Other Questions about Why Bad Things Happen

Back in 1997, a gentleman whom I'll just call Robert (he has requested that I not use his full name in this age of personal google searches) posted on alt.christnet a post rejecting Christianity in part because of the existence of evil and suffering. This is the seventh and last in a series of posts that constitute my response to some of his objections. You can use this table-of-contents post to read Robert’s original post and then each of my response posts, in the appropriate order.

Robert,

Now we can still ask, "Why does God allow man to harm his fellow? Why does God allow war? Why does God allow profound suffering? Why did God allow 6 million of his Chosen People to die in the Nazi death camps?" We can't rationally ask those questions as judges ("How dare You, God?"), but we can reasonably ask them as students ("Why do you, God?"). In other words the question, "Why is God such a jerk?" is out of court, and the question, "How can the Christian God be logically reconciled with the existence of suffering?" has been answered; but there still remains the question, "What principles lie behind the existence of evil and human suffering?" ...continue reading...

In a sense the best answer is — as you yourself have rightly noted — "Who knows?" As the Bible puts it, "Who has known the mind of the Lord, that he can instruct Him?" In talking about God and His purposes in creation we face the same difficulty scientists face in talking about quantum physics: the only words available to us are words developed to express human experience, and therefore it is impossible adequately to express in human language those things that are permanently beyond human experience. We can at best draw models and analogies, making approximations that come more or less near the truth without ever fully grasping it.

However, God has given us some help, through Scripture and the life of Christ. So we can make some guesses that are at least better than, "You need to get involved in a relationship with God before any of these questions can be answered. You can't do it by yourself."

Let me pause for a moment to try to salvage that last quotation, which understandably enraged you. It is true that watching an atheist try to understand Christian doctrines is like watching an eight-year-old boy try to understand grown-up discussions of falling in love. When we speak of the "love" of God, the very word "love" is a metaphor for something that, while it is more like human love than like anything else we know, is still in many ways very unlike human love. Christian doctrine tends not to make sense to atheists for the same reason that romantic poetry tends not to make sense to eight-year-old boys: communication presupposes some commonality of experience.

But that quotation goes too far. In the first place, while it is true that any explanation I can give you will be necessarily inadequate because of your lack of experience of the love of God (and by that I mean the kind of experience that people such as Mother Theresa or St. Francis of Assisi or Billy Graham or my father have had), that hardly means that you can't understand any explanation at all. Furthermore, if we're going to avoid any explanations that are inadequate, why then we can't talk about God at all, no matter how holy we think ourselves to be or for that matter how holy we really are. The most brilliant Christian mind ever, St. Thomas Aquinas, refused to complete the most monumental work of Christian theology ever, his Summa Theologica, after having a vision in which, as he told a friend, "I have seen things that make everything I've written seem like straw." There is a point beyond which you cannot go without knowing God's love experientially; for that matter there is a point beyond which you won't go if you live a thousand years and never sin again. But you can get quite a ways down the road to understanding even as an unbeliever. The Christian who gave you that cop-out answer owed you more than that, and I apologize on his behalf.

I'm not the best person to give you an explanation; you really should start with C. S. Lewis's The Problem of Pain; from that it wouldn't hurt you to read his Till We Have Faces. I can point out a couple of things to get you started, though.

First there is the principle of the Fall. Christianity teaches that God did not create evil; he created free will, which entails the potentiality, but not necessarily the actuality, of evil. Both Satan and man chose to commit evil; thus we are, in a very real sense, the creators of evil.

There were three principal, immediate results of the Fall:

(1) The individual Adam and Eve were cursed with chronic and incurable (save through grace) self-centeredness and rebelliousness.

(2) Their descendants were also cursed with this same sinfulness.

(3) Their entire world was cursed because of them.

(4) God set about a plan to redeem both mankind and the world, a plan which involved Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and ultimately the recreation of the universe and its cleansing from the curse of the Fall.

The second should not be misunderstood. We are bound to sin sometime. However, each of us, at least from time to time, finds himself at a point of genuine choice, where we are perfectly free not to sin right now and in this particular way. If we choose selfishly and cause others to suffer, we can hardly blame God for our choice. Let me make that a little clearer. I may not be able to help being self-centered. Still, unless I have considerably worse mental problems than has the average American adult, I can, even self-centered as I am, decide not to seduce the sixteen-year-old neighbor girl this evening. If I seduce her anyway, I cannot truly say, "It wasn't my fault; it's Adam's." And if she gets pregnant and has to face the unpleasant alternatives of secret abortion or public disgrace, it is surely unreasonable for me to blame Adam and Eve — or God — instead of accepting my own responsibility in the matter.

Now for two reasons you will probably consider the doctrine of the Fall a bad answer. The first is that you probably don't believe in it, because you think belief in a literal Fall entails belief in "creation science." This is hardly true, as I think you'll see if you'll do a thought experiment with me. Imagine that the "Garden of Eden" was actually a parallel space-time continuum, and that when Adam and Eve, in the perfect universe which parallels the present one (and therefore has left no trace in the present one), chose to rebel, they were punished by being evicted from their original home and translated to this parallel — and cursed — universe. Now imagine that you are asked to tell this story of Adam and Eve to a group of second-millennium-B.C. shepherds who have no concept of experimental science and have never read so much as a page of modern science fiction. How would you tell the story? Wouldn't it come out looking remarkably like Genesis 2? I think so, at least; and so I agree with, say, Francis Schaeffer in insisting on a "literal space-time fall," while disagreeing with the particular brand of inerrantist who insists that dinosaur fossils are red herrings left by God as a test to see whether a person trusts God or science more.

I am in fact making a distinction here between the mythical and the scientific — though not between the false and the factual (which is what people usually mean when they contrast the "mythical" with the "scientific"). That is, the Fall of Man is a true story, corresponding to real actions by real beings making real choices, but it is set in the narrative form of myth in order to render it comprehensible to people who lacked the conceptual background necessary for a scientific (in the modern sense) account.

Your second probable objection goes deeper. For I will be very surprised if your reaction to my blaming human suffering on the Fall doesn't go something like this:

"Okay, fine. We'll say, arguendo, that Adam and Eve sinned and deserved to be punished. But what kind of God punishes an entire universe because two people sin?" Now my answer is basically the Christian rejoinder to the whole American fixation on "fairness."

For that objection rests on the assumption that God should be fair. I have said already that God cares about Love, not Fairness. But I didn't explain what a Christian means by Love. Only as you come to understand what Christians mean when they say, "God is love," and, "Love your neighbor as yourself," do you begin to grasp the outlines of God's use of "unfair" suffering as a means of love.

I assume that you have seen Disney's Beauty and the Beast. You will remember the scene in which Belle asks permission to suffer in her father's place, while her father begs to be the one to suffer. Each wants to be the one to suffer, not because they love suffering, but because they love each other. Or think of Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities going to the guillotine in another's place, and saying, "It is a far, far better thing I do, than I have ever done." Above all, think of the central doctrine of Christianity, that God Himself bore the suffering that should have been ours, out of His unquenchable love for us.

Then think of a petulant six-year-old saying, "Why do we all have to stay home from the park just because Jimmy broke the rules? I didn't do nuthin'."

Which attitude shows love? Which demands fairness?

There is a stretch of dialogue in Lewis's Till We Have Faces that is inexpressibly moving to the person who has really grasped the Christian point of Love, while being alien and repellent to the person who retains his American attachment to Fairness. When this dialogue makes sense to you — and not before — then you can approach an understanding of the way in which Christianity sees the very unfairness of suffering as a sign that the universe was created by a God who is Himself nothing but Love:

"But how could she—did she really—do such things and go to such places—and not...? Grandfather, she was all but unscathed. She was almost happy."

"Another bore nearly all the anguish."

"I? Is it possible?...Oh, I give thanks. I bless the gods. Then it was really I—"

"Who bore the anguish. But she achieved the tasks. Would you rather have had justice?"

The theological principle here is Vicariousness. One sins and another suffers: "Bear ye one another's burdens." One acts virtuously and another reaps the benefits: "Surely He bore our sorrows, and by His stripes we are healed." It is a principle that runs through Scripture from beginning to end. It makes possible the good news of Atonement, but it is also responsible for the (to us repulsive) idea that God punishes sins "to the third and fourth generation." It causes the very universe to suffer vicariously for Mankind: "The creation waits in eager anticipation for the sons of God to be revealed...the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time" — a pregnant (sorry, couldn't help myself) analogy in light of the fact that the pains of childbirth are part of the curse of the Fall. Suffering in this fallen world is not meted out by desert because love is not concerned with desert, and the universe was meant to be a universe founded on love.

Now we may be able to see that an individual who sacrifices himself in love is admirable and Christ-like, and yet feel that it is wrong to force anyone to be a hero. We might say, "I can admire a friend who stands up and says, 'I'm willing to pay his fine,' but I would despise a judge who says, 'You are guilty, so I am going to force your friend (who hasn't done anything) to pay a fine.'" On the level of human law-courts, that is perfectly justified. But if we extend the analogy to the relationship between man and God, we err. God is in a sense our Judge; but then He is also the potter to our clay. God can make whatever demands He wishes — and His demand is, "Be ye perfect, even as I am perfect." There are limits to what one man can demand of another. There is no limit to what God can demand of man. And God demands precisely that kind of love which casts aside concern for its own rights and rushes in to bear the beloved's suffering. To every man, woman, boy and girl, Jesus says, "If you want to be my disciple, you must deny yourself, and take up your cross, and follow me." Everyone is called to be a Christian, and every Christian is called to suffer for the sins of others. That is, I think, the meaning of Paul's statement, "I fill up in my body what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ."

If this call, this demand seems unreasonable, we must bear in mind two things. First, that all such vicarious suffering is rewarded with glory incomparable. The same Paul who said, "I fill up in my body what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ," said also, "I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed in us." This theme as well runs throughout the New Testament. "...Christ, who for the glory that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame..." "Have the same mind as Christ Jesus...he became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has exalted him to the highest place..." The single most striking aspect of most conversations I've had with atheists is their complete inability to entertain, even hypothetically, the possibility that eternity overwhelms our fourscore and ten, and that everything that happens to us here is preparatory work for when our real existence begins, and that any attempt to understand what happens here without reference to eternity is hopelessly out-of-context and doomed to fail. Christianity says, "If you don't see everything that happens in this life from the perspective of eternity, then you get it wrong and come to all kinds of wrong conclusions and make all kinds of wrong decisions." But for most atheists of my acquaintance, their entire emotional makeup rebels at the mere thought of such an approach to life. They have read the one-page prologue to a ten-thousand-page novel and passed judgment on the whole thing, and can't allow themselves even seriously to entertain the idea that anything could be misleading in that approach. God says of the suffering, "Trust me, and you won't regret it," and they answer, "Up Yours, I'll never forgive You for this no matter what You do from this point on." This is a less than impressively rational response.

But even more importantly, I must again emphasize that God asks us to do nothing more than He has already done. No suffering of ours can be more unfair, more undeserved, more objectionable than the suffering that God Himself has already taken on for our sakes. Dorothy Sayers: "[F]or whatever reason God chose to make man as he is — limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death — He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself....[The story of the Crucifixion is] the tale of the time when God was the under-dog and got beaten, when He submitted to the conditions He had laid down and became a man like the men He had made, and the men He had made broke Him and killed Him." (Creed or Chaos, pp. 4-5)

Each of us is called to share in the work of Christ; and the work of Christ was — and is — to suffer vicariously for the whole world.

Now because God has created a universe characterized by vicarious suffering, we really cannot choose whether to participate. We will suffer without desert; that is the nature of our world, the mode of existence for every element of our fallen creation. But we can choose whether freely to accept the suffering as an act of love, or rebelliously to resent and to try to wriggle out of the suffering in the name of "fairness." If we rebel, why then we are rebelling against God and render ourselves deserving of punishment; if we don't...well, then we suffer. It appears to be a Catch-22: we suffer either way, so what's the difference?

That appearance is an illusion, however. If we refuse to carry our cross, we will not escape suffering; we will only fail to love, and thus lose the reward for which we were intended to suffer. "He who saves his live shall lose it." But if we take up our cross, then we discover the joy of love and ultimately receive the glory that awaits the children of God. "He who loses his life for My sake shall save it." The world does not give us a choice as to whether we will be crucified. It does, however, give us a choice as to whether we will be crucified as a snarling thief hurling defiance to the end, or whether we will be crucified with Christ, sharing in his sufferings "so that we may also share in his glory."

"Why did God allow 6 million of his Chosen People to die in the Nazi death camps?" you ask. At least in part precisely because they were His Chosen. For to be chosen by God is, usually if not always, to be chosen to suffer undeservedly. "Why did God allow 6 million of his Chosen People to die in the Nazi death camps?" I answer in fear and trembling, as one whose heart quails at the thought that I or (worse) my family might ever be trapped in such a horror myself. Yet I cannot deny the Christian answer: Each of the 12 million people killed by the Nazis was, in the end, called by God to share in the undeserved sufferings of Christ. To each victim was given the opportunity and the responsibility to love his murderers. Every person is called to return good for evil, and no limit is set beyond which the evil becomes so bad that we are not required to respond in love. Every Jew and Christian and homosexual who fell dying in Nazi camps could either curse with the unrepentant thief on the cross or else cry out with Christ and St. Stephen, "Father, forgive them." (I completely understand anyone's thinking that I have no business talking about it since I didn't go through it. I can only send such people to The Hiding Place, written by a woman who herself saw her sister die at Ravensbrück, the Nazis having killed her father months earlier. Her conclusion is the same as mine; her authority to state it is much greater. Kenny Pierce may be a mere idle theorizer, but Betsy and Caspar ten Boom were obedient literally unto death.) The Holocaust was one of the ways in which the expiation of the human race for the sins of the human race was worked out, and the fact that in this case the price for the sins of the Nazis was paid in part by the sufferings of the Jews, is an echo of the way in which the sins of Jew and Gentile alike are redeemed by the sufferings of the Galileean Jew Yeshua, "by whose stripes we are healed."

Please do not think that I am implying that the Jews deserved what they got "because their ancestors killed Christ" — a doctrine I find abhorrent in the highest degree. (I've actually been called "Christ-killer" by a group of skinhead teenagers who thought I was Jewish, by the way. Not a pleasant experience.) I am saying that the Nazis' victims did not deserve their suffering, and that precisely because they did not deserve it, they were sharing the burden of Christ.

In all this discussion of pain and suffering, I'm grossly oversimplifying, of course. Twenty-five pages makes a long post, but it would make a ridiculously superficial book about pain and suffering and God's purposes therein. I have not talked about pain that we bring on ourselves through silliness or carelessness or as a direct consequence of sin (e.g., lung cancer in a chain smoker), or about pain that God imposes on us as spiritual discipline to bring us back to Him. There is pain that we suffer at the hands of evil people such as Hitler (the possibility of which is a necessary corollary of free will; see Sheldon Vanauken's essay, "God's Will: Reflections on the Problem of Pain"). There is the generalized pain of living in a cursed world (e.g., the leukemia that killed my late partner, or the Parkinson's disease that incapacitated and eventually destroyed my grandfather, so painfully and slowly that it was a relief to see him released from his suffering). There is even pain that exists simply and solely so that God can take it away and thus remind us that our health is due to Him; see John 9, especially 9.3. (Don't go up in the air about the "unfairness" or "selfishness" of God's inflicting blindness on that fellow for His own glory; the greatest beneficiary may well have been the man himself, who might never have come to know and believe in Jesus had he not spent those years in blindness.) If I have concentrated on the suffering of innocents, that is only because I thought that was the kind most likely to cause you intellectual difficulties.

Unfortunately this makes my presentation out of balance. For I've spent all this time talking as though God were the Great Inflictor of Suffering, when in fact He is much better described as the Great Healer. It is true that sometimes doctors have to inflict extra (short-term) pain in order to help the patient to long-term health, as in back surgery or the filling of a cavity. It is even true that in certain cases doctors have to inflict pain on one person in order to help another person, as in an emergency C-section due to fetal distress. And there are trainers who push athletes to the point of pain in order to fit them for peak performance (hence the motto, "No pain, no gain"). In all this doctors are roughly analogous to God. But surely it is obvious that doctors spend far more time easing pain than inflicting it? You have put me in the position of someone having to justify surgeons' painful use of the scalpel; that is hardly the way to get a balanced view of the medical profession as a whole.

I'm particularly concerned about this balance because all along, behind your intellectual difficulties, there stands the terribly negative experience you had with "Christianity." It would be very natural for you to be afraid to try Christianity again because last time you got hurt. And here I've spent pages trying to assure you intellectually that it's okay for God to hurt you and indeed that Christians are called to suffering. The more effective I have been intellectually, the more I have reinforced your emotional barrier. So let me here pause just a moment to remind you of a couple of things.

First, if Christianity is true, refusing to come to Christ because it might be painful is like refusing to go to the dentist for the same reason. But much more importantly, I am very far from convinced that your "Christian" experience had anything to do with God in the first place. Your post gives ample reason to suspect that your "Christian" teachers weren't really Christians at all; at best they were hopelessly incompetent Christians with no idea of what is required to live a successful Christian life. Either that or you weren't listening — but my guess is that the fault lies more with your teachers than with you. Anybody can call himself a "Christian," even if he is as far off the pier as Jim Jones or David Koresh. I think that responsible Christianity "works," but I would certainly agree that "Christianity" in the Branch Davidian compound did not. Responsible Christianity is no bed of roses, but I think you may legitimately hope that your "Christian" experience is not representative of what you would find if you came back to Christianity through an orthodox and spiritually mature community. To be fair, my wife and I have good friends who received reasonably sound teaching in college but still felt that Christianity "didn't work" for them. But you don't sound like them. You don't sound like someone who has seen solid Christianity and rejected it. You sound like someone who has run into some fringe group and quite rightly rejected their snake oil under the impression that you were rejecting Christianity. In short it looks to me like you didn't meet the Great Physician. You appear to have met the Great Quack.

Rather than pursue that assertion further, though – which would require a series of posts at least as long as you’ve already waded through here – I want to tie up the loose ends in theodicy.

There remain the questions, "What does God want me to do about this suffering?" and, "What specific thing is God going to do in my life through this?" A general answer to the first should be obvious: "Take up your cross, and follow Me." If your goal in life is to minimize your suffering, Christianity is the wrong religion, for we are called to love at whatever cost to ourselves — and in this fallen world, love is guaranteed to cost us some suffering. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." (Bonhoeffer, by the way, is another of those Christians, like the ten Booms, who forgave the Nazis at his execution.) More specific answers are of course beyond the scope of this post, since they must be tailored to the specific circumstances of the Christian's life.

Similarly, a general answer can be given to the last question. "What is God going to do in my life through this?" The answer: "Reveal His glory in you, and accomplish (in part) His work of redeeming the world." Again, more specific answers depend on individual situations.

We come at last, then, to the end of Crappy World. To the question, "Why is God such a jerk?" we can only point out that no human being is competent to stand in judgment over God, and anyone who stands around shaking his fist at God (or even tsk-tsking Him) is nothing more nor less than a prize jackass. To the question, "How can a good, loving and omnipotent God be considered logically compossible with evil and suffering?" we can observe that apparent contradictions are based on misleading definitions of the terms "good," "loving," "omnipotent," and "evil," as well as on hidden premises about the nature of God (such as the false assumption that God is subject to the time continuum). To the question, "What principles govern the distribution of suffering and evil?" we can point to the principles of free will, the Fall of Man, and Vicariousness as at least first steps toward an understanding of the good Creator behind this apparently bad creation. To the question, "What am I supposed to do about it?" we can answer in general terms, "Take up your cross and follow Him." And to the question, "What is God going to do in my life through this?" we can provide one more generalization: "Reveal His glory, build His character into you and into others, make fit you to share in the glory of the saints, and accomplish His work in the world."

And there's my answer to the Crappy World argument.

...And that’s where I left this response to you, Robert, when I originally wrote it, ten years ago. I would add something more now, though. I have in the last few years become much more heavily involved in the lives of people who suffer deeply, as a result of working with orphans in Kazakhstan. I have a friend who jumped out of a third-storey window to escape a murderously drunken father when she was ten or eleven; I have a friend whose mother forced her to watch while the mother murdered my friend's father; I have helped various kids get adopted and have adopted four myself and have tried and (heart-breakingly) failed to adopt two others. And my wife and I, with help from other people, have been trying to help several orphanage “graduates” make it through college. One evening after they had all come to visit the apartment where we were staying on our most recent trip to Karaganda, I found myself thinking some more about how God was using their suffering, and the pain we felt on their behalf because we loved them. I wrote what follows, groping my way to an understanding of something hovering at the edge of my ability to articulate it. I hope someday a Christian wiser and far more advanced than I can express what I was trying to grasp. Perhaps it’ll be you.

Compassion is so named because it is, fundamentally, the act of suffering along with somebody else. Now, I never could see the point of feeling pain if it didn’t do any good. How can it possibly help anything for me to know, without being able to do anything about it, that our friend Maryam will be on the street in five days, if the knowledge causes me pain and doesn’t keep her from being kicked out onto the street? Isn’t it bad enough for her to be hurting without my having to hurt, too, when it does no good? If that seems callous, turn it around: when I feel bad I tend to withdraw and keep to myself because it’s bad enough for me to be having a crappy day without other people’s days having to be ruined, too. What a very rationally unselfish attitude that is, eh?

Yet I have come to see, slowly, that if you love someone and they are hurting, then it causes you pain; and that therefore that if someone is hurting (and most of the world is) and you do not feel pain, that simply means that you do not yet love him. But I begin to understand these days that when we share pain with someone, that sharing binds us together more closely than anything else in the world can do. Pain is love’s toll, and it is a toll that God pays more deeply than we can imagine because He loves more deeply than we can imagine. But intimacy is shared pain’s fruit. And the more we learn to love God, the more deeply we feel the pain of others, because God hurts for them and we love Him. And in sharing His pain we grow close to His heart.

Thus there is value in the tears we shed for Maryam even if we never find a way to help her (though God knows we desperately want to help her). I stood at the grave of a young girl I never met not so long ago, and you would think my tears did her no good; yet who knows whether she now intercedes on my behalf to God and appeals to my tears and loves me for having let myself feel hurt on her behalf?

Paul says that we fill up in our own lives “what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ.” There are three characteristics, I think, of the sufferings of Christ that I see more clearly now than ever I have. First, His sufferings were all on our behalf, not His own. Second, His sufferings were all freely and voluntarily chosen by Himself; He needn’t have accepted them.

And third, it is His suffering that made our very relationship with Him possible at all. His suffering opened the door for us to experience His love.

So as I meditate on filling up His sufferings, I look at these kids and at the pain I have felt on their behalf, and I compare it to Christ’s sufferings in those three ways. I see that their suffering is becoming my own, a little like my suffering became God’s; and I recognize that Dessie and I didn’t need to accept the burden, any more than God needed to accept mine. But I begin to realize that when Damyir says, “You have been our greatest support,” he is talking not about the money we’ve sent, but about the fact that we know their names and we know their stories and we long to be with them so that they don’t have to go through it alone, and they know we desperately want to be there with them even though we can’t. Just the knowledge that we desire it is deeply valuable to them even though we haven’t yet actually succeeded. Jessica sees in my eyes how I hurt for Layla; Damyir and the rest see how we hurt for Maryam. Because they can see the pain, they can see the love. It is precisely our felt pain on their behalf that opens up to us the doors of their hearts. The ministry of Christ to the world is a ministry of shared suffering; and these children who never met Jesus, see the pain we suffer on their behalf and know themselves – feel themselves – to be loved, as they otherwise never could.

But at root, though all that is true, I think there is something deeper.

As long as it is always just Christ sharing our pain, then we have a one-sided relationship. His pain on our behalf can only take the relationship so far. There is more needed. It is not enough for Him to love us. We must love Him. And so He invites us to choose to share in His pain, as He has chosen to share in ours; so that we can pass the relational barrier of non-reciprocity and find levels of intimacy with God that we could not otherwise have tasted.

It probably is not the most important of the Christian mysteries, but I think it must be one of the most astonishing and unexpected of all the graces that God has bestowed upon us: that, even such as we are, God invites us to have compassion...on Himself.

Good-bye, Robert. I hope we meet someday.