Rite and Reason:Is God irresponsible? Would it have been better had nothing ever existed? asks Martin Henry
The idea that there is something scandalous and foolish or even absurd about Christianity is not new. It's what it says about itself, as St Paul's contribution to the New Testament amply testifies. And some, like the early Christian writer Tertullian, or Kierkegaard in modern times, have gloried in its absurdity.
But something even more sinister than absurdity has been associated with Christianity. This is the notion, which has provoked intense hostility towards the Christian faith from Julian the Apostate to Friedrich Nietzsche, that Christianity is anti-human. What, above all, has been found abhorrent is the way the act of redemption - Christ's death on the cross - has been understood.
The idea that, as the journalist Vincent Browne has put it, "an all-merciful, all-loving and all-forgiving God was so obsessed with the sinfulness of humanity, that to atone to Himself for that sinfulness, He sent His Son into the world to be tortured and crucified to save us all from His (God's) wrath", is indeed repulsive and incredible.
Such a sadistic God, who enjoyed torturing his own son and who, by implication, enjoys tormenting the inhabitants of a world He has created for no other apparent reason, would, if he existed, be a monster.
So far, the caricature. But even if it is conceded that this is only a caricature of Christian beliefs, it is worth remembering that a caricature only exaggerates or distorts for emphasis something that is essentially true.
Christianity does indeed interpret the death of Christ on the cross as effecting the redemption of the world. There is no getting round this, or rendering it less unpalatable or less offensive to human reason.
And even if one tries to soften the impact of the crucifixion by appealing to the resurrection, the scandal still remains. Resurrection, in a sense, proves nothing, or justifies nothing because it doesn't undo the past and its sufferings.
This perhaps brings us closer to what the crucifixion, I think, means for Christian faith. It has nothing to do with smoothing the ruffled feathers of an easily offended, testy deity, or nothing to do with a neurotic God "obsessed with the sinfulness of humanity", but everything to do with our acceptance of life and death.
So much of human history is characterised by suffering, defeat and death, that the figure of the crucified Christ is for many a uniquely poignant reflection of the absurdity and horror and wastefulness of their own lives.
But the miracle of Christianity is that no amount of ignominy and humiliation and suffering has in fact been able to extinguish faith in the value of our humanity, as reflected, or rather as incarnated, in the figure of Jesus. It has, rather, emphasised that value. Nietzsche, Christianity's most passionately serious critic in the modern age, saw too the problem of suffering in life with finally unbearable lucidity.
To live and to realise how living is inseparable from suffering (both the suffering we cause and the suffering we endure), to recognise how suffering cannot be edited out of the texture of life, is to see that a price has to be paid for living.
The question then is: "Who pays the price of our redemption?"
It is more than a question of morality. Ultimate questions are about more than morality. They are, in Nietzsche's expression, "beyond good and evil". Is life itself to be endorsed or repudiated? Is the game worth the candle?
Christianity, as I understand it, takes the view that, because we did not create the world or ourselves, we don't have the wherewithal to make the kind of affirmative claim that Nietzsche makes about the meaning or value of life, but can only endorse the value of life by faith, ie by believing that God in Christ took upon himself the evil and suffering of life and thereby redeemed the world. He did so, however, not out of a sadistic - or masochistic - love of suffering, but out of a desire to let the world exist, despite its woes. From our perspective - and what other have we? - it really depends on how we view life and its ultimate origin and end.
If there is no God, we cannot be made in his image. So in what or in whose image are we made? What is our meaning? What is our value? What is our identity?
And if we do believe in God, but believe that God didn't create the world out of any inner divine necessity, is God then wilfully responsible for the suffering of the world? Is God in that case irresponsible? Would it not have been better had nothing ever existed?
The Christian faith, with the reality of the crucified Christ at its centre, is an attempt to answer that question of all questions.
• Fr Martin D Henryis lecturer in dogmatic theology at St Patrick's College, Maynooth and author of On Not Understanding God(Columba Press, 1997)