No but plenty of people use it to dodge a good God, Alex being one. And I’m not sure that’s true. I don’t think a paradise we left (or got ourselves thrown out of) makes it worse. It’s like saying hell is locked from the inside. It’s meant to soften.
That is how Alex frames it. As the end shows he says their end has been dismal. The whole argument is untold and insane amounts of animal suffering. Not to mention human suffering. But from past material, I know Alex is big on the animal issue.
Gentlemen, would you agree that the problem of suffering is intrinsic to virtually
all religion? Many, many denominations have come (and many have disappeared)
through the process of trying to devise specific answers. Inevitably, the metaphysical
explanations leave us without a Universally Satisfying answer.
An old testament scholar from Yale (I forget her name) made a powerful presentation
about the suffering of Job, and essentially used the old school answer that this is what
God intended, and to “Keep calm and carry on!” These words are not hers… but I
think Calvin would have liked that expression.
Is it mostly the modern age perspective that finds that so unsatisfying?
When my Pilgrim ancestors were exposed to the NEW trinity of
”An all powerful god, and all knowing god and an all loving God”, the
original Pilgrim Church in Plymouth Massachusetts threw out the old
clergy, and replaced Fire & Brimstone with Love and Unitarianism.
A third of the Church stomped out, walked across the Plymouth Common,
and established a Fire & Brimstone Congregational Church!
A landmark 1820 Massachusetts Supreme Court case, Baker v. Fales,
ruled that church property—including buildings, silver, and funds—belonged
to the “parish” (the majority of the town’s voting citizens) rather than the
“church” (the actual communicant members).
So, in many towns, the majority of citizens had become Unitarian, while the
core church members remained Orthodox/Trinitarian. Following the court’s
ruling, the Trinitarian minorities were forced to vacate their historic meeting
houses and build new ones down the road. (“The Congregationalists
kept the faith; the Unitarians kept the furniture.”)
But eventually, Calvinist suffering fell aside most everywhere, as the intellectual
center of Congregationalism had moved away from orthodoxy. In 1825 the
struggle culminated in the formal separation of the American Unitarian Association,
where the liberal congregations officially broke away, leaving the “Orthodox”
Congregationalists to defend what remained of their Calvinist heritage.
**Then in the mid-1800s, Horace Bushnell, often called the “father of American
religious liberalism,” provided the theological framework to move past Calvinism
without becoming Unitarian.
**
He challenged the Calvinist emphasis on a “crisis” conversion experience (being
“born again”) and instead promoted Christian Nurture, arguing that children should
grow up in a Christian home never knowing themselves to be anything other than
Christian.
He replaced the Calvinist view of the Atonement (substitutionary sacrifice) with
a “moral view,” emphasizing Jesus as a moral example rather than a sacrifice for
sin. The 1865 Burial Hill Declaration was produced by the National Council of
Congregational Churches (they met at Burial Hill in Plymouth). While they nominally
reaffirmed their faith in the “confessions of our fathers,” they notably omitted the
word “Calvinism” and refused to explicitly endorse the specific decrees of John Calvin.
This signaled a shift toward a broader, more ecumenical “evangelical” identity that
was less tied to strict Reformed dogmas. The final “sweeping aside” is often identified
with the adoption of the Kansas City Statement of Faith in 1913. This document
officially replaced earlier, more rigorous Calvinist confessions with a brief, modern
statement that focused on character, service, and the “Fatherhood of God.” It
represented a radical break from the past, effectively ending the era where
Calvinist orthodoxy was the standard for the denomination.
By the time the Congregational Christian Churches merged to form the United
Church of Christ (UCC) in 1957, the denomination had moved almost entirely
into the camp of Mainline Protestant liberalism, prioritizing social justice and
ecumenism over traditional Reformed soteriology.
On the OTHER SIDE OF CULTURE, we had the world’s geologists to thank
for a new view that played well with stepping away from Calvin orthodoxy:
In the 1830s, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology argued that Earth was
shaped by slow, consistent processes (like erosion) over millions of years. To
reconcile this with faith, many 19th-century Americans adopted “Progressive
Creationism,” viewing the “days” of Genesis as vast geological epochs.
From 1859 to 1880s, Darwinism provided a narrative for how life changed
within that vast timeframe. And the general idea of biological evolution
gained rapid traction in American scientific and academic circles.
From the 1880s to 1900, there was pushback by niche religionists who
were skeptical of “Natural Selection” because it seemed too random and
lacked a clear mechanism for how traits were passed down. The “missing
piece” of evolution—how traits are inherited—arrived with the birth of
modern genetics.
Gregor Mendel’s laws of inheritance were rediscovered, providing a
mathematical basis for how traits are transmitted. Thomas Hunt Morgan’s
work with fruit flies in 1915 proved that genes are located on chromosomes,
transforming genetics from a theory into a physical science.
The Modern Synthesis, formulated during the 1930s & 1940s, fused
Darwinian natural selection with Mendelian genetics, creating the unified
“Modern Synthesis” that remains the standard model today. The application
of radioactivity to dating rocks finally allowed scientists to assign absolute
ages (billions of years) to the geological strata, confirming the “Old Earth”
required for genetic evolution to occur.
In 1944, Oswald Avery and colleagues demonstrated that DNA was the
carrier of genetic information. And finally, in 1953, Watson and Crick solved
the double helix structure… demonstrating how genetic information was
actually coded and transmitted from generation to generation.
And through it all, the metaphysics of suffering and sin, was variously
mitigated and re-stated by anyone who wanted to explain or dispute
suffering in a religious Universe.
G.Brooks
Of course.
Vinnie