God's Problem (2 page)

I began the semester by laying out for the students the classical “problem” of suffering and explaining what is meant by the technical term
theodicy.
Theodicy is a word invented by one of the great intellectuals and polymaths of the seventeenth century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who wrote a lengthy treatise in which he tried to explain how and why there can be suffering in the world if God is all powerful and wants the absolute best for people.
⁴
The term is made up of two Greek words:
theos,
which means “God,” and
dike¯,
which means “justice.” Theodicy, in other words, refers to the problem of how God can be “just” or “righteous” given the fact there is so much suffering in the world that he allegedly created and is sovereign over.

As philosophers and theologians have discussed theodicy over the years, they have devised a kind of logical problem that needs to be solved to explain the suffering in the world. This problem involves three assertions that all appear to be true, but if true appear to contradict one another. The assertions are these:

How can all three be true at once? If God is all powerful, then he is able to do whatever he wants (and can therefore remove suffering). If he is all loving, then he obviously wants the best for people (and therefore does not want them to suffer). And yet people suffer. How can that be explained?

Some thinkers have tried to deny one or the other of the assertions. Some, for example, have argued that God is not really all powerful—this is ultimately the answer given by Rabbi Kushner in
When Bad Things Happen to Good People.
For Kushner, God wishes he could intervene to bring your suffering to an end, but his hands are tied. And so he is the one who stands beside you to give you the
strength you need to deal with the pain in your life, but he cannot do anything to stop the pain. For other thinkers this is to put a limit on the power of God and is, in effect, a way of saying that God is not really God.

Others have argued that God is not all loving, at least in any conventional sense. This is more or less the view of those who think God is at fault for the terrible suffering that people endure—a view that seems close to what Elie Wiesel asserts when he expresses his anger at God and declares him guilty for how he has treated his people. Others, again, object and claim that if God is not love, again he is not God.

There are some people who want to deny the third assertion; they claim that there is not really any suffering in the world. But these people are in the extreme minority and have never been very convincing to most of us, who prefer looking at the world as it is to hiding our heads in the sand like ostriches.

Most people who wrestle with the problem want to say that all three assertions are true, but that there is some kind of extenuating circumstance that can explain it all. For example, in the classical view of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, as we will see at length in the next couple of chapters, God is certainly all powerful and all loving; one of the reasons there is suffering is that his people have violated his law or gone against his will, and he is bringing suffering upon them to force them to return to him and lead righteous lives. This kind of explanation works well so long as it is the wicked who suffer. But what about the wicked who prosper while the ones who try to do what is right before God are wracked with interminable pain and unbearable misery? How does one explain the suffering of the righteous? For that, another explanation needs to be used (for example, that all will be made right in the afterlife—a view not found in the prophets but in other biblical authors). And so it goes.

Even though it was a scholar of the Enlightenment—Leibniz—who came up with the term
theodicy,
and even though the deep
philosophical problem has been with us only since the Enlightenment, the basic “problem” has been around since time immemorial. This was recognized by the intellectuals of the Enlightenment themselves. One of them, the English philosopher David Hume, pointed out that the problem was stated some twenty-five hundred years ago by one of the great philosophers of ancient Greece, Epicurus:

As I was teaching my course on biblical views of suffering at Rutgers, more than twenty years ago, I began to realize that the students seemed remarkably, and somewhat inexplicably, detached from the problem. It was a good group of students: smart and attentive. But they were for the most part white, middle-class kids who had yet to experience very much pain in their lives, and I had to do some work to help them realize that suffering was in fact a problem.

As it turned out, that was the time of one of the great Ethiopian famines. In order to drive home for my students just how disturbing suffering could be, I spent some time with them dealing with the problem of the famine. It was an enormous problem. In part because of the political situation, but even more because of a massive drought, eight million Ethiopians were confronting severe shortages and, as a result, starving. Every day there were pictures in the papers of poor souls, famished, desperate, with no relief in sight. Eventually one out of every eight died the horrific death of starvation. That’s one million people, starved to death, in a world that has far more than enough food to feed all its inhabitants, a world in which American farmers are paid to destroy their crops and most
Americans ingest far more calories than our bodies need or want. To make my point, I would show pictures of the famine to the students, pictures of emaciated Ethiopian women with famished children on their breasts, desperate for nourishment that would never come, both mother and children eventually destroyed by the ravages of hunger.

Before the semester was over, I think my students got the point. Most of them did learn to grapple with the problem. At the beginning of the course, many of them had thought that whatever problem there was with suffering could be fairly easily solved. The most popular solution they had was one that, I suspect, most people in our (Western) world today still hold on to. It has to do with free will. According to this view, the reason there is so much suffering in the world is that God has given human beings free will. Without the free will to love and obey God, we would simply be robots doing what we were programmed to do. But since we have the free will to love and obey, we also have the free will to hate and disobey, and this is where suffering comes from. Hitler, the Holocaust, Idi Amin, corrupt governments throughout the world, corrupt human beings inside government and out—all of these are explained on the grounds of free will.

As it turns out, this was more or less the answer given by some of the great intellectuals of the Enlightenment, including Leibniz, who argued that human beings have to be free in order for this world to be the best world that could come into existence. For Leibniz, God is all powerful and so was able to create any kind of world he wanted; and since he was all loving he obviously wanted to create the best of all possible worlds. This world—with freedom of choice given to its creatures—is therefore the best of all possible worlds.

Other philosophers rejected this view and none so famously, vitriolically, and even hilariously as the French philosopher Voltaire, whose classic novel
Candide
tells the story of a man (Candide) who experiences such senseless and random suffering and misery, in this allegedly “best of all worlds,” that he abandons his Leibnizian
upbringing and adopts a more sensible view, that we can’t know the whys and wherefores of what happens in this world but should simply do our very best to enjoy it while we can.
⁶
Candide
is still a novel very much worth reading—witty, clever, and damning. If this is the
best
world possible, just imagine what a worse one would be.

In any event, as it turns out—much to the surprise of my students—this standard explanation that God had to give human beings free will and that suffering is the result of people badly exercising it plays only a very minor role in the biblical tradition. The biblical authors did not think about the possibilities of
not
having free will—they certainly didn’t know about robots, or indeed any machines that more or less did what they were programmed to do. But they had many explanations, other than free will, for why people suffer. The goal of the class was to discuss these other views, evaluate them, and try to see if any resolution of the problem was even possible.

It was, in fact, fairly easy to show some of the problems with this standard modern explanation that suffering comes from free will. Yes, you can explain the political machinations of the competing political forces in Ethiopia (or in Nazi Germany or in Stalin’s Soviet Union or in the ancient worlds of Israel and Mesopotamia) by claiming that human beings had badly handled the freedom given to them. But how can you explain drought? When it hits, it is not because someone chose not to make it rain. Or how do you explain a hurricane that destroys New Orleans? Or a tsunami that kills hundreds of thousands overnight? Or earthquakes, or mudslides, or malaria, or dysentery? The list goes on. Moreover, the claim that free will stands behind all suffering has always been a bit problematic, at least from a thinking perspective. Most people who believe in God-given free will also believe in an afterlife. Presumably people in the afterlife will still have free will (they won’t be robots then either, will they?). And yet there won’t be suffering (allegedly) then. Why will people know how to exercise free will in heaven if
they can’t know how to exercise it on earth? In fact, if God gave people free will as a great gift, why didn’t he give them the intelligence they need to exercise it so that we can all live happily and peaceably together? You can’t argue that he wasn’t
able
to do so, if you want to argue that he is all powerful. Moreover, if God sometimes intervenes in history to counteract the free will decisions of others—for example, when he destroyed the Egyptian armies at the exodus (they freely had decided to oppress the Israelites), or when he fed the multitudes in the wilderness in the days of Jesus (people who had chosen to go off to hear him without packing a lunch), or when he counteracted the wicked decision of the Roman governor Pilate to destroy Jesus by raising the crucified Jesus from the dead—if he intervenes
sometimes
to counteract free will, why does he not do so more of the time? Or indeed, all of the time?

At the end of the day, one would have to say that the answer is a mystery. We don’t know why free will works so well in heaven but not on earth. We don’t know why God doesn’t provide the intelligence we need to exercise free will. We don’t know why he sometimes contravenes the free exercise of the will and sometimes not. And this presents a problem, because if in the end the question is resolved by saying that the answer is a mystery, then it is no longer an answer. It is an admission that there is no answer. The “solution” of free will, in the end, ultimately leads to the conclusion that it is all a mystery.

As it turns out, that
is
one of the common answers asserted by the Bible. We just don’t know why there is suffering. But other answers in the Bible are just as common—in fact, even more common. In my class at Rutgers I wanted to explore all these answers, to see what the biblical authors thought about such matters, and to evaluate what they had to say.

Based on my experience with the class, I decided at the end of the term that I wanted to write a book about it, a study of suffering and biblical responses to it. But the more I thought about it, the more I
realized that I wasn’t ready to write the book. I was just thirty years old at the time, and although I had seen a lot of the world, I recognized that I had not seen nearly enough of it. A book like this requires years of thought and reflection, and a broader sense of the world and fuller understanding of life.

I’m now twenty years older, and I still may not be ready to write the book. It’s true, I’ve seen a lot more of the world over these years. I’ve experienced a lot more pain myself, and have seen the pain and misery of others, sometimes close up: broken marriages, failed health, cancer taking away loved ones in the prime of life, suicide, birth defects, children killed in car accidents, homelessness, mental disease—you can make your own list from your experiences of the last twenty years. And I’ve read a lot: genocides and “ethnic cleansings” not only in Nazi Germany but also in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and now Darfur; terrorist attacks, massive starvation, epidemics ancient and modern, mudslides that kill thirty thousand Colombians in one fell swoop, droughts, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis.

Still, even with twenty years’ additional experience and reflection, I may not be ready to write the book. But I suppose in another twenty years, with the horrible suffering in store for this world, I may feel the same way then. So I’ve decided to write it now.

As I’ve already intimated, my basic goal in writing the book is to explore the biblical answers to the problem of suffering. I think this is an important task for a number of reasons: