God's Problem (13 page)

People who take this point of view, as I have pointed out, often suffer unnecessarily from self-imposed guilt. Is suffering really our fault? Is it not the case that this very explanation—as prevalent as it was in antiquity and as it is today—simply doesn’t work in view of the realities of our world? Do we really want to say that suffering always (or typically) comes from God as punishment? that children who die in tsunamis are being punished? that God forces millions of innocent people to starve to death? to die of cancer or AIDS? to be the victims of genocide? Is it true that twenty-year-olds stuck in frozen foxholes under enemy fire are being punished for their sins, or that their buddies killed by land mines are even worse sinners? Is it true that those of us who have it good are pleasing to God and those of us who suffer are being punished? Who has the arrogance to make such a claim, or the self-loathing?

There must be other answers. Indeed, the Bible provides us with some—even in the writings of the prophets—as we will see in the chapters that follow.

The Consequences of Sin

 

With so many people suffering in so many ways, how does one begin to tabulate the misery? A thirty-year-old neighbor is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. A single mother of three loses her job and with it her health insurance and any way of keeping the house or feeding the children. A car accident kills five teenagers from the local high school. A fire across town destroys a nursing home and three of its elderly occupants.

Much of the time we simply throw up our hands and admit defeat. We can’t understand it and never will. But there are times when we feel like we ought to be able to do something. Especially when the suffering comes at the hands of others, when crime is on the rise, when we read of burglaries, car thefts, rape, or murder.

The most horrific—and some people think, the most preventable—forms of human abuse of others come at the national level. We tend to understand wars: sometimes they are fought for just causes (the Allies against Germany), sometimes for questionable causes (Vietnam), and sometimes for downright insidious causes (Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait). But for most of us, other forms of large-scale force defy the imagination.

I spoke of the Holocaust, modern history’s most notorious example, in chapter 2. Many people who visit the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, or its counterpart in Berlin, or the actual site of a camp like Auschwitz, come away saying “Never again.” It’s a noble thought, and thinking it makes us feel determined or
strong. But do we really mean it? Do we really mean that we will do whatever it takes to stop a massive purge of innocent people on the grounds of their race or nationality? If we are really that determined, how do we explain our recent reactions to events in Rwanda and Bosnia? How do we explain our current reactions to Darfur? Do we really mean
never
again?

These situations are not easy. The political situations are notoriously complex and intricate, and it is rarely possible to deal with national abuses simply by sending in the bombers and then the ground troops to restore a sense of human decency to a region controlled by forces determined to assert their will over the masses, even when that will involves killing millions of innocents. Witness Iraq.

Of the genocides since the Holocaust, none was more notorious than the purge sponsored by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. I have a very distant connection to the events, in that I came to know one of the lucky survivors, who went through hell on earth before showing up in Trenton, New Jersey, where I met him.

The history of Cambodia in the late 1960s and early 1970s was not at all pretty. Toward the end of the war in Vietnam, U.S. troops moved into Cambodia as part of their strategy to root out the Vietcong. There was a good deal of what we now euphemistically call collateral damage to the innocents who happened to make Cambodia their home. The B-52 bombers, napalm, and dart cluster bombs used by the Americans to destroy suspected North Vietnamese supply lines also killed an estimated 750,000 Cambodians.

After the war, in 1975, civil unrest broke out. Eventually, the U.S.-backed government of Lon Nol was overthrown by the communists, the Khmer Rouge, headed by the notorious Pol Pot. During the conflict, another 150,000 Cambodians were killed. And then the real purge began. Driven by their communist ideology, the Khmer Rouge emptied out the urban areas, including the capital, Phnom Penh, taking the populations into rural areas to specially constructed camps where they worked, under duress, for the party.
All the opposition was killed. All protesters were killed. Anyone who was thought to be a potential problem was killed. Anyone known to be well educated—doctors, lawyers, teachers—was killed. Anyone known to wear glasses (and thought, therefore, to be educated and a potential problem) was killed. Many others died from disease and starvation. By the time Pol Pot’s regime was finished, it had killed off some two million people.

When Pol Pot’s toll is added to the total of those killed during the U.S. bombings and the subsequent civil war, we find that nearly half the population of Cambodia had been killed, most of them in very ugly ways.

The survivor I came to know was named Marcei Noun, and I met him almost purely by accident. When I had finished serving as the pastor of the Princeton Baptist Church in Princeton, New Jersey (they eventually found a permanent pastor), I moved off to worship in a nearby church, which happened to be Lutheran. I knew some of the people there and appreciated the rich liturgical emphasis of the church, which stood in sharp contrast with the rather bare liturgy of the Baptist church. But after having been actively involved in churches for many years before that—as a youth pastor, a director of Christian education, and then a pastor—I felt somewhat at a loss and had a burning desire to
do
something that could make a difference, rather than simply attend church once a week.

I was at a point in my life where I was starting to have serious doubts about my faith, both because of my historical research into the origins of Christianity and, perhaps more so, because of my sense of the unfairness and injustice in the world—the problem of suffering. In any event, these various motivations led me to look into doing something more in the line of social work, not as a career (I was already teaching a full load in the Department of Religion at Rutgers University) but as something to do on the side. I learned through my new church of the existence of the Lutheran Social Services, which among other things had a program that involved
teaching English as a second language to recent immigrants to the United States. That struck me as just the sort of thing I was looking for: an activity through which I might make a difference to the world, if only in a very small way, and without a lot of religious entanglements. So I signed up.

I was given Marcei Noun’s name and told where he lived, in a rundown part of Trenton a half-hour’s distance from my house. I called him on the phone and managed through his very broken English to set up a time to come see him. We met, he introduced me to his wife, Sufi, also Cambodian, and their two teenaged children. Marcei was eager to improve his English, and so we started that very day.

From then on I went to Marcei’s house once a week for several hours. It was not really enough to make the kind of major impact on his spoken English that either of us wanted, but neither of us had much more time to devote to it—I was teaching full time and he had a job as well, working at the Duke Gardens in nearby Somerville, New Jersey. Over time we did make some progress, and I began working with Sufi as well.

This was one of the most gratifying experiences I had had in a very long time, as our relationship developed and our work progressed. At first Marcei was completely deferential toward me—a university professor from the powerful United States of America. But as we got to know each other, he saw me more and more as just another human being, and I became more and more interested in how he had managed to arrive in Trenton as an immigrant from Cambodia.

Eventually he told me his story, and it sounded like something straight out of
The Killing Fields
(a movie that came out just as we were doing our work together). In the mid-1970s Marcei and his family (Sufi and two young children) had been living in Phnom Penh. He was reasonably well educated, was a part-time poet (with a couple of pieces published), and a full-time gardener. When the Khmer Rouge came to drive out the population, he destroyed his glasses and hid all evidence of learning, wisely pretending to be illiterate. The
family was forced from its home and driven into the countryside, with millions of others. The worst of it was that they were separated, Marcei to work on a slave farm, Sufi (with the kids) at a tree nursery. Sufi’s experience was probably the hardest: she was forced to work outside all day long, no matter what the weather conditions, and compelled to sleep outside as well, often in standing water.

The details of what happened next are both sketchy and complex, but the short of it is that Marcei managed to escape from his forced labor camp in the dark of night; he somehow had a sense of where Sufi and the children were, and he went off to find them. Together they managed to get away and saw as their only chance of survival a treacherous hike over the mountains into Thailand where, they had heard, refugee camps had been set up. Nearly starved and totally exhausted, they made it to a camp and stayed there under international care for a couple of years. Eventually they were chosen for immigration to the United States, helped by the Lutheran Social Services, which located them in Trenton, found them an apartment (cockroach-infested and dirty, but for them it was like heaven on earth), helped Marcei get a job, got the kids into school, and checked in on them regularly to make sure they were adjusting to their new life.

They were adjusting extremely well. When I got to know them a year or two later, they had met other Cambodians in Trenton and had a solid social network. Marcei made enough money working at the gardens (he put in as much overtime as they would allow) for them to live cheaply but, for them, reasonably well. Sufi had herself gotten a part-time job. The kids were learning English at a fantastic rate (they were virtually fluent when I met them as young teenagers; they certainly had the American slang down). They were even able to save money to send to relatives back in Cambodia.

Later, when I moved away from New Jersey in 1988, they cooked me a final Cambodian meal and went out of their way to express their gratitude for my help. But I had done almost nothing—I’d simply shown up on their doorstep once a week to help them with
English and to help them understand, and operate better in, the American system. What they had given me was beyond calculation. And yet, at the end of our relationship, I was still in awe of what they had been through and how they had managed. Their suffering could be seen in their faces; they still had nightmares about their experiences; they still were reluctant to say much about them and never, apparently, talked about them among themselves.

How can human beings—in this case, the ruthless devotees of the Khmer Rouge (many of them mere children, but children with assault weapons)—treat other human beings in this way? It would have been absurd for me to think that Marcei and his family had gone through this as a punishment for their sin. While they were working in slave labor camps and sleeping in standing water, I was getting an education, driving a car, living in a nice apartment, drinking beer and watching baseball on the weekends. Marcei wasn’t any more of a sinner than I was. The classical view of suffering just didn’t work, for me, as an explanation for what actually happens in this world.

There are, of course, other explanations for why people suffer, and the Bible itself provides some of them. Somewhat ironically, one of the other answers to the question of why people suffer is found in the writings of the very prophets who think that suffering (sometimes? often?) comes as a penalty from God for disobedience. These writers also indicate that suffering comes from disobedience in another sense. Often “sin” leads to suffering, not because God is punishing the sinner but because other sinners are causing affliction. Suffering is often portrayed in the Bible simply as a consequence of sin.

The Consequences of Sin According to the Prophets

Even from our earlier discussion of the prophetic understanding of suffering, you will have noticed that the prophets often describe suffering that comes
not
from God as a manifestation of God’s
wrath, but as the infliction of pain by some human beings on others. The reason for God’s wrath in the first place is that people have broken God’s law. Sometimes this involves what we might think of as purely religious transgressions—for example, when the people of Israel commit idolatry by worshiping gods such as the Baal of the Canaanite pantheon. At other times, though, sin involves social transgressions, in which people abuse, oppress, and otherwise harm other people, causing
them
(the victims) to suffer. The classical understanding of suffering is that God makes people suffer (by punishment) when they cause others to suffer (through oppression).

This is the biblical analogy to what happens when an adult today spanks a child (doing him violence) for hitting another child (doing him violence). The punished child suffers, of course, from the parent’s blows. But the innocent child who was first hit suffers as well, not from the parent as punishment but from the child who decided to strike out in the first place. So too in the biblical traditions: people who sin afflict their innocent victims.

We have already seen instances of this in the prophetic writings we have examined. The eighth-century prophet Amos, in particular, was incensed by the social injustices he observed in his world. You’ll recall that his world was one of relative peace and tranquillity. Amos wrote in the middle of the eighth century
BCE
, before the devastations to be brought by the Assyrian armies had occurred (the fall of Samaria was in 722
BCE
). There was prosperity in Israel, the northern kingdom, during this time of peace. But as often happens in situations of prosperity, there was a good deal of misery as well—in no small measure because the rich were increasing their wealth at the expense of the poor. The problems of wealth inequality are not limited to capitalist societies of the modern West. They may be more obvious to us living here and now, and they may seem more insidious (when one compares what a CEO of a major corporation makes in comparison with the lowest-paid workers). But in almost every economic system known on earth, the problems can be seen—and felt, if you are on the short end of the stick.

In any event, Amos took to task those who were acquiring and using their wealth in ways contrary to the will of the God, who was to be their guide in how to live. He condemned those “who sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals…who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth and push the afflicted out of the way” (2:6–7). He maligned those who “trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain…who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate” (5:1–11). He pointed in particular to a group of well-to-do women who lived in the capital city, Samaria, likening them to a herd of overfed and greedy cattle (Bashan was known for its abundant livestock):