When I graduated from seminary, my first pastoral assignment included chaplaincy service on the children's ward of a local hospital. There, on a weekly basis, I encountered the pain and sorrow of families struggling with seriously ill, sometimes dying, children. Often I sat with parents whose questions were poignant and painful: “Why?” “How could God allow this to happen to us?”
As a young minister, I soon realized that the usual theological answers were anemic. The mystery of evil, the reality of suffering, and for many, the absence of God, can be overwhelming.
The Christian doctrine of providence teaches that God not only created the world but also guards, guides, and governs it with a purpose. Theodicy is an attempt to justify the existence of providence – a good and powerful God – in the face of manifest evil, natural and moral, in our world. The problem was put forth clearly a couple of centuries ago by the philosopher David Hume: “If God is willing to prevent evil, but not able, then God is not all-powerful. If God is able to prevent evil, but not willing, then God is not good.” In a suffering world, therefore, is it possible to trust in God?
This is, of course, a very tough, intractable, problem. When it comes to pastoral care, however, most of us have learned that weighing in with carefully crafted theological answers to these questions often misses the point. It's more important to listen and be present to the pain of those who suffer. But that response also springs from a perspective emphasized in recent theologies.
The fact of the matter is this: the Bible provides no ultimate theoretical answer to the problem of evil and suffering. Rather, Christian faith clings to Christ in the midst of it all. At the heart of the gospel we find the cross. And on the cross we find God's crucified Messiah. The message of the cross is that in Jesus Christ, God enters into and takes up the destructive sin and the horrific evil and the inexplicable suffering of the world. Theologians today do not shy away from speaking about the suffering of God as they once did. God in Christ is present in the darkness where the demons of destruction do their damnedest to destroy us. There, Christ stands, stoops, and stays.
This is not, to be sure, a polished philosophical explanation or a logical argument. It's probably why Paul said that “the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:18) It is, however, an ever-present help in times of ever-present trouble. Christian hope reminds us that we never suffer alone – but in and with and through God's crucified Messiah, Jesus the Christ. This is the One, after all, who cried out in anguish and lament using the words of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
We are indebted to Jürgen Moltman among others for this insight in his book The Crucified God. There, Moltmann describes how the Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel captured the horror of the Holocaust, an event which has had a profound influence on Christian theology. In a poignant passage he tells how a young boy was hanged for breaking the camp rules. As his body dangled from the rope, someone asked “Where is God now?” In the midst of this horror Wiesel could hear deep within himself: “God is here – hanging in this gallows.”
Isn't this what Christians mean by incarnation? The Word became flesh, and God entered into the fullness of human experience, including pain, suffering and death. In the midst of a suffering world, in the darkness, the absence, the void – this is precisely where God is found. Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it this way: “On the cross God allows himself to be pushed out into the world.” It is precisely at this point of greatest weakness that God is able to help us. God's omnipotence is expressed in suffering love, not raw power.
Bonhoeffer celebrated two Christmases in a Nazi prison before he was executed in 1945. In a letter he reminded his family: “For a Christian there is nothing particularly difficult about Christmas in a prison cell … Indeed, Christmas has more meaning and is observed with greater sincerity there than in places where all that survives of the feast is its name. The misery, suffering, poverty, loneliness, helplessness, and guilt look very different to the eyes of God from what they do to human beings, that God should come down to the very place which we usually abhor, that Christ was born in a stable because there was no room for Him in the inn – these are things which a prisoner can understand better than anyone else.”
That's a theology for a suffering world. The New Testament makes it clear: in the cradle and on the cross we meet a Messiah who has entered our experience. By faith we are in this Christ, and this Christ is in us. We are loved and held by a Jesus who suffered for us, and suffers with us. Such faith is more than a powerless placebo imbibed to dull the pain of daily life, an “opiate of the people,” as Marx said. A religion which distracts us only long enough to get us through tough times is not much more than a deadly addiction.
But a faith which binds us to God's crucified Messiah is a faith which binds us to the suffering of our world, and to God's risen Son, ascended and glorified. As Living Faith puts it, “The forces of evil still wage war against us. The destructive powers are still present. But their end is not in doubt. We await the full revelation of our Lord's triumph … Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
STUDY GUIDE
- Discuss the following traditional responses which have been used by Christians in the past to explain the providence of God and the mystery of evil. Do they make any sense? Are they helpful at all? If so, how? If not, why not? Are there others?
- God's ways in the world are mysterious and should be accepted by faith.
- God uses suffering as a means of teaching us in order that we will mature.
- Suffering in the world is an expression of divine punishment.
- The author talks about his experience as a chaplain on the children's ward of a hospital. On one occasion he was confronted by parents cradling their three year old son who had just been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour. Their first words were poignant and painful: “Why?” “How could God allow this to happen?” How would you have responded?
- In the past theologians spoke about two types of evil: (1) natural evil, such as disease, earthquakes, and tsunamis; and (2) moral evil, such as war, terrorism, and poverty. Is this difference significant for how we think about God? If so, how? If not, why not?
- The article suggests that we should begin to think about the providence of God and the mystery of evil by looking first into the face of God in Jesus Christ, i.e. the incarnation and the cross. Do you agree? How might this change our sometimes infantile and paternalistic views of God?
- Is there not a danger that a Christian theology which appeals to the suffering of God can in fact be used to justify suffering and violence in our world?
- In Colossians 1:24 Paul writes: “I am now rejoicing in my suffering for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” What does this mean?
For Further Reading…
Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God
Douglas John Hall, The Cross in Our Context
Philip Yancey, Where is God When It Hurts?
John Stackhouse, Can God be Trusted?
