Why fundamentalism is an atheistic response to pain and an alternative (part III)

If some silly think like a job, or a family, or Netflix kept you from lapping up the sweet wellspring of wisdom that was parts I and II, I’ve been trying to make the case that art—writing a novel, directing a movie or singing a song—is more helpful and truer to the biblical methods of dealing with pain than, say, writing a fundamentalist Handbook of Christian Apologetics.

In many ways, these are opposite strategies. The handbook is written to help us distance ourselves from our pain and look at it analytically. Art pulls us in deeper so we can experience the pain at a more conscious level.

A handbook writer starts out with the intellectual assumptions that God must be a certain way, that pain exists, and that the one needs to be justified in light of the other.

A painter just expresses his pain and assumes that God will provide the defense—that is, of course, if God is God. A musician that’s worth even half the liver in her belly doesn’t talk about God. She talks to God. Poets feel no pressure to speak reasonably in their moment of need. In fact, they’re liable to air all kinds of short-sided, irrational, even unfair grievances because they're only responsible for what’s honest, not what’s true.

Here’s an analogy from our bodies (if you’re medically trained, don’t correct any inaccuracies or it won’t work). I understand there are certain types of back injuries where our body’s first impulse is to engage the muscles around the injury to protect us from feeling the pain fully. But eventually this becomes counterproductive as the tightening and inflammation becomes the source of a more enduring pain long after the original injury would have healed.  What we really need to do at that point is learn to relax those muscles so that we can really feel the pain and let the healing process work more directly. 

I say the artist's method is more true to the Bible because, anywhere other than a handbook writer’s desk, the Bible pretty obviously isn’t a collection of logical assertions about God but of family myths, and petty songs of tribal vengeance, and morally questionable parables, and seemingly off topic sidebars, and poems. Lots of poems.

And just as good art isn’t a random hodge-podge of colors or sounds but a creative use of the rules and boundaries of a particular medium, the Hebrew culture that generated our Bible developed structures and forms for their poems that helped them deal with their pain more effectively.

For instance, the poems of the book of Lamentations, written shortly after everything the Israelites knew was demolished, killed or shipped off to exile, are written in acrostic. With the first word of each line corresponding to one of 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, the lamenter was free to make whatever raw and sometimes venomous grievance he or she would like to make toward God. But just as the alphabet comes to an end, so too must the lament.

We’ve all known the mourner who refuses to go on whatever other love and blessings are poured into her. Or the former jock who insists on not showing gratitude for his stable job and beautiful family at present because sometime in the past he “could’a been a contender.” We can be just as narcissistic about using our pain to gather attention around ourselves as we can about hoarding blessings. The lamenter isn’t encouraged to deny her pain, but she isn't allowed to identify with it indefinitely, either. This structure provided a lamenter a means of addressing her pain without becoming unhealthily co-dependent on it.

The Psalms of lament often end with a line of praise and thanksgiving that always looks a little out of place in an otherwise ugly string of complaints and accusations (E.g. Ps. 13:5-6).  These lines are more than just token happy endings. They provide a way for the Psalmist to acknowledge, “However raw my feelings are right now, I will still acknowledge that this lament takes place within a relationship that is more enduring than my current emotional state. So I will end with a word of praise even when I don’t feel like it, because I know there will be other times when I do feel like it.” 

This kind of directness is only possible if, beneath the pain of the moment, the poet has a deeper trust in the integrity of the relationship surrounding the words.

My wife has committed to me for better or worse. I wear evidence of that commitment around my finger and keep paperwork for it safely filed away. So around her, I might spout out all kinds of hair-brained nonsense in a moment of frustration, nonsense that I might think to filter out in the context of a lesser relationship. The more secure our relationship, the more she is able to suspend any judgment on my temporary irrationality or any fear that this might be a permanent threat to our relationship.

It goes both ways, of course. I have a responsibility not to let frustration and accusation become my normal modes of relating to her, and surely I’ll need to become the more mature and rational one at some other point when she is having a moment.

The covenant secured relationship that we’ve made becomes the kind of container for unedited speech that a shaky, superficial relationship can never be.

So people are arguably at their most faithful when they're comfortably expressing their frustration and doubt to God. 

For all this, you’ll notice that the handbook writer will usually sell more books than the poet. Logically Why-ing away pain will always be a sexier alternative to engaging it head on.

But you’ll notice that at the end of the day, when the handbook writer has dried his final sheet and closesd up his ink well, when all arguments have been exhausted, questions settled, the victim stripped of any reason to gripe, no one actually comes away from the ordeal with the responsibility to actually do something about the pain.

The fundamentalist handbook writer is similar to the atheist. He either believes that (1) God does not exist or that (2) God is not capable of doing stuff. Otherwise, he would not feel such enormous pressure to make God's case.

By way of contrast, the Psalmist, by not providing any explanation or justification, has put the ball in God’s court to actually do something about the pain. At the end of a work of art, no questions have been answered and no grievances settled, so it’s actually incumbent upon God to come through on the back end.

The Psalmist doesn’t seek answers for pain but healing.

Suffering like an artist (Part II)

In the first part of this blog series, I talked about how intellectual or rational responses to the problem of pain, even if they’re good responses, are ultimately unsatisfying because we are more than just intellectual creatures. That’s not to imply that there is a satisfying alternative. But what other resources should our faith give us to push through suffering?

As I write, I’m fixated on the song, Silence, by Matisyahu. To feel the full gravity, you really have to listen to it, but I’ll provide some pertinent lines for the time-challenged.

True to the Hebrew tradition of candid, unedited prayer, the singer lifts up words that are at once indicting of himself and of God. Authenticity before the Holy One is valued over religious propriety. Closed, intellectual answers to the problem of suffering are neither offered, nor are they pursued.

 If it should turn out that he was really just praying at the ceiling, this effort to “shine a warmth into eternity” is doomed to fail in a world where “all is vanity” (Eccl. 1:2) and a universe where the cold, chaotic laws of thermodynamics are unrelenting. He risks the prayer anyways. It’s on God to prove that it was not in vain.

This is not a rational way of dealing with pain. But what cancer patient or grieving mother could give two damns about what’s rational?

To stubbornly “shine warmth” into a universe that tends toward cold is not a levelheaded action prompted by a calm assessment of possible outcomes. It is an act of defiance against chaos. It’s a mortal cry that if there does not exist a bridge between a future where “we’ll dance like flames” and a present where “I’m just a candle trying to stay lit in this windy night,” then I will insist on building such a bridge. I will begin to build even if my own love is the only cabling and my faith the only anchorage. I will leave it up to God whether hope should prove a worthy deck to get us across.

He is pitting love against entropy to see who wins. I don’t have to offer a defense for you, God. If you are God, prove it.  “[I] bring my heart to an invisible king with a hope one day you might answer me, so I pray, ‘Don’t you abandon me.’”

The song offers no explanation for the “problem of pain,” because, in fact, the song is not about suffering. The song is his suffering. It is his suffering not talked about at a distance but completely felt with music as the medium that allows him to access it fully.

Explanations, on the other hand, are like opiates for the soul. We dab the topical anesthetic, Explainitall, onto our hearts and escape into our heads in hopes that the pain will have gone away by the time our chest comes to. But it’s a deceptive solution. We’re numbed to the pain, but its root cause hasn’t been dealt with at all.

The art method is very much opposite that of philosophy. An artist assumes that if pain is going to happen, then we can’t get out of it but only through it.

This is hard to understand in our therapeutic culture where rosy praise songs and happy-ending apologetics are written by Christians who seem to want to act as veritable publicists for God, and we might be confused by the biblical faithful who are typically the ones lamenting the loudest; but avoidance of pain is a sign of unfaith. Faith is what gives us the courage to drink that foul cup without a chaser.  

Nevertheless, an honest artist is hard pressed to lay all responsibility for suffering in the lap of God and leave it at that. Can one ever honestly level such a charge at God without simultaneously indicting oneself?

“Your silence kills me…”

Matisyahu says. True enough. But he knows himself well enough to know,

“…I wouldn't have it any other way.”

Do I actually want to know what God thinks about things? Do I actually want God to offer an evaluation of my own silence toward the poor and oppressed? toward my own apathy in the face of injustice? toward my own negligence of the orphan and the stranger? Do I actually want to allow God that level of intrusiveness upon my own aims and motives?

No. If I’m truly honest with myself, all things being equal, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

There is, of course, a heavy price to pay for this silence. Not just for us. For God. What does a parent do, when she can’t bear the sight of her child’s suffering nor can she coerce the child’s affairs enough to avoid it? That parent dies.

More on that in Part III of this blog.

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