When
I was ten, I went to the Dominican Republic for the first time, and when I was
twelve I went to Haiti for the first time. These trips have since shaped and
colored my perception of the world; I knew then that not all is right with the
world. In the backyard of the wealthy are people living in cardboard huts
without clean water as if they do not exist. When I was in high school, my mom
was diagnosed with cancer; the world collapsed. These moments in my life shook
me, and I think in order to begin grasping the problem of suffering it has to
shake you first.
I
remember sitting in my dimly lit dorm room at CIU during my junior year and reading
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers
Karamazov for the first time; I remember reading the chapter entitled
“Rebellion” in which Ivan Karamazov graphically describes the suffering of
children. After Ivan tells a story about a general casting a young boy to be sundered
by dogs in front of the boy’s mother, Ivan declares,
“I absolutely renounce all higher
harmony. It is not worth one little tear of even that one
tormented child…what do I care if the
tormentors are in hell, what can hell set right here, if these little ones have
already been tormented? And where is the harmony, if there is hell? I want to
forgive, and I want to embrace, I don’t want more suffering. And if suffering
of children goes to make up the sum of suffering needed to buy truth, then I assert
beforehand that the whole of truth is not worth such a price.”
For
the past eight months, I have been interning at a small Presbyterian church in
Hollywood, California, and part of what I do is lead the congregation in prayer
during the worship service on Sunday mornings. People offer their concerns, and
then I pray for them. Invariably, on Sunday mornings I have prayed for people
with cancer and for families that have recently lost dear friends and family
members. In these moments I have often thought and felt, “What shall I say? How
should I pray?” These questions have thoroughly shaped my subsequent
theologizing. I am reminded of Dietrich Bonhoeffer when he asked, “What do we
really believe? I mean, believe in such a way that we stake our lives on it?” (Letters and Papers From Prison, 382).
On
All Saints Day in 1755 an earthquake shook the very foundations of Lisbon,
Portugal. Fires broke out, and people fled to the shore. They watched as the
ocean strangely shrunk from the shore only to return as a mountainous wall of
water; thousands of people fled to the shore only to be swept away by a
tsunami. Tens of thousands of people died. This sparked numerous responses.
Some theologians asserted that it was the judgment of God, while philosophers
such as Voltaire criticized Leibniz’s repugnant best of possible worlds
argument.
But
we need not look back several centuries. Such tragedies are with us today. The
tsunami that overwhelmed Japan a few years ago is not front-page news in the U.S.
any longer, but nonetheless people are still recovering. The same continues to
be the case with people in Haiti.
We
would likely wish for a few giant miracles to eradicate suffering from the
world in one fell swoop. Indeed with a few twirls of a wand that is what we
would like God to do. However, an easy button may be consistent with our
character, but however strangely it is not with God’s. Is God then a malicious
demon? Or is God impotent?
In
response to the question, “How can a good, powerful God allow suffering,” it
may be retorted, “God created beings free, which entails the possibility of suffering.”
I rather dislike this response because like Job’s interlocutors it pussyfoots
around, holding the matter at a distance and pretending to have answers that
are little more than half-baked clichés of self-congratulation (albeit I am not
calling Alvin Plantinga’s freewill argument a half-baked idea).
Leaving our armchairs in which we query only about the logical problem of suffering
(such queries never get us out of our armchairs!), we should ask, “What has God
done and what is God continuing to do about this terrible mess?” I would submit
that God is not a malicious demon nor is God impotent; it is often the
case that theologians are willing to relinquish God’s omnipotence for the sake of retaining
his goodness (cf. Harold Kushner).
God
has done and is doing something. The canonical witness describes God responding to human suffering. In response to theodicy questions,
it may be said, “Christ and the Church.”
Christ stood in solidarity with those who
were suffering. Jürgen Moltmann
says, “The apocalyptic sufferings of ‘this present time’ are gathered up into
‘the suffering of Christ’ on Golgotha. Jesus suffers them in solidarity with
others, and vicariously for many, and proleptically for the whole suffering
creation” (The Way of Jesus Christ,
152).
The
Church universal is Christ taking form in the world and bearing the world’s
suffering. Bonhoeffer explains,
“Suffering has to be endured in order
that it may pass away. Either the world must bear
the whole burden and collapse beneath it,
or it must fall on Christ to be overcome in him.
He therefore suffers vicariously for the
world. His is the only suffering, which has redemptive efficacy. But the church
knows that the world is still seeking for someone to bear its suffering, and
so, as it follows Christ, suffering becomes the Church’s lot too and bearing
it, it is born up by Christ.” (The Cost
of Discipleship, 92).
Theodicy
questions then are as much ecclesiological ones as theological ones. What
Christ did and continues to do is linked to the very existence of the Church
universal. But this is not only a theology of solidarity, for this also entails
empowered activism on the Church’s part. The suffering Church, the bleeding
Church, the Church of the bread and the cup is the Church that knows the
suffering of the world and seeks to bring it to an end with the knowledge that
it will be brought to an end because the Church is the Church of the empty tomb.
This does not mean that the Church mends wounds in the same way an atomic bomb
destroys; rather, the Church works from weakness like Christ; the empowered
Church works like a mustard seed.
