Yet my Friend's call to search for the truth gradually led me to acknowledge that science, suffering, and the plurality of world religions all indicate that the existence and love of a divine being are not clear and obvious to all honest and intelligent seekers. Honest reflection showed me that even my own experiences could be accounted foron naturalistic grounds. Indeed, I found myself increasingly compelled to think so. And so my personal position, aswellas the world's position, is thoroughly ambiguous. The traditional God could reveal the divine existence and love clearly, and the God who was my Friend would make that existence and love clear. So why is God hiding from us?
People who accept the integrity of other searchers cannot think as Paul did. Belief that the world plainly and unambiguously displays the existence and love of God necessarily entails the conclusion that those who do not believe are dishonest, refusing to acknowledge what they know to be true. "They exchanged the truth about God for a lie" (Rom. 1:25). Such belief has obvious epistemological consequences, as reflected in I John 4:6: "We are of God. Whoever knows God listens to us, and who is not of God does not listen to us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error." How can traditional theists avoid this conclusion?
John Hick has seen far more clearly than most that the ambiguity of the world is part of the problem of evil. Knowledge of God is surely a good thing, and the classical God would obviously be able to reveal the divine existence and majesty with overwhelming clarity, as Paul declared. But Hick recognizes that the existence and nature of God are not made clear in this ambiguous world. Hick stands above the theological crowd in seeing that this is a serious modern challenge to classical theism and in systematically attempting to justify God's lack of clearer revelation. Rejecting Paul's confidence, and the inevitable dogmatic corollary, Hick's solution is that God has intentionally made the world ambiguous -- i.e., has intentionally created it "to look as if there were no God" so that we can come to faith freely.
I believe that Hick is absolutely right in insisting that classical theists today who would reject narrow dogmatism must hold that God intentionally created an ambiguous world. Hick recognizes that a basic grasp of modern science makes naturalism an honest option. But also, as a student of world religions and a philosopher, he recognizes that only by acknowledging that ambiguity can he participate authentically in a community of inquiry that includes people with so many differing points of view.
Nevertheless, I cannot accept Hick's solution that a loving God has intentionally made the world look as if there is no God so that we will be free to choose faith. I do not believe that ignorance is the ground of freedom or faith. It is true that good teachers must let student arrive at some insights on their own. But imagine parents following the model of Hick's God and putting their children in an orphanage so that they will be free to decide whether to believe that their parents are alive and whether they love their parents. This is absurd! Yet it is what Hick says God did.
Hick's solution to the world's ambiguity also ignores the heart of the Christian experience. When I experienced my Friend's love poured into my heart I could not help but love the people around me. But it was not against my will because my will had been transformed. We cannot be fully free to choose faithful commitments when we do not clearly see what we are choosing for or against. Nor are we fully free to love until we have first been loved. Hick is right in seeing that this world's ambiguity is a serious challenge to traditional theism, but he solves the problem in the wrong way. Process theology, however, can solve the problem while affirming the core experience of Christian theism: that God loves us and struggles to reveal that love in all of life.
The world's ambiguity is not an embarrassment to process theologians. Instead, it is a primary datum on which process theism builds. Because God loves us, God is constantly struggling to disclose that love in the world; but because the world has its own agency, and God's power is solely persuasive, that disclosure always occurs within and through the historical and natural processes. Of course all religious experiences, texts, and institutions are historically conditioned (while yet opening occasional windows to a glimpse of the divine). Of course the world of nature involves its own causality (while yet leaving us to wonder at the beauty and love it has produced). Of course God's creative and sustaining activity appears through a glass darkly.
In process theology, neither belief nor unbelief caries any moral stigma, because the world is ambiguous; but unlike in Hick's thesis, God has not intentionally created it that way to test our faith. So process theology can claim as a major strength its ability fully and consistently to sanction the modern ethic of mutual respect by removing any preconception that those who disagree are necessarily unfaithful. It supports the modern climate of inquiry in ways that classical theism must resist. If one adopts a process concept of God and God's relationship to the world, the ambiguity of the world loses its character as a divine deception and becomes an expression of the divine struggle for self-disclosure, a struggle powerfully symbolized in the paradox of a crucified God.
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