, on page 45, in this section on “The Analogy between Sin and Physical (Natural) Evil”.

Schoonenberg walks the reader back, from a quote in the writings of de Chardin (on the statistical necessity of failure or evil in biological systems), to a consideration of the evil of sin.

What he cannot cover, because he does not have the tools to articulate the ideas, is that the evil of sin occurs in the cultural spontaneous orders that we live in. We interpret failure through the lens of designed order, without an intuitive sense of the way that spontaneous orders emerge and maintain themselves, without a clue that our “designs” are “beings within the cultural spontaneous order”, and, until now, with no awareness that our world is not the Lebenswelt that we evolved in.]