God's Problem (36 page)

For John the world is still an evil place, ruled by the Devil. But salvation will not come when the Son of Man arrives in judgment on the world, bringing in the Kingdom of God within the lifetime of his disciples. It will come to each individual, who will have eternal life when he or she believes in the one who came down from the Father and has returned to him. Here, in John, we find the horizontal dualism of apocalyptic expectation transformed into the vertical dualism of heaven and earth.

Christians later developed in greater detail the doctrine of heaven and hell as places that individual souls go when they die. This teaching is not much found in the Bible. Most of the authors of the Hebrew Bible, if they believed in an afterlife at all, thought that the afterlife was a shadowy existence in Sheol for all human beings, whether wicked or righteous. Most of the authors of the New Testament thought that the afterlife involved a resurrected existence on earth in the coming Kingdom of God. The Christian notions of heaven and hell reflect a development of this notion of a resurrection, but it is a notion that has been transformed—transformed because of the failed apocalyptic expectations of Jesus and his earliest followers.

The Apocalyptic Solution to Suffering: An Appraisal

At the heart of the apocalyptic answer to suffering is the notion that the God who created this world is going to transform it. The world has grown wicked; forces of evil are in control of the world and will grow increasingly powerful until the very end, when God will intervene once and for all, destroy all that is evil, and re-create the world as a paradise for his people.

I must say that there are aspects of this apocalyptic vision that I find very powerful and attractive. This is a view of the world that takes evil seriously. Evil is not simply something bad that people do to one another—although it is certainly at least that. But the evil people do to one another can be so massive, so wicked, so overwhelming that it is hard to imagine it as simply people doing bad things. The Holocaust, the genocide in Cambodia, the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia—these are somehow bigger than the individuals who did them. Human catastrophes can be cosmic in proportion; evil is sometimes so far beyond palpable that it is demonic. Apocalypticism argued that in fact it is demonic, caused by forces larger than human beings and more powerful than anything we ourselves can either muster or imagine.

Moreover, the apocalyptic view takes into account the horrendous sufferings experienced by people who fall prey to natural disasters: hurricanes that devastate entire cities; earthquakes that leave more than three million people homeless and helpless with winter barreling down upon them in the Himalayas; mudslides that destroy villages in a matter of minutes; tsunamis that kill hundreds of thousands in one very foul swoop. The apocalyptic view acknowledges that there is genuine evil in the world and that it isn’t simply a matter of bad people doing bad things.

It is also a view designed to give hope to those experiencing suffering that otherwise seems too much to handle, suffering that seems to be completely nonredemptive, suffering that tears not just at the body but at the very core of our emotional and mental existence. The hope provided by an apocalyptic view is the hope in ultimate goodness. It says that even though evil is on the ascendancy now, its days are numbered. The people who experience pain, misery, and suffering in the world will all be vindicated. God will intervene and reassert his good power over this world gone awry. Evil does not have the last word; God has the last word. Death is not the end of the story; the future Kingdom of God is the end of the story.

I find all this powerful and moving. At the same time, I have to admit that the apocalyptic view is based on mythological ideas that I simply cannot accept. For ancient thinkers, like the writers of the Bible, the very notion of what would happen at the end of the age was predicated on an understanding of the world as a three-storied universe in which God above had relinquished control of earth down here but would soon come down and bring the world above to our world here below. But there is no God up there, just above the sky, waiting to come “down” here or to take us “up” there.

Moreover, the fervent expectation that we must be living at the end of time has proved time after time—every time—to be wrong. It is true that those who suffer can find hope in the expectation that soon all things will be transformed, that the evil they experience
will be destroyed, and that they will be given their just reward. But it is also true that this expected end never has and never will come until, for whatever reason, the human race simply ceases to exist.

To be sure, there have always been prophets to tell us that it is sure to come very soon. Every time there is a major world crisis, these prophets arise in force. They write books (many of them make lots of money doing so, which has always struck me as ironic). They tell us that events in the Middle East, or in Europe, or in China, or in Russia, or in our own country are fulfilling what was predicted by the prophets of long ago. But then time goes on, nothing changes except the rulers in power and their policies and, often, the borders of the countries they control. And a new crisis arises: instead of Nazi Germany it is the Soviet Union; instead of the Soviet Union it is Islamic fundamentalism; instead of Islamic fundamentalism it is…whatever comes next. Each new crisis generates a new set of books, which again assure us that recent events are now fulfilling the prophecies. And so on, ad infinitum, world without end.

There are problems with these points of view. Most obvious is the problem that everyone who has ever made a prediction of this sort—every single one of them—has been absolutely and incontrovertibly wrong. Another problem is that this kind of perspective tends to breed a religious complacency among those who “know” what the future holds and are unwilling to examine their views critically. There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.

Still another problem is that “knowing” that all things will eventually be made right by a supernatural intervention can lead to a kind of social complacency, an unwillingness to deal with evil as we confront it in the here and now, since it will be dealt with later by Someone far more capable of handling it than we are. But complacency in the face of real suffering surely is not the best approach to dealing with the world and its enormous problems. There must be a better way.

Suffering: The Conclusion

 

I decided this morning to pick up the newspaper and take a look at the world. How are we doing today, in the suffering department? Frankly, it is not heartening. Here are some of the stories that I ran across. (I looked only at the first section of my Sunday paper, the Raleigh
News and Observer.
)

Pain hits even the rich and famous. Presidential hopeful John Edwards, a hometown boy (he lives in Chapel Hill, where I teach), has announced that he will continue his campaign even though his wife, Elizabeth, has been diagnosed with bone cancer. They found a malignancy. It’s incurable. They have had four children. The second child, Wade, tragically died at age sixteen in a car accident eleven years ago. Two of the others are just eight and six. No one knows how long Elizabeth will last, but she’s in good spirits and still on the campaign trail.

A twenty-one-year-old student at my school, the mascot for the athletic events, was struck by an SUV; he is in a coma with serious head injuries and brain swelling. He was to graduate in a month and a half; he will probably not live that long.

A tornado struck Logan, New Mexico, wrecking or destroying about one hundred homes and businesses and three schools, sending thirty-five people to the emergency room.

Residents of New Orleans are beginning to arm themselves at all-time high rates. Gun sales are thriving there. The reason? In the wake of Katrina, the homicide rate has grown to the highest in the
nation. The sheriff has sent armored vehicles into some neighborhoods, and National Guardsmen and police are patrolling the streets. But people there don’t trust the system and so are arming themselves.

Yesterday, North Korea’s negotiators broke off six-nation talks regarding their nation’s nuclear program. Now
that’s
just what the world needs: more nuclear threats.

The war in Iraq has this week entered its fifth year. So far the war has claimed the lives of 3,230 U.S. troops. God knows how many Iraqis have died; we’re never given those statistics.

The war so far has cost at least $400 billion. What the government is not saying, of course, is that that’s $400 billion that could have been used on other things, like feeding the hungry or providing housing for the homeless.

Suicide bombings killed forty-six in Iraq yesterday (this little news item was buried on ). One U.S. soldier was killed on patrol. Four Iraqis were killed by a mortar shelling. Ten bodies of men shot to death were found in Baghdad; ten others were found in the city of Fallujah, all killed execution-style. Things are not going well.

There was a kind of human interest story about Staff Sgt. Daniel Gilyeat, injured in Iraq. He was riding in an armored Humvee when it hit a tank mine. After the explosion he looked down and saw his pants shredded, but he didn’t now how bad it was—until he saw two of his friends remove his leg from the truck, and someone else remove his foot. He’s now back home, trying to learn how to walk with an artificial leg.

Another story from Iraq. There is a woman—one of many hundreds—whose brother had been kidnapped. The kidnappers were demanding $100,000. She and her family could raise only $20,000. They were told that would be enough. They dropped off the money and were told that they would be contacted about where to find their brother. But they didn’t hear from the kidnappers again. In desperation, they made the rounds of the morgues to try to find his
body. They finally tracked down an independent burial contractor with pictures of all the bodies he had buried. The woman’s brother was one of them. The picture showed him with hands tied over his head; his face was terribly bruised; his torturers had used an electric drill to put a hole through his forehead.

At this point, I stopped reading. Yesterday’s paper had similar reports, and the paper the day before. And so it goes. The paper didn’t mention the number of people who died yesterday of starvation, cancer, AIDS, malaria, and waterborne parasites, or the people who are perennially homeless or hungry, the wives who were physically or emotionally abused by their husbands or the children abused by their parents, the victims of racist or sexist violence, and on and on and on.

What are we to make of this mess? I should say that I’m not one of those people who is all gloom and doom, who wakes up every morning depressed and despondent about the state of the world. I’m actually very cheerful, with a good sense of humor, a zest for life, and a sense that there is an unbelievable amount of good in the world—some of which I personally enjoy, every day of my life. But what are we to make of all the tragedy in the world, all the misery, the pain, the suffering?

Just about every day I receive e-mails from people I don’t know; they have read something I’ve written and heard that because I have difficulty explaining the suffering in the world, I have become an agnostic. These e-mails are always well meaning and many of them are very thoughtful. I try to respond to all of them, if nothing else just to thank the person for sending along his or her thoughts. It is a
little
surprising to me, though, that so many people have such a simple understanding of suffering and want to share it with me as if I hadn’t heard or thought of that one before. Still, it’s all kindhearted and innocent, and so I appreciate it. One of the most common explanations I get is that we have to understand that God is like a good parent, a heavenly father, and that he allows suffering into our lives as a way of building our character or teaching
us lessons about how we should live. There is, of course, biblical precedent for this view:

I haven’t devoted an entire chapter to this view, because I don’t think it’s one of the most common explanations found in the Bible, but it is there on occasion, as we have already seen. In the book of Amos, for example, when God punishes the people for their sin, it is precisely as a kind of discipline, to teach them a lesson: they need to return to him and his ways. That is why, according to Amos, the nation has experienced famine, drought, pestilence, war, and death: God was trying to get his people to “return to me” (Amos 4:6–11).

This view would make sense to me if the punishment were not so severe, the discipline so harsh. Are we really to believe that God starves people to death in order to teach them a lesson? That he sends epidemics that destroy the body, mental diseases that destroy the mind, wars that destroy the nation, in order to teach people a lesson in theology? What kind of father is he if he maims, wounds, dismembers, tortures, torments, and kills his children—all in the interest of keeping discipline? What would we think of a human father who starved a child to death because she did something wrong, or who flogged a child nearly to death to help him see the error of his ways? Is the heavenly father that much worse than the worst human father we can imagine? I don’t find this view very convincing.

From the e-mails I get, I realize that a lot of people think that the suffering experienced in this world is a mystery—that is, that
it cannot be understood. As I’ve said before, this is a view that I resonate with. But many think, at the same time, that one day we will be able to understand and that it will make sense. In other words, God ultimately has a plan that we cannot, at present, discern. But in the end we will see that what happened, even the most horrendous suffering experienced by the most innocent of people, was in the best interests of God, the world, the human race, and even of ourselves.

This is a comforting thought for many people, a kind of affirmation that God really is in control and really does know what he’s doing. And if it’s true, I suppose we’ll never know, until the end of all things. But I’m not sure that it’s a convincing point of view. It is a view that reminds me very much of an episode in one of the greatest novels ever written,
The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The most famous chapter of this very long novel is entitled “The Grand Inquisitor.” It is a kind of parable, told by one of the book’s main characters, Ivan Karamazov, to his brother Alyosha, in which he imagines what would happen if Jesus were to return to earth as a human being. In his parable Ivan argues that the leaders of the Christian church would have to arrange to have Jesus killed again, since what people want is not the freedom that Christ brings but the authoritarian structures and answers that the church provides. I think the leaders of our world’s megachurches should sit up and take notice—leaders who much prefer providing the certainty of right answers to guiding people to ask difficult questions.

In any event, even though the chapter on the Grand Inquisitor is the novel’s best-known chapter, it is the two chapters immediately before it that I have always found the most compelling. In these chapters it is again Ivan and Alyosha who are talking. Alyosha is a bright but inexperienced young novice at the local monastery; he is deeply religious but still displays some (at times delightful) naïveté. Ivan, his older brother, is an intellectual and a skeptic. Ivan admits that he thinks God exists (he is not an atheist, as interpreters have sometimes claimed), but he wants nothing to do with God. The
pain and suffering in the world are too great, and ultimately God is at fault. Even if God were to reveal at the end of time the secret that made sense of all that had happened here on earth, it would not be enough. Ivan wants no part of it. As Ivan says: “It’s not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God’s, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept”.
¹

He does not accept the world because even if God were to reveal at the end the one thing that made sense of it all, Ivan would still find the suffering in the world too horrible. Ivan likens his rejection of the world to a mathematical problem. The ancient Greek mathematician Euclid indicated that two parallel lines cannot meet (otherwise they would not be parallel). But Ivan notes that there are “some geometers and philosophers” who think that this rule applies only in the realm of finite space, that somewhere in infinity in fact the two parallel lines do meet. Ivan doesn’t deny that this might be true, but he rejects it—his mind can’t grasp it and so he refuses to believe it. It is like that with suffering for him. If in the end God showed that it all served some greater, nobler purpose, it still would not be enough to justify it. As Ivan says:

This then launches Ivan into a discussion of his view of suffering, in the key chapter of the book, called “Rebellion.” In it he explains
that, for him, the suffering of innocent children can
not
be explained, and that if an explanation from the Almighty ever is forthcoming, he simply won’t accept it (that’s why the chapter is called “Rebellion”—for his pious brother Alyosha, this kind of attitude toward God is rebellious).

Much of the chapter involves Ivan agonizing over the suffering of the innocent. He talks about the violence of Turkish soldiers in the wars in Bulgaria who “burn, kill, rape women and children, [and] nail prisoners by the ears to fences and leave them like that until morning, and in the morning they hang them.” He objects to anyone calling this animal behavior, because that “is terribly unjust and offensive to animals,” who could never behave with this kind of cruelty. He continues:

He then comes up with another horrible scenario:

Ivan’s stories are not just about wartime atrocities. They involve the everyday. And what is frightening is that they ring true
to real-life experiences. He is obsessed with the torture of young children, even among well-educated, “civilized” people living in Europe: