Spring and theodicy

  • I’m look­ing out the air­plane win­dow at lumpy masses of clouds that look so solid that it seems like we could land on them if we wanted. I’m fly­ing off for a week-long vaca­tion with my mother in Wyoming, and in this case, I’m a lit­tle glad to be leav­ing Mis­souri behind. The long snowy win­ter has made for an explo­sive start to spring. And with every­thing bloom­ing at the same time, I find that I’m hav­ing trou­ble with stuffi­ness and itch­i­ness. It’s unusual for me, and I still feel luck­ier than oth­ers I know who suf­fer more with this sort of thing. One lit­tle god­son has been laid up for days, and his mom is try­ing dif­fer­ent med­ica­tions to find one that brings him relief.

    So here we are again: Beauty and pain, pain and beauty. I’m still think­ing about it — as I was last week. Cre­ation puts on the bright col­ors of spring and an inno­cent lit­tle boy is laid low for days at a time. And the unbe­liever says, “Why did God make such a world, if He is all-powerful and all-good?”

    And the hon­est believer has to admit: “I don’t know.”

    It is enough — has been enough, because this is a very old chant and response — to con­vince some unbe­liev­ers that there’s noth­ing else to see in all of the Chris­t­ian narrative.There are just a cou­ple prob­lems there.

    For one thing, we didn’t say it was A Good Idea, or a bold adver­tis­ing cam­paign or even a sweep­ing polit­i­cal and social ide­ol­ogy — we said it was the truth. Those other things arise from human inge­nu­ity and imag­i­na­tion and must rec­om­mend them­selves to human cri­te­ria. The truth doesn’t. The sky is blue no mat­ter whether that’s anyone’s favorite color or not. It’s not because the sky is heart­less; it’s because it isn’t up to us.

    That’s the way in which Chris­tians say that we don’t have all the answers. We are the part of the human pop­u­la­tion that believes that there is one God — God the Father — and one way to Him — through God the Son — and one source of Grace to approach God — through God the Holy Spirit. And we say that we know this truth through rev­e­la­tion by this tri­une God, not through our indus­try, wor­thi­ness, intel­lect or any­thing else.

    So when it comes to this ques­tion by which unbe­liev­ers mea­sure God and find Him want­ing, what we wish to say, I think, is that they haven’t the slight­est idea who or what they’re actu­ally mea­sur­ing. They’re try­ing to use a stop­watch to clock the speed of light. And even if it was a really good stop­watch, it would come up blank in the trial — not because there is no speed of light, but because the stop­watch can’t begin to do the job.

    Basi­cally, the unbe­liever says, “How can you believe in such a God?” and the believer, if he has real faith and sim­plic­ity, just says, “Why don’t you come and see?”

    Not that the unbe­liever will be put off that easy. The ones that I’ve encoun­tered who go this route think that it answers every­thing, puts all of Chris­ten­dom and orga­nized reli­gion neatly into a dump­ster. “What about the chil­dren? What about babies born with AIDS? What about the oppressed, the starv­ing, the impov­er­ished? What about, what about, what about?”

    And the mild-mannered Chris­t­ian is likely to fall back before this great show of tender-heartedness. (If there is any tender-heartedness behind it. In my expe­ri­ence, the peo­ple who say such things are LESS likely to do what­ever they can to alle­vi­ate suffering,not MORE. But we’ll pass on that for now.) Silence is still a bet­ter response than blus­ter or sterile-sounding the­ol­ogy, both of which make it seem as though we have no heart with which to feel the sor­row of the world.

    There may not be a fit­ting answer to things stated in such a way. Our “I don’t know” seems piti­ful in the face of it. God must have known that we would lose such argu­ments over and over. It should just redou­ble our com­mit­ment to alms­giv­ing and char­ity, because those who live in that way may win the argu­ment with­out know­ing they do, and with­out using any words. There is a bat­tle going on, as we know, and those who yell at our claims of our God may really be dar­ing us to show up their god. Which we know we can’t do, when they won’t even admit that they’re ele­vat­ing coarse ratio­nal­ity and raw emo­tion to the sta­tus of god­hood. But by being peo­ple who absolutely believe and pro­claim the tenets of Chris­tian­ity, and are at the same time, giv­ing, lov­ing, at work, at peace, we may put these hard­ened athe­ists and agnos­tics in doubt of the essen­tial right­ness of their religion.

    One last thing: I remem­ber a lec­ture by John Mark Reynolds in which he pointed out that when non-believers pre­fer their unbe­lief to our belief where the ques­tion of suf­fer­ing is con­cerned, they’re pre­fer­ring no solu­tion to a bro­ken solu­tion. We don’t always think of it that way, but it is true. The athe­ist says, “This is all there is and every­thing is mean­ing­less, and there is great suf­fer­ing.” The Chris­t­ian says, “There is a spir­i­tual realm and a God that gives mean­ing to every­thing. But there is suf­fer­ing that I can’t explain.”

    So where our answer may seem incom­plete, the unbe­liever has no answer at all.

    Sup­pose you asked some­one which they’d rather have, a clock that ran slow or a clock that didn’t run at all. A wit might say that they’d rather have the clock that was com­pletely bro­ken, because at least it would be right twice a day. But of course, the answer to that is “And what good would that do you, if you didn’t know the two times a day that your clock was right?”

    We Chris­tians have the revealed truth that we were given, and we have holes — some of them sig­nif­i­cant — in our under­stand­ing. The unbe­liever rejects revealed truth, insists on only the purity of empir­i­cal evi­dence, … and has no answer or hope of ever hav­ing an answer to why inno­cent peo­ple suffer.

    So who should be win­ning the argument?


    Related posts:

    1. Late win­ter, early spring
    2. Nat­ural Man, Reli­gious Man and the recession
    3. Egypt­ian darkness
    4. A friendly face as spring offi­cially kicks off
    5. Catholics and Ortho­dox, play­ing together by spring?

    April 17th, 2010 | Grace | 4 Comments |

4 Responses and Counting...

  • s-p 04.17.2010

    One of your best, Grace. I may steal some of it for a pod­cast in the future. Wor­thy of a bookmark!

  • Word­mama

    I can sym­pa­thize (but try not to emu­late) the ones who do noth­ing, hav­ing built up a vast land­scape of suf­fer­ing chaos that makes indi­vid­ual acts of kind­ness seem point­less. Makes me think of the old story of the lit­tle boy walk­ing along the beach throw­ing stranded starfish back into the water. When an observer asks him if he thinks he’s mak­ing a dif­fer­ence, given the end­less num­ber of dying starfish, the lit­tle boy tosses another starfish into the surf and says, “It made a dif­fer­ence to that one.“
    I agree with s-p — thought­ful and well-written.

  • Nathaniel McCal­lum

    Check out Father Raniero Cantalamessa’s ser­mon from (I think) Good Fri­day 2009. He speaks ele­gantly about how Christ brings mean­ing to suf­fer­ing itself.

  • Grace

    Every­one is too kind. (And, s-p, if you lift parts of it for a pod­cast, I’ll be so proud I’ll go out and have t-shirts made to com­mem­o­rate the occasion!)

    I just notice the places where Ortho­dox should be try­ing to dia­logue (IMHO, of course), and instead we tend to talk amongst our­selves. And we looove to talk, but if we could direct some of that focus to help­ing faith-challenged peo­ple achieve Step 1 — at least begin­ning to believe in God — we’ll have done some­thing incred­i­ble in this increas­ingly god­less society.

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