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An excerpt from Chapter 4 of God Of Our Silent Tears, now available from Cathedral Bookstore on line. http://www.godofoursilenttears.com/#et_page_802

Any attempt to look upon suffering as caused directly or indirectly by God

            stands in danger of regarding him as sadistic.[i]

                                                                        Dorothee Soelle, Suffering

            Every human creature born

            Is born into the bright delusion

            Beauty and loving-kindness care for him.

            Suffering teaches! Suffering is good for us!

            Imagine men and women dying

            Still believing that the cuddling arms

            Enclosed them! . . .

            We learn to wish we’d never lived.[ii]

Archibald MacLeish, J. B. [Nickles speaking]

            “Affliction as punishment” does not carry much weight among today’s theologians. Saddling contemporary Christianity with that notion is truly not fair. But some of our best minds are inclined to interpret hardship as an opportunity for spiritual growth. Suffering can be understood as a test or an exercise. This approach is better because it attributes tough love, instead of vengeance, to God. But it is still problematic.            

            Let’s begin with the “test of faith” view before dealing with the closely related “spiritual exercise” theory. “Test of faith” regards affliction as a kind of trial or temptation to measure the degree of faith the sufferer has developed. The story of Job can be read this way, and I Peter 1:6–9 supports that view.[iii] The problem with “test of faith” is that it posits a seriously flawed view of God. Just ask: How do we feel about the cosmic proctor administering a moral midterm? Louise Glück protests against that kind of God in her poem “Matins (3)”:

                                    What is my heart to you

                                    that you must break it over and over

                                    like a plantsman testing

                                    his new species? [iv]                         

It is hard to worship and adore someone who would give us cancer to see how we handle it. Besides, this theory just doesn’t fit with the rest of what we believe about God. Does God test our characters with broken relationships, diseases, and social injustice? The notion is patently absurd. Scripture is quite clear that God knows us quite well already:

                        Lord you have searched me out and known me;

                                    you know my sitting down and my rising up;

                                    you discern my thoughts from afar.

                        You trace my journeys and my resting places

                                    and are acquainted with all my ways.

                        Indeed there is not a word on my lips

                                    but you O Lord know it altogether.

                                                                        – Psalm 139:1–4

One of the Church’s prayers begins, “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, from whom no secrets are hid.” God doesn’t need to administer tests. The tragedies that we are calling “tests” are the sorts of tests that might be dreamed up by Joseph Mengele. The God of Christianity does not afflict us out of curiosity to see how we’ll respond. Louise Glück protested against the God of the inhuman experiment, the God who “tests our faith.” Then she quickly saw that the God against whom she rebelled was a straw man, not the true God. In “Matins (4),” she writes:

                                    I am ashamed

                        at what I thought you were,

                                    distant from us, regarding us

                                    as an experiment: it is

                                    a bitter thing to be

                                    the disposable animal,

                                    a bitter thing. Dear friend,

                                    dear trembling partner, what

                                    surprises you most in what you feel,

                                    earth’s radiance or your own delight?[v]

            The only way to read the “test of faith” idea as saying something worthy of consideration is to interpret the “test” not as an examination, but as an exercise in faith. That idea has been embraced by notable theologians such as Simone Weil, Diogenes Allen, D. Z. Phillips, and John Hick. They have offered truly compelling arguments that God has designed the world as a spiritual boot camp to whip us into shape.

         The Christian tradition is not alone in its claim that suffering can humanize us and make us wise.
            
Aeschylus and Sophocles rarely wrote a play that did not include the line “I have suffered into truth.” 

Undoubtedly, the idea of suffering as a way to grow spiritually has deep roots in the Christian tradition, 

too. St. Paul said, “I want to share in the sufferings of Christ . . . if I may somehow attain the 

resurrection from the dead.” St. Ireneaus, in the third century, taught that evil was in the world in order 

to help us to grow toward holiness.[vi] Hebrews opines that “God disciplines those he loves” and that

“all discipline is painful” (but not that all pain is discipline). In the fourteenth century, Lady Julian of

Norwich prayed for the wounds of true contrition, true longing for God, and a serious illness to purify

her soul. In her classic Shewings, she said the wounds of life lead to greater honor and joy than we

could experience without them.[vii]

We must acknowledge that suffering and spiritual growth are sometimes, at least potentially, connected. 

In the Christian tradition, there are two versions of the idea that suffering is good for us. A view that D. 

Z. Phillips calls the “Outward Bound” school of theology holds that our own suffering poses challenges 

that enable us to develop heroic virtues, and the suffering of others gives us opportunities to practice 

mercy.[viii]

         I call the other theory the Casablanca school of theology (“the problems of three little people 

don’t  amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world”).[ix] The Casablanca school does not see God as

sending specific sufferings, but as leaving the universe to function unrestrained and therefore with

amoral  indifference to our well being. From the resulting hardships, we should learn that we are

insignificant.  This insight liberates us from our egos.

            Both views have some merit, but I cannot unqualifiedly accept either of them. As with the “divine retribution theory,” this “spiritual growth” theodicy is undercut by the facts we experience. So much suffering is grinding, dehumanizing, and embittering. Suffering is as likely to disintegrate us as it is to ennoble us. In Imagining Redemption, theologian David Kelsey shares such a case study. Sam was a little boy who contracted Guillain-Barré syndrome. It left him disabled and behaviorally unmanageable. The strain drove his mother to suicide. His father was then worn down by trying to care for Sam alone, leaving Kelsey to ask the hard question, “What earthly good does Jesus do in this situation?”[x]

            Does this theology offer a God we can worship and adore? No. It reduces God to a cosmic drill sergeant. That God-image may be more benign than the cosmic executioner, who punishes us for our moral lapses, but it is still a small-hearted God, using carrots and sticks to enforce his will. It is hard, and perhaps not healthy, to love such a God. His character still smacks of sadism.

            So how shall we sort out the truth from the falsehood in this approach to suffering? It is crucial here to distinguish a cause from a purpose, and a purpose from a justification.[xi] Spiritual growth will not do as a cause of suffering. God doesn’t send affliction like a thunderbolt to humble us. But our choice to use our suffering as an occasion for growth is another matter. Purpose and meaning are not just lying there before the event in an objective way for us to discover. Purpose and meaning are fashioned by our own interpretation and actions. Suffering and grief are sometimes somewhat redeemed from utter meaninglessness by spiritual transformation. Suffering isn’t caused by our need to grow, but we can grow through suffering and so give it a purpose or meaning.

            The possibility of making productive spiritual use of our suffering still doesn’t justify what happened to us. That would be a false defense of evil and injustice. Simone Weil, of all people, a brave fighter against fascism, certainly never intended that. Rabbi Harold Kushner described what he had gained spiritually from the death of his son Aaron, but acknowledged the gains did not justify the loss:

                        I am a more sensitive person, a more effective pastor, a more

                        sympathetic counselor because of Aaron’s life and death than I

                        would ever have been without it. And I would give up all those

                        gains in a second if I could have my son back. If I could choose,

                        I would forego all the spiritual growth and depth . . . and become

                        what I was fifteen years ago, an indifferent counselor, . . .

                        and the father of a bright, happy boy. But I cannot choose.[xii]

 Spiritual growth does not justify our suffering. But it can often paint the silver lining. If Kushner had shriveled into bitterness when his son died, he would have suffered just as much, perhaps more, but without finding any meaning or value in it. In fact, it would have made the meaning of his son’s death even worse. Kushner says:

                        We, by our responses, give suffering either a positive or a negative

                        meaning. Illnesses, accidents, human tragedies kill people. But

                        they do not necessarily kill life or faith. If the death and suffering

                        of someone we love makes us bitter, jealous, against all religion,

                        and incapable of happiness, we turn the person who died into

                        one of the “devil’s martyrs.” If suffering and death in someone

                        close to us bring us to explore the limits of our capacity for strength

                        and love and cheerfulness, if it leads us to discover sources of

                        consolation we never knew before, then we make the person

                        into a witness for the affirmation of life rather than its rejection.[xiii]

It is not always possible to turn pain into wisdom and compassion, but when it is possible, it is a 

profound way to live through affliction. Making meaning is a spiritual challenge life sets for us. We 

grow stronger in the process of trying to meet it. The irony in Archibald MacLeish’s J. B. is this: The 

“God” character is an immoral tyrant who subjects J. B. to unendurable suffering just to win a bet. But 

J. B. makes meaning of his suffering in the end, by resolving to love in spite of it all, knowing that love 

entails suffering, but that same love makes life worthwhile anyway.

---

[i] Dorothee Soelle, Suffering, trans. Everett Kalin (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 25.

[ii] MacLeish, J.B., 49.

[iii] “In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith—being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” The treatment of suffering in I Peter is, however, much richer and more complex than this snippet would suggest. See Patricia M. McDonald, “The View of Suffering Held by the Author of I Peter,” in Tambasco, The Bible on Suffering, 165–87. I would call it the weak point of the epistle.

[iv] Louise Glück, “Matins (3),” in The Wild Iris (New York: Ecco Press, 1996), 12.

[v] Louise Glück, “Matins (4),” ibid., 13.

[vi] Alistair McGrath, Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 292.

[vii] The idea that our suffering and struggle with evil is an essential part of our spiritual growth goes back to St. Ireneaus and persists today in the theology of John Hick (ibid., 292–93).

[viii] D. Z. Phillips, The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005), 166, 179–80. Ireneaus, Hick, and Swinburne are leading proponents of this approach.

[ix] Simone Weil, Diogenes Allen, and D. Z. Phillips are proponents of this view. Allen insists that God’s reality makes everything meaningful, even catastrophes: “[We] can trust that what we are doing and what is happening to us from the operations of the natural world and the social order make a contribution, even when we are not able to see that they do. All moments of dismay and dryness, as well as times of elation, make a contribution to that life which is being formed but which is not visible to us, especially when we are in states of distress” (Christian Belief in a Postmodern World [Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1989], 117). Later, in commenting on Adams’s Horrendous Evils, Allen implicitly acknowledges that horrendous evils may serve no good purpose, but can only be redeemed by some counter-good that only God can offer. Simone Weil is the greatest exponent of the view that affliction ennobles, but it should be noted that Weil’s life makes her subject to Soelle’s accusation of masochism.

[x] Kelsey, Imagining Redemption, 51-54.

[xi] Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas were careful to distinguish between what we would call “causes” from what we would call “purposes.”

[xii] Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (New York: Schockten Books, 1981), 133–34.

[xiii] Ibid., 138.

HOW MUCH FREEDOM DO WE REALLY NEED? ENOUGH FOR THIS?

I was in a class

            and the teacher said

            I hear we hear we have

            a Jew pig in this class.

            I shook. He said

            I’m going to show

            this Jew pig

            how much pain

            a Jew can survive.

            He took a stick

            out of the desk

            and hit and hit.

            I don’t remember the pain,

            but only the kids

            who’d once been my friends

            laughing and laughing.

                                    Lyn Lifshin, “For Me The Holocaust

                                    Started In ‘33 In A Small Village” from Blue Tattoo[i]

. . . .

A. FREE WILL

            Why, then do bad things happen to good people? One reason is that our being human leaves us free to hurt each other, and God’ can’t stop us without taking away the freedom that makes us human.

    Harold Kushner, When Bad Things Happen To Good People [i]

            The “free will defense” is easily the most widely held belief explaining why an omnipotent good God would choose to allow people to misbehave. The argument goes that freedom is essential to make life meaningful and valuable. We are given freedom so our relationship with God can be personal and authentic. God wants real lovers, not Stepford Wives. The price of freedom is the genuine possibility that freedom will be abused. Free persons will sometimes choose to do wrong.

            Philosopher Alvin Plantinga has made a cogent argument that evil is the price of freedom and that a free world is better than a world that is good only because it has no choice.[ii]  Freedom makes the whole event of human life meaningful as opposed to a puppet show. Spiritually, the value of freedom is even greater. One of the most compelling views of our world is as an arena for “soul making.” In such an arena, freedom to choose between good and evil is essential to the environment for spiritual growth.[iii] As a matter of philosophical logic, the “free will defense” is widely regarded as having carried the day against the atheist argument from the problem of human evil.[iv]

            While this “free will defense” does not help with natural evil, it is so persuasive in explaining human evil that we need to be careful not to swallow it whole before we have chewed on it a bit. Oddly enough this popular notion, in its current form, is fairly new. Augustine said that creation was given a primal freedom for the sake of making the whole project meaningful. However, that freedom was lost with the Fall of Adam. Since then, the creation has been decidedly unfree because it is enslaved to the power of sin.

            While “free will” resonates with the cultural assumptions of modern Westerners who vote for political candidates and routinely choose from among five different brands of laundry detergent, most Christians over history have not shared these assumptions.  Trumpeting even the existence of individual free will was called “the Arminean heresy” well into the 18th Century. Christians traditionally might have believed with Augustine in “free Fall,” that creation and humanity were free in the beginning, but that did not mean humanity was still free to choose between good and evil. Rather humanity was enslaved to evil, and awaiting liberation.

            St. Paul did not regard sin as a wrong moral choice. He regarded it as a power to which people are in bondage. He said of himself that he did not do the good he wanted to do, but compulsively did the evil he did not want to do.[v]  Just so, in our time, contemporary theologians have disputed the free will defense because we so often do not experience sin as a wrong choice made with the options held before us evenly like “two roads diverg[ing] in a yellow wood.” Rather, sin works as a compulsion, a force that does not feel like our own true will making the decision.[vi]

            Much modern psychology insists that human beings are subject to a panoply of controlling, or at least powerful, influences that drive our decisions, often unconsciously – ranging from internal influences including genetic dispositions to external forces such as social pressure and economic necessity. Paul might call these factors that dispose us toward sin “powers and principalities.” Remember, Brian Nichols (Atlanta man who killed several people in the course of a jail break) did not experience himself as exercising free will in his decision to kill. A few years ago, a pre-teen boy in an urban ghetto was invited by older boys to try crack. He refused, so they burned him alive.  What kind of free will does such a child have?

            The free will defense fits well in the world view of modern democratic capitalism where the myth of freedom undergirds the way we organize our government and economy. However, the notion of free will is challenged from antiquity by Holy Scripture and from modernity by depth psychology, systems psychology, and behaviorism. In short, it is not as strong an argument as it seems at first glance.

            As a response to the existential problem of evil, the one with the blood and tears, it does not work all that well. First, when people hurt us badly, we don’t value their freedom so highly. Second, we often do not experience our own misdeeds as freely chosen. Finally, neither the perpetrators nor the victims of human evil always grow spiritually from the experience. In fact, the growth rate isn’t very good.

            Granted some freedom is a good thing. But how much freedom do we really need? Freedom obviously is not absolute. We live lives of limitation. We cannot do whatever we choose. Since free will is not absolute, we may ask why it extends to allow the worst forms of evil. If the possibility that someone may steal my car is the price I pay for free and meaningful choice in human life, I’ll gladly pay it many times over. If the possibility of someone killing my child is the price, that’s another matter. Does free and meaningful human life really require the possibility of what the Spanish did to the indigenous people of Latin America or what the Nazis did to Jews? Just how much freedom do we need to make life meaningful and interesting? Freedom may be a sufficiently valuable to justify some level of evil, but it is not sufficient to justify the “horrendous evils” we encounter all too often.[vii]

            Finally, if free will is so absolute as to keep God always on the sidelines of life, then such a God is irrelevant to the things that really matter to us. This does not make for much of a God. As a line of graffiti in the restroom of the Hungarian Pastry Shop in New York City so aptly puts it, “God isn’t dead. He just doesn’t want to get involved.”

God Of Our Silent Tears is available for purchase at http://cathedral-bookstore.myshopify.com/products/god-of-our-silent-tears

           

---

[i] Harold Kushner, When Bad Things Happen To Good People (New York: Schockten Books, 1981) p. 81.

[ii] Alvin Pantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdman’s Publishing Co., 1974) pp. 29-34. Plantinga’s “free will defense” is less ambitious in his view than Augustine’s “free will theodicy.” Plantinga merely purports to defend belief against the problem of evil by arguing that God might reasonably be all powerful and all good and yet permit evil in order to preserve the greater good if allowing freedom. Plantinga’s argument differs from Augustine’s “free Fall defense.” For Plantinga, we have to remain free individuals in order for the good of freedom to outweigh the evil we endure for its sake.

[iii] John Hick, Evil And The God Of Love (New York: Harper and Row, 1978).

[iv] Michael Peterson, God And Evil, p. 41.

[v] Romans 7: 21 – 8: 6.

[vi] Shirley Guthrie, Chistian Theology, at 178.

[vii] Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils And The Goodness Of God (Ithaka: Cornell University Press, 1999).

---

[i] Lyn Lifshin, “For Me The Holocaust Started in ’33,” in The Blue Tattoo

THE NATURAL ORDER IS DEADY -- PART 1

Excerpt from GOD OF OUR SILENT TEARS ch 2:

I have administrative bones to pick with God, . . . .. I’ll say God seems to have a laid-back management style I’m not crazy about. I’m pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I’m not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I . . . .

David Foster Wallace

They were confused, the chaos too much for them

destruction as far

as 3 miles in

where are the people

hundreds of shoppers

swept from an outdoor

market. Roads

remain impassible

One child watches

the cremation of his

sister. And in

the pale boy’s arms, the

sign: MISS PARENTS

AND TWO SISTERS

“They Were Confused, The Chaos Too Much For Them,”

by Lyn Lifshin

The tsunami that devastated South Asia is the largest modern natural disaster. In the midst of that catastrophe, there were stories of unlikely, seemingly miraculous survivals, like a toddler who floated on a mattress for five hours before she was rescued. But more than 100,000 people were not rescued. A six month old Australian baby, Melina Heppell, was torn by the waters from her father’s arms. Tamara Mendis, the wife of a Chicago Lutheran pastor, was visiting her family in Sri Lanka when the waters overwhelmed her train and took her life. To say Melina and Tamara were in the wrong place at the wrong time doesn’t begin to explain why any place should undergo such a time.

“The problem of evil” arises out of certain assumptions that if there is a God, then God is a certain way. God is the all-powerful designer, manufacturer, and ruler of the world. God is loving, good, and kind. Up against that, we experience a world in which horrible things happen. Everything must be the way God wants it. Then why are things so bad? All of the attempted answers to that question have a name – “theodicy.” It means, in the words of John Milton, “to justify the ways of God to man.” We will begin by examining the main theodicies of Christian tradition, the main ways Christian theologians have tried to make sense of this conundrum. . . . .

B. BEING MORTAL AND VULNERABLE
After the funeral, the mourners gather

under the rustling churchyard maples

and talk softly, like clusters of leaves . . .

They came this afternoon to say goodbye,

but now they keep saying hello and hello,

peering into each other’s faces,

slow to let go of each other’s hands.

From “Mourners” by Ted Kooser

in Delight and Shadow

The basic problem which we call natural evil is that we are not God. As creatures, we are mortal, so we die. Sad as that may be, it is just how it is. But why can’t God make us immortal? One reason is that life is meaningful only if it is made up of real choices. Without death, we do not really have to make choices. Having only one limited life to live means our choices count. Only if choices count, only if they really are choices from among a limited number of opportunities, do we have real freedom. Mortality is the tragic but essential context for authentic human life.

Not only does mortality make life choices meaningful, it makes life precious.  In Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Gilead, when old pastor Ames is approaching death, he says,

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes
on the world once and sees amazing things  it will never know

any names for  and then has to close its eyes again. I know all this is all a mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty to it. And I can’t believe that when we have been changed  and put on incorruptibility that we will forget our fantastic condition  of mortality and impermanence,  the great bright dream of procreating and perishing  that meant the whole world to us. In eternity, this world  will be Troy . . .  and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe,  the song they sing in the streets. 

 

Our mortal, vulnerable condition makes life precious and beautiful. It makes our choices meaningful. Some forms of suffering (loneliness, limitation, temptation, and anxiety) “belong to the human condition.” They  are necessary to all that we value and love in life. They are inherent in being human and essential to our fulfilling our spiritual potential. Theologian Douglas John Hall calls these hardships “integrative suffering.”

Frailty, faults, and death make compassion possible. They are the context of personal relationships that could not exist among more angelic beings. Czeslaw Miloz wrote in his poem “In A Parish,”

Had I not been frail and half broken inside
I would not think of them, who are like myself half broken inside.
I would not climb the cemetery hill by the church
To get rid of my self-pity.
Crazy Sophies.
Michaels who lost every battle,
Self-destructive Agathas
Lie under crosses with their dates of birth and death, And who
Is going to express them? Their mumblings, weepings, hopes, tears
of humiliation ? . . .
.
There is some truth in the idea that mortality gives makes life precious, poignant, and meaningful. It is also true that vulnerability is essential to truly human relationship. Spiritual teachers from several traditions have prescribed practicing awareness of our impending death as a way to sharpen our appreciation of life. “Keep death at your left shoulder,” some say. “Memento mori”—“remember death,” we used to inscribe on tombstones.

But that argument only defends the fact that life is subject to some limits. It does not justify the extent of human suffering or the randomness with which people die. It does not justify life ending prematurely or slowly with frailty and senility. It does not justify pain and disability. Much of our vulnerability is quite unnecessary to make life meaningful and beautiful. The Christian tradition does not posit, in the Hall’s words, “a God who actually wills the massive, unbearable, or seemingly absurd suffering of the creature – any creature! A deity personally and directly responsible for all the agony of earth would be unrecognizable as God from the perspective of biblical faith. "

GOD OF OUR SILENT TEARS is now available from Cathedral Bookstore on line. http://cathedral-bookstore.myshopify.com/products/god-of-our-silent-tears