Suffering and why answering 'Why' is not enough (Part I)

If God is both powerful and good, why do bad things still happen?

This is such an unrelenting question in the life of faith, theologians have given it its own name: theodicy. It has even been suggested that the whole of Christian preaching and teaching for two thousand years finally boils down to grappling with this one question.

In 1994 an Evangelical publishing company released the Handbook of Christian Apologetics, a book which advertises itself as having “concise” and “witty” answers to all the big questions, does God exist? providence versus free will? and of course, the mother of all big questions given above. Not unlike a telemarketer’s script, this marvel of peaceful, easy certitude provides a user-friendly flowchart for each section (E.g. If your opponent mentions the randomness of the evolutionary process, talk about the complexity, pointing to intentionality, behind of human cell structure; if they argue that such a structure could randomly develop, given enough chances, here is the statistical improbability of this, even if the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, etc.).

It’s in handbook form, I presume, so that we can quickly reference it and beat back the accusing inquiries of those conniving “secularists,” but still thick enough that, verbal argument notwithstanding, it can be used to beat them back in a different sort of way.  I humbly confess that there was a time, when I was first figuring out the extent to which I would own my faith as an adult, where I remember finding it convenient that someone had finally laid out these answers in such an easy-to-use format, such that my then fragile theological system should never have to be troubled by unpleasant outliers—questions unanswered and data that doesn’t fit. It was fantastic! Simple, untroubled certitude for only $16.75 on Amazon.  

So why, then, did I still struggle with my faith? It would not have been so deflating if the “answers” that this handbook gave me eventually proved to be bad. I could always just find better answers. The real problem was not that the “handbook” gave all invalid arguments. It was that it gave many valid answers, and I still wasn’t satisfied. The logic of it worked out, so why was my faith life still such a struggle?

I still felt used and unlovable when a girlfriend would break up with me. I still spiraled into existential crisis when it became unavoidably clear that my hairline was, in fact, receding. I was still bothered by the amount of poverty and violence in the world.

Perhaps the problem is not finding an answer to the Why question but the expectation that an answer to the Why question will be enough.

The first thing that both “believer” and skeptic have in common when they bring up theodicy, is they both anticipate (albeit, one more optimistic than the other) that this is primarily an intellectual question, so an adequate intellectual answer would satisfy it.

The second thing they have in common is that, having found a rational answer to the Why question, neither will be completely satisfied, because…

…the third thing, they are both actually searching (whether they realize it or not) for far more than an intellectual answer to an intellectual question.

Here is what I mean. We all already know the standard, prosaic answers to the theodicy question. E.g.

- God creates free will, and where free will exists, so does the opportunity for evil.

- Love can’t exist where hate is not an option, nor beauty without ugliness, nor pleasure without pain, blah, blah, blah... 

These calm, analytical responses, usually offered from comfortably upholstered armchairs in climate-controlled offices, continue to be as reasonable today as ever.  The problem is not that very rationale answers to the Why question don’t exist. The problem is that they do exist, but so long as there is much more to the human creature that experiences suffering than just the rational self, these answers remain unsatisfying in our actual moment of pain and crisis. 

If I can try to fit into a blog paragraph the subject of entire tenured careers, the problem of “theodicy” can’t really be addressed in the modern Western world until we recognize how we’ve unwittingly restricted ourselves to valuing one aspect of our humanness—reason—over against any other. When the Enlightenment swept across Euro-America a few centuries ago, it was unofficially decided that the life of the rational intellect was the only part of life worth paying attention to. “Human” was defined as that creature which could reason. Filtered out of this definition was any concern for the aesthetic self, the emotional self, the intuitive self, the poetic self, the story-telling self, and most importantly, the loving self (if you assume, as I do, that love isn’t love if it is strictly rational).

That puts us in a strange position now—just starting to come off the enlightenment buzz but still grasping for a more adequate understanding of what makes us human—when we set the theodicy question in terms of reason and logic.  It’s not that reasonable, logical answers don’t exist. It’s that they do exist, and it has proven to be enough. We’ve heard those answers. Yet, here we are, still asking the question.

If this is the central question, it’s remarkable that in the entirety of the scriptures, never is there offered up an “apology” or rational defense for how a loving God can allow suffering to go on in the world in the vein of the Handbook of Christian Apologetics. But no one in any of our scriptures ever claims to have any such answer.

I take that back. The four “friends” of Job have all kinds of answers, the very fact of which makes them stock characters whose words come out cheap and forgettable. Trivial people saying trivial things. However well-reasoned their defense, however well their system fits together, it will be forgotten as hastily as it was devised, not because their logic doesn’t work but because logic doesn’t work. We don’t have bad answers that have been proven bad. We have good answers that have been proven insufficient. We have reasonable answers but reasonable answers hardly matter one iota in the face of real suffering.

So, in the second part of this blog coming next week, I will try to grapple with the problem of pain in a way that is not irrational, hopefully, but that does not fixate on rational answers at the expense of all other facets of what it means to be human. I’ll try to stay truer to the method of Jesus and his Jewish roots which prefers stories to arguments, open-ended parables to closed logic, includes poetry as well as prose and, most of all, seeks a Who more than a why.

See you there.

Pastor Jared