A Meditation on Suffering and Evil in the World God has made
Any
theology that does not offer healing, liberation, and guidance for human beings
who must face suffering and evil would not be worth the effort. So many efforts
to do so seem to offer superficial reflections that are unwilling to face the
ocean of evil and suffering that confronts humanity. Trivial reflections simply
make one weary and increase the sickness of the heart. We would be better to
remain silent.
“My
God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1 and Mark 15:34) The silence
of the Father at this moment in the life of Jesus is a parable of the silence
of the Father to all human suffering. In many ways, suffering reminds us that
we are little more than small, trembling, and weak animals that decay and die.
In recent history, the horror of September 11, 2001, the devastation of the
tsunami in Asia in December 2004, and the evil perpetrated in the name of Islam
by terrorists become graphic examples.
For
those of us who believe in God, the quite real question arises as to why the
God who created life would also allow, within that creation, forces that oppose
creation and life and that therefore seek to deface and destroy what God has
created. In fact, I think it quite likely that any notion of suffering and evil
suggest a pre-existing order. This may well suggest that what we think of as
suffering and evil is an entropic force. Stability and instability co-exist, so
to speak.
Something
inside us recognizes the alien character of such suffering. It revolts us.
People who commit such evil acts puzzle us. The presence of such evil and
suffering makes us puzzle about whether life is meaningful and purposeful. We
struggle for a reason or design. For some people, it helps if such suffering
and evil are the result of the will of God, for then it would fit into a divine
plan beyond our comprehension. If we can find no such plan or purpose, the
alternative seems to be that life is a set of meaningless and random acts that
have no point or purpose. Our moral sense suggests that somehow, this universe
ought to be better than it is. We have an idea of what such a better universe
would be like. The fact that we have such ideas suggests the existence of God,
according to Descartes.
We
puzzle how human beings can do such monstrous things to each other. Socrates (Gorgias and Hippias Minor) thought it arose out of the ignorance of good. All
human beings need is education in the good and its connection to happiness.
Yet, such a rationalistic understanding of evil does not seem to explain the
overwhelming nature of the evil human beings perpetrate upon each other. Some
evil and suffering seem beyond the pale. In the modern era, we might think of
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and radical or political Islam. Such persons seem to have
a distortion of mind and will so severe that no among of education could
correct it. How do you explain the suffering and evil innocent children
experience? The X-Files in Season 7, Episode 11, called closure, has Mulder
standing at the site of a massive grave where a mass murderer has buried the
little bodies of child victims. Ivan Karamazov refers to the innocence of
children, even while they suffer horribly, often for the sins of their parents.
He refers to Turks in a war in Bulgaria who disemboweled children from the
womb. He refers to another Turk who put a gun in the face of a baby. The baby
giggled and played with the barrel until the Turk pulled the trigger, blowing
off the head of the baby. A Russian officer had a pack of dogs attack a boy and
tore him to pieces in the presence of his mother. He wants to understand
reasons, “But then, there are the children. What am I to do about them?”
Regardless of the reason, it would not be worth the tears of one tortured
child.[2]
Albert Camus has a priest protesting the death of an innocent child due to
plague. He refuses to love a scheme in which children receive torture.[3]
Children have not crossed the threshold from innocence to guilt. All adults
have taken a bite of the apple, so to speak, and know good and evil. We must
not make trivial the shadow side of reality. Such suffering and evil cries out
for justice, and thus, for overcoming it. The unredeemed and incomplete present
will always make this world a moral riddle and offense. Human beings torment
each other and they torment themselves. If we were to focus upon this, we might
wonder why we continue to desire life. Such reasoning from effect to cause
might even lead one to think of the divine as finite, for a finite being, even
if much greater than human beings, might end up making a world like this.[4]
I will make no attempt at a theodicy in
the traditional sense. The presence of such evil and suffering, especially its
absurdity, will always provide reason enough for some to accept atheism. Their
presence will always call into question the holiness, love, goodness, justice,
and power of the divine. It would not appear that good and evil must coexist,
that we need evil in order to advance goodness, or that the universe is better
with some evil to overcome, or that evil is due to human free will. As to the
latter, we simply need to think of the natural evils of this world and the
sufferings they cause.[5]
Yet, if we reflect upon the precious qualities of freedom and independence, one
could make an argument that they open the door for both good and evil actions.
If God creates a world in which freedom exists, then God also creates a world
in which suffering and evil exist. God created a world in which free persons
are finite centers of creative activity. It would not be genuine freedom if the
only choices such finite creates could make would be good choices.[6]
Their finitude will mean some choices intended for good will result in
suffering and evil. We can grant that some of the things we experience as evil
and suffering may serve the purpose of teaching us the difference between good
and bad choices. A certain kind of life, such as one intemperate with food, one
given to drugs and alcohol, will lead to suffering for oneself and for others.
We can learn morality through such consequences.[7]
In that sense, some suffering and evil would serve a higher purpose.[8]
The presence of evil calls forth a desire on our part to avoid it and remove
it. Our moral imagination moves toward the goal of its removal. The skeptic
cannot imagine God making a good world with evil in it. Yet, one could
reasonably conclude that a world with at least some suffering and evil is
better than a world with none. In such a world, God will suffer with the
creation God has made.[9]
For one who believes in God, the goodness of God and this world does not depend
upon the removal of evil and suffering. Yet, for the believer in God, none of
these considerations absolves God of the responsibility for evil and suffering.
God took the risk of the suffering and evil by making a world in which freedom
and independence are realities. God created a world in which suffering and evil
were possibilities. For
some people, their experience teaches them that they could not get through the
difficulties of life, they could not oppose the evil they see, without their
belief that God was at their side.
Lactantius, an early
Christian author (ca. 240 – ca. 320) who wrote in Latin, in his On the Anger of God, 13.19, refers to
the argument of Epicurus in the following way.
"God, he (Epicurus) says, either wants
to eliminate bad things and cannot,
or
can but does not want to,
or
neither wishes to nor can,
or
both wants to and can.
If he
wants to and cannot, then he is weak and this does not apply to god.
If he
can but does not want to, then he is spiteful which is equally foreign to god’s
nature.
If he
neither wants to nor can, he is both weak and spiteful, and so not a god.
If he
wants to and can, which is the only thing fitting for a god, where then do bad
things come from? Or why does he not eliminate them?"
The
longest treatment of suffering in the Bible is the story of Job. The account is
courageous in many ways as it questions the traditional notion of the righteous
receiving blessing and the evil receiving curses. God seems to attack the
innocent Job. The innocent sufferer questions the moral order of the world God
created. The friends of Job seem to have a view of the world in which
everything has a pat answer. Thus, the book seems to accept that we have no
answer to expect in this world. The suffering of Job and the evil done to him
become a test of the character of Job. It may well be, however, that this is
the best any of us can do. In the midst of the reality of suffering and evil,
we could become bitter and angry people.
When
we contemplate history, we can hardly avoid sorrow at its universal stain of
corruptions. We see this corruption in
the display of the passions and the consequences of their violence, the
unreason that is associated not only with them, but even with good designs and
righteous aims. We see arising from them
the evil, the vice, and the ruin that has befallen the most flourishing
kingdoms that the mind of human beings ever created. Since this decay is not the work of mere nature,
but of human will, our reflections may well lead us to a moral sadness. Without rhetorical exaggeration, a simple,
truthful account of the miseries that have overwhelmed the noblest of nations
and polities and the finest exemplars of private virtue form a most fearful
picture and excite emotions of the profoundest and most hopeless sadness,
counter-balanced by no consoling result.
However, in contemplating history as the slaughter-bench at which the
happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have
been sacrificed, a question necessarily arises: To what principle, to what
final purpose, have these monstrous sacrifices been offered?[10]
Let
us consider another way of viewing suffering, evil, and death. When humanity
focuses upon the finitude and temporality of this world, clinging to it as if
it will yield ultimate meaning and purpose, it will lead to the sins, evil, and
desperation of human life. It leads to rupture from the world and thus to the
unhappiness and misery of humanity with itself. Humanity is not now its
destiny. Humanity is not now, what it ought to be. Nor is it satisfied in the
world. Our unhappiness can drive us back to ourselves. For religion, finite
live is like a desert. It becomes meaningful and purposeful only in light of
the Infinite and Eternal. Finitude and temporality are transitional toward the
Infinite and the Eternal. In that sense, God incorporates finite life into
divine life. The bliss of the promised future radiates life here and now.
Thought of the divine lifts humanity out of its finite life. For Christianity,
this weak, fragile, finite human life is a moment of divine life through the
Incarnation.[11]
I wonder if the spirit of age is not something like
what Thomas Hardy expressed in a poem. It appears that if God made this earth
and God made human beings, God has long ago forgotten and dismissed it. Here is
his poem, “God-Forgotten.”
I
towered far, and lo! I stood within
The presence of the Lord Most High,
Sent
thither by the sons of earth, to win
Some answer to their cry.
--"The Earth, say'st thou? The Human
race?
By Me created? Sad its lot?
Nay: I
have no remembrance of such place:
Such world I fashioned not." -
--"O Lord, forgive me when I say
Thou spak'st the word, and mad'st it
all." -
"The
Earth of men--let me bethink me . . . Yea!
I dimly do recall
"Some tiny sphere I built long back
(Mid millions of such shapes of mine)
So named
. . . It perished, surely--not a wrack
Remaining, or a sign?
"It lost my interest from the first,
My aims therefor succeeding ill;
Haply it
died of doing as it durst?" -
"Lord, it existeth still." -
"Dark, then, its life! For not a cry
Of aught it bears do I now hear;
Of its
own act the threads were snapt whereby
Its
plaints had reached mine ear.
"It used to ask for gifts of good,
Till came its severance self-entailed,
When
sudden silence on that side ensued,
And has till now prevailed.
"All other orbs have kept in touch;
Their voicings reach me speedily:
Thy
people took upon them overmuch
In sundering them from me!
"And it is strange--though sad enough -
Earth's race should think that one whose
call
Frames,
daily, shining spheres of flawless stuff
Must heed their tainted ball! . . .
"But say'st thou 'tis by pangs
distraught,
And strife, and silent suffering? -
Deep
grieved am I that injury should be wrought
Even on so poor a thing!
"Thou should'st have learnt that Not to
Mend
For Me could mean but Not to Know:
Hence, Messengers!
and straightway put an end
To what men undergo." . . .
Homing at dawn, I thought to see
One of the Messengers standing by.
- Oh,
childish thought! . . . Yet oft it comes to me
When trouble hovers nigh.
We
come again to the question of whether any God worthy of worship would make such
a world. If God has done so, then the suffering and evil we experience is
redeemable. We might even hesitatingly suggest that the world is a better place
through its encounter with evil and suffering. A sane person might receive such
encounters as a gift and at the same time fight against it. If we come to such
a worldview, it will not be because we have reasoned our way there by
philosophical propositions. It will happen because we can tell the details of
the story of our lives in a form that has narrative beauty. Such a narrative
will intermingle heartbreak, joy, and love. It will do so because of the
narrative of relationships one has with other people and with God.[12]
Such a story acknowledges that suffering and evil undermine the potential for
human flourishing, but that God has a way of defeating it in such a way that
human beings flourish. The providence and power of God reveal themselves
precisely in overcoming evil with good.[13]
Such a story could be beautiful, remembering that beauty is part of the road to
truth.[14]
Can we bear any sorrow as long as we tell a story about them?[15]
If so, all the story can do is invite us to look at a life in a certain way. It
will invite us to consider the possibility of living in the actual world in the
way the story recommends.[16]
I grant that such a view requires that we look beyond the truths of math,
logic, or science.[17]
The story or narrative suggests the
value of personal relationship. We can have “knowledge about” persons, places,
and things, but this does not mean we “know” them. This is true particularly of
personal relationships.[18]
If so, love will play a central role. Love will desire the good of the other
and union with the other. We would then have story in which God desires human
flourishing and thus our good and union with us. Forgiveness will arise out of
this love.[19]
Such love will mean mutual closeness, significant attention offered to each
other, and psychic integration around goodness.[20]
This will mean that lack of personal integration will inhibit genuine attention
and closeness with others. Our alienation from our true self will lead to
frustration of our hunger for flourishing. Fragmented persons full of shame and
guilt will resist the love needed in developing the narrative of a human life
that ends with the redemption of evil and suffering.[21]
All persons face this lack of personal integration. They must make choices that
resist isolation and lead to cooperation with others and with God. We can think
of the prevenient grace of God as cooperating with the will of the person
toward the highest good for that person. Such a process will deepen love and
resist the disintegrating forces of shame and guilt.[22]
If we are to tell a story of our lives, it might be helpful to read other
stories in which the narrative assumes a worldview of God making a world in
which suffering and evil exist. The Bible is full of such stories. However, to
immerse oneself in such stories is to accept the invitation the story extends
to immerse oneself in such a worldview.[23]
Such stories will lead to a simple conclusion. God is justified in allowing
suffering because what God gives to the sufferer is something so precious to
the sufferer that they are willing to trade their suffering in order to receive
it. God may well have willed a world without suffering and evil in creation
(antecedent will of God), but in creating the independence of creatures the
possibility of suffering and evil for which God would need a separate plan
(consequent will of God). In such a world, the worst possible form of existence
would be alienation from others and from God. Suffering and evil in this case
would have medicinal purpose in warding off the worse evil, isolation from
people and from God. Our view tends to be toward short-term pleasure and power
to the longer term thinking of the greater goods. Our suffering, in such a
world, would be toward our good, purging us of the obstacles we have
constructed toward loving union with others and with God. If suffering is like
medicine, then it will not always be pleasant for us to receive, but its intent
is toward our good. The loving presence of God would encompass all suffering. The
complexity of a human life means we will never have sufficient knowledge to
describe the ways suffering and evil are redemptive. Our grief and our
inability to explain particular suffering is a sign of our humanity. Yet, this
particular suffering is compatible with a world God created, especially when we
understand its goal as loving union with God and with others.[24]
To think of this subjectively, we have desires of the heart, such as love for a
parent, a child, or even a project. To extinguish such desires would make us
less human, although some parts of the spiritual tradition suggest we do so. Yet,
such desires of the heart seem to be what makes us human and elevate us to our
best. Yet, such connection at an emotional level can lead us to thinking and
acting as if a finite thing can fill a place in our lives that only God can
fill. They will never satisfy. Such feelings, such desires of the heart, are a
subjective a hint of the true desire of our hearts, loving union with God. God as
creator endows every created thing with goodness, truth, and beauty. Yet, it
cannot fill the place only God can fill in our lives. The broken nature of our
desires of the heart, which often involve suffering and evil, will find
transformation and fulfillment in loving union with God.[25]
I stress that such a narrative is only a possible world in which God and human
suffering coexist. It seeks to undermine the idea that no morally sufficient
reason exists for omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good God to allow suffering
in the world. It suggests that suffering is pointless. We have seen that we can
narrate a possible world in which suffering allows persons to flourish and
fulfill the desire of their hearts. If so, suffering has a medicinal and
healing purpose in the actual world we inhabit. The desire of our hearts must
interweave with the desire for God. We might know God intimately without having
intellectual truths about God that is the result of revelation. If any form of
theodicy is “bad faith,” then the person whose life includes serious suffering
is not good for him or her. Such a person would have been better off ot have
died at birth. In fact, we might say this over the life of every human being. By
the time of death, the life of every person could be pointless. Does this not
seem wrong to you? For such a reason, the narrative of our lives may not end at
death. Our lives may well find their redemption in life with God in eternity. Suffering
can lead to learning and wisdom. Grace comes violently. Yet, in our weeping and
in our singing, we have sought God. Grace and wonder are along the journey of
life, but they hard to see and embrace for those who wander in darkness.[26]
In this
matter, a point comes when an explanation becomes so comprehensive that it
ceases to explain anything. Determinism is like that. The journey toward
continued belief in God through the experience of evil and suffering is a
difficult journey. From a philosophical perspective, the journey involves
reconsidering the notion of the Infinite and the Eternal. Without this
philosophical notion, we run the risk of grasping at finite things and events
as if they are ultimate. Soren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich[27]
are particularly good on this point. We run the risk of becoming bitter and
angry people. If we believe in the God of Christian teaching, then we know that
God is not the author of evil. Even if God created a world in which evil is
possible, evil is not an object of the divine will. Suffering, evil, grief, and
mortality are contingent realities of this created world. Such a world is
valuable because it respects the freedom and independence of the things God has
made. The free play of love we find in the Triune God of Christian thought
sought the free play of love among the things God made. Thus, along with this
freedom and independence is the possibility of suffering, evil, and death. The
risk was always the turn from the one who created them. This self-assertion
would lead to entropy. Those who cannot take on new energy and thus transcend
themselves come under the neutralizing sway of entropy. Finite creatures are
interdependent. They live off of and for each other. They build on the
existence of others and others build on them. They are not the final word. God
may make them the occasions of redemptive grace and incorporate them into
providential ends. Their presence calls forth from us actions of justice, love,
and compassion. Belief in God holds out the hope of eventual reconciliation and
redemption of the tensions created by the shadow side of creation. Religion
arises out of the antinomy created by this darkness of reality. Something seems
strangely out of joint and wrong with this world, so much so that it needs
salvation. Religion generally seeks a healing, liberating, and guiding word in
the midst of suffering. It seeks a hope in a world that often gives us little
reason to do so. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed, the protest against
suffering, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions,
as Marx so well expressed it.[28]
Humanity becomes a partner with God as God overcomes evil, suffering, and
death. They are the enemy of God and therefore the enemy of humanity. Humanity
cannot have peace with them. For Christians, the resurrection of Jesus
announces this victory. God brings salvation and redemption. Even evil,
suffering, and death can become occasions of grace, even when we do not have
answers for their presence. The world has a degree of independence from God. In
the rebellion of humanity, humanity turned from God and sought autonomy. God
permits the shadow side of our reality, thereby respecting our finitude,
temporality, and independence. Such an understanding of God is consistent with
omniscience, omnipotence, and transcendence of time. If God is the source and
end of all things, nothing is completely alienated from God. Turning from God,
we also turn from ourselves. Estranged from God, we estrange ourselves from
ourselves. We are in exile as long as we persist in this condition. The grace
of God we experience by virtue our formation in the image of God means that we
have an insatiable hunger for God. God has already overcome evil, suffering,
and death in the resurrection of Jesus. The end of the story of humanity, with
all its evil, suffering, and death, is victory and triumph that God
accomplishes. If God is love, the consummation of the story of humanity and the
rest of the created order is love.[29]
The
praise of God while living in such a world as we see and experience presupposes
dissatisfaction with the present state of affairs. Any theological approach to
the presence of suffering and evil needs eschatology and its hope for victory
over evil. The works of God in creation, reconciliation, and redemption embraces
the universe. Creation finds its completion in the reconciling and redeeming
work of God in the world. This means humanity has an ally in God in the battle
to overcome evil, as well as reduce and heal suffering in the world. The
importance of eschatology is that only in the end of the story will we find the
demonstration of the goodness, holiness, and justice of God. One can offer
praise of God through creation only in anticipation of this eschatological
consummation. Finite life does not have its ground or foundation in itself, but
in another. Such eschatological consummation will bring definitive proof of the
existence of God and the final clarification of the character of God. The
believer can only acknowledge that freedom, independence, the absurdity of
suffering and evil, will always provide reason enough for some to argue that
such a world in incompatible with a loving and wise creator. Eschatology
reminds us that the future of the world and the end of the story reveals the
glory of God. Such a future will reveal the love of the creator for the
creatures God has made. Any this-world eschatology will sacrifice the
individual for the general vision of the end, with Marxism being the supreme
example. Our attention needs to focus on the need for a history of
reconciliation that focuses upon the future of the world as an end that
embraces the individual and experiences transfiguration of both the individual
and the collective.
Bibliography
Hegel, G. W. F. Letures on the Philosophy of
Religion. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1827, 1988.
—. Philosophy of History. New York: Dover,
1956, 1830.
Stump, Eleeonor. Wandering in Darkness: Narrative
and the Problem of Suffering. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1951.
[1]
Leibniz On the Ultimate Origination of
Things (1697).
[2]
F. M. Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov (1880)
Book 5, Chapter 4.
[3]
Albert Camus, The Plague (1947) Part
4, 3 & 4.
[4]
David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 1776, 1779, Parts 10 & 11.
[5]
J. L. Mackie, “Evil and Omnipotence,” Mind,
Volume LXIV, no 254 (1955)
[6]
Alvin Plantinga, “The Free Will Defense,” Philosophy
in America (Englewood-Cliffs, 1965, 205); The Nature of Necessity, Chapter IX, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.
[7]
Nelson Pike, “God and Evil: A Reconsideration,” Ethics, Vol. 68 (1958), 119.
[8]
Dewey Hoitenga, “Logic and the Problem of Evil,” American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. IV, no 2 (1967).
[9]
Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God, Chapter 11,
revised edition, 1979, 1991, 2004.
[10]
(Hegel, Philosophy of History 1956, 1830) Introduction.
[11]
(Hegel 1827, 1988) ).
[12] (Stump 2010) Kindle edition,
Prologue.
[13] (Stump 2010) , Kindle edition, p.
3-16.
[14] (Stump 2010) , Kindle edition, p.
22.
[15] Isak
Dinesen.
[16] (Stump 2010) , p. 25-7.
[17] (Stump 2010) , p. 40-62.
[18] (Stump 2010) , p. 65-82.
[19] (Stump 2010) , p. 85-107.
[20] (Stump 2010) , p. 109-128.
[21] (Stump 2010) , p. 130-150.
[22] (Stump 2010) , p. 152-172.
[23] (Stump 2010) , p. 176-372, where
she examines Job, Abraham, Samson, and Mary of Bethany.
[24] (Stump 2010) , p. 371-418.
[25] (Stump 2010) , p. 418-450.
[26] (Stump 2010) , 451-482.
[27]
(Tillich 1951) , Part III, ID.
[28]
Karl Marx, Critique
of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844).
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