God's Problem (37 page)

He tells then the story of a five-year-old girl who was tormented by her parents and severely punished for wetting her bed (a story that Dostoevsky based on an actual court case):

Ivan notes that some people have claimed that evil is necessary so that we human beings can recognize what is good. With the five-year-old girl with excrement on her face in mind, he rejects this view. With some verve he asks Alyosha:

For Ivan, the price is too high. He rejects the idea that there can ever be a divine resolution that will make all the suffering worthwhile, a final answer given in the sky by-and-by that will justify the cruelty done to children (not to mention others; he restricts himself to children just to keep the argument simple): “Listen: if everyone must suffer, in order to buy eternal harmony with their suffering, pray tell me what have children to do with it?”. Ivan takes his stand in the here and now to say that whatever is revealed later, whatever can bring “ultimate harmony” to this chaotic world of evil and suffering, he rejects it, in solidarity with the suffering children:

In a sense Ivan is reacting against the old Enlightenment view of Leibniz, that despite all its pain and misery, this is the “best of all possible worlds.” The only way one could recognize that this is the best world is if what happens in it is finally explained and justified. But for Ivan, nothing can justify it. He prefers to stand in solidarity with the suffering children rather than to be granted a divine resolution at the end that provides “harmony” to the world—that is, a sense of why all things worked together for the good purposes of God and all humanity.

Here Ivan likens the final act of history, in which God reveals why all innocent suffering was “necessary” for the greater good—the harmony of all things—to a stage play, wherein the conflicts of the plot are resolved in the end. Ivan admits that the conflicts may be resolved, but he is not interested in seeing the play. The conflicts are too real and damning. And so he returns his ticket.

I first read
The Brothers Karamazov
more than twenty-five years ago when I was a graduate student (for years I read nothing but nineteenth-century novels, and this was one of my favorites). This passage has stayed with me all those years. I’m not sure I completely agree with Ivan. I think that if, in fact, God Almighty appeared to me and gave me an explanation that could make sense even of the torture, dismemberment, and slaughter of innocent children, and the explanation was so overpowering that I actually could
understand,
then I’d be the first to fall on my knees in humble submission and admiration. On the other hand, I don’t think that’s going to happen. Hoping that it will is probably just wishful thinking, a leap of faith made by those who are desperate both to remain faithful to God and to understand this world, all the while realizing that the two—their views of God and the realities of this world—are at odds with each other.

Other people, of course, have dealt with suffering by insisting that we change our views of God. This is what Rabbi Harold Kushner urges in his best-selling book
When Bad Things Happen to Good People.
²
I have to admit, when I first read the book, in preparation for my course on suffering in the biblical traditions at Rutgers in the mid-1980s, I didn’t like it at all and started calling it
“When Bad Books Are Written by Good People.” My problem with it was that Kushner wanted to argue that God is not all powerful and cannot control the bad things that happen to people. What I found most unsettling was that Kushner took this to be the teaching of the Bible itself, specifically the book of Job. I thought that interpretation was outrageously bad, in fact just the
opposite
of the view of Job (and of almost all the other biblical writers). Job’s entire point is that God is the Almighty who created and runs this world, and that mere mortals have no right to question him for what he does, even when he makes the innocent suffer. Kushner had not simply gotten an interpretation wrong—he had gotten it precisely reversed.

I reread Kushner a couple of months ago, and I must say that now that I’m older (and generally less irritable), I had a very different reaction to the book. It is, in fact, a wise book written by a wise man that can speak to people who are experiencing personal tragedy. I suppose that now—twenty years later—I’m not nearly as concerned as I used to be about having the “correct” interpretation of the Bible. I’ve seen a lot over the past two decades, and biblical interpretation no longer strikes me as the biggest concern on the face of the planet. Moreover, Kushner’s view has a lot to be said for it. Not that it’s a correct interpretation of Job—it’s not even close. But it is a helpful view, one that has in fact helped many thousands of people, maybe even millions.

For Kushner, God is not the one who causes our personal tragedies. Nor does he even “permit” them when he could otherwise prevent them. There are simply some things that God cannot do. He can’t intervene to keep us from suffering. But what he can do is equally important. He can give us the strength to deal with our suffering when we experience it. God is a loving Father who is there for his people, not to guarantee miraculously that they never have hardship, but to give them the peace and strength they need to face the hardship.

I now find this a powerful view, and it is understandable that so many people have been affected by it. If I still believed in God, it is
probably the view I would eventually want to take. But for a biblical scholar like me, I have to admit that it still seems problematic. Most of the Bible’s authors are completely unequivocal about the power of God. It is not limited. God knows all things and can do all things. That’s why he is God. To say that he can’t cure cancer, or eliminate birth defects, or control hurricanes, or prevent nuclear holocaust is to say that he’s not really God—at least not the God of the Bible and of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Believing in a God who stands beside me in my suffering, but who cannot actually do much about it, makes God a lot like my mother or my kindly next-door neighbor, but it doesn’t make him a lot like GOD.

Kushner is a Jewish rabbi, and he has found his views helpful in his pastoral ministry. There are other views, advanced by Christian thinkers, that have also proved helpful to people over the years. One of the classic discussions of suffering from the early 1980s, a book that a lot of seminarians used to read, is called
Suffering: A Test of a Theological Method
by Arthur McGill.
³
This too is a very wise book—written, though, not for popular audiences like Kushner’s, but for pastors and theologians who don’t mind thinking deeply about a complicated subject. McGill’s book is explicitly Christian and would be of almost no use to someone who was not already a Christian. He insists, in fact, that Christian theology presupposes Christian faith and is an intellectual exercise engaged in and suitable for Christians alone. His view of suffering is completely Christocentric (i.e., focused on Christ). For McGill, Christ himself is the incarnation, the embodiment, of God. If we want to know what God is like, we look to Jesus.

And what do we see when we look to Jesus? We see one who spent his entire life, and went to his death, in self-giving love. This was not a love that expected anything in return. This was a love that was costly. It cost Jesus everything while he was living, and at the end it cost him his life. Jesus is the one who paid the ultimate price for his love. And if Christians want to be his followers, they will follow his example. They too will give everything for the sake of others. This is what Jesus did, and in doing it he showed us the
true character of God. God is one who suffers with us. His power is made manifest in suffering. His character is shown when his followers give of themselves for others, even unto death.

This may seem like a severe religious view, and it is. It is serious Christianity. It is not the kind of Christianity that sells books (this was never a best-seller); it is not the kind of Christianity that builds megachurches (which prefer and preach success rather than suffering, thank you very much). But it is rooted in a carefully thought-out position on what it means to be a Christian—a true Christian, as opposed to the plastic model—in the world.

As moving as I find this point of view, I’m afraid that—as an outsider—I find it nonetheless problematic. There have been lots of other theologians who, along with McGill, have argued that Christ is God’s solution to suffering, because in Christ God himself suffered. This view, I think, has proved comforting to Christian people who suffer, realizing that God too has gone through pain, agony, torture, humiliation, and death. But again I’m left wondering. Most of the Bible, of course, does not portray God as suffering. He is the one who causes suffering. Or who uses suffering. Or who prevents suffering. The idea that God himself suffers is based on the theological view that Jesus was God and that since he suffered, therefore God suffered. But the view that Jesus was himself God is not a view shared by most of the writers of the New Testament. It is, in fact, a theological view that developed rather late in the early Christian movement: it is not to be found, for example, in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, or Luke—let alone in the teachings of the historical man Jesus. For me it is an interesting and important theological development, but not one that I find convincing.

I also have trouble with McGill’s perspective because it seems to provide an arbitrary, rather than a necessary, understanding of the Christian God. One could just as plausibly argue, theologically, that since Christ took on the suffering of the world, the world no longer needs to suffer. That is, after all, what theologians have argued about sin and damnation: Jesus bore our sin and experienced the
condemnation of God precisely so
we
wouldn’t have to do so. Why isn’t the same true for suffering? Didn’t he suffer so that we don’t need to?

Moreover, if the Christian God is the one who suffers, then who is the one who created and sustains this world? Isn’t it the same God? By saying that God suffers with his creation, we seem to have sacrificed the view that God is sovereign over his creation. In other words, once again, God is not really GOD. And we are still left with the problem of suffering: why is it here?

In this book I’ve looked at a range of the biblical answers, and most of them, in my opinion, are simply not satisfying intellectually or morally. (It is important to recall that these are
different
explanations for why there is suffering; some of these explanations contradict others.) Is it because God is punishing people for their sins? That’s what the prophets of the Hebrew Bible maintain. But I refuse to think that birth defects, massive starvation, flu epidemics, Alzheimer’s disease, and genocides are given by God to make people repent, or to teach them a lesson.

Other writers—and the prophets themselves—want to maintain that some suffering is caused because people have the free will to hurt, maim, torture, and kill others. And that’s certainly true. Racism and sexism are rampant, there continue to be wars, there are still genocides—not to mention the mean-spirited and malevolent people some of us have to put up with all the time, in our neighborhoods, our workplaces, our government, and so on. But why would God allow human-caused evil in some instances and not others? Why doesn’t he
do
something about it? If he was powerful enough to raise up the Babylonian armies to destroy Jerusalem, and then to raise up the Persians to destroy the Babylonians—where was he in Vietnam? or Rwanda? If he could do miracles for his people throughout the Bible, where is he today when your son is killed in a car accident, or your husband gets multiple sclerosis, or civil war is unleashed in Iraq, or the Iranians decide to pursue their nuclear ambitions?