Repost from December 20, 2006
Tim Keller has been preaching a bunch lately on suffering, just in time for Christmas. In a lecture called Suffering and the Steward-Leader he makes some startling comments on suffering. He states that suffering is one of the resources that God brings into our lives that has to be cultivated and that we live in one of the only cultures in history that doesn’t see suffering as natural and normal but have no place for it at all.
I have also been doing a lot of thinking about realized eschatology, “the now and the not yet”. I’ve been doing the book “Simply Christian” in a men’s group and NT Wright has really been pushing (as does Keller often) on the changes that the crucifixion and resurrection accomplished in reality. I’ve been looking at what NT Wright has to say about “the little apocalypse” in the Synoptics and reflecting on the fact that one of the reasons for joy in the NT church was the fact that they saw (much more than we do) that the resurrection meant the end of the “present evil age” and the beginning of the “age to come”. Jesus’ resurrection was “first fruits” of the resurrection for us all.
A third vein I have been mining through my Advent series on Abraham is on how God changes us. We always imagine that the obstacles to our happiness lie in our surroundings. If I only had more money, more time, more power, more influence… THEN the world would be as I wish it to be. This is in fact a basic secular assumption. “Salvation” is achieved through money, power, time, influence, etc. Adam and Eve lived in a perfect garden when they fell. What does that tell us about the relationship between environment, happiness and blessedness? The really big thing that God must change in our redemption is not earthquakes or drought or global warming, but our hearts. I’ve made the observation before that it is helpful to read the Bible and notice what is easy for God and what is hard. It is easy to send plagues on Pharaoh. It is easy to wipe out enemy armies or strike them blind. It is easy to cure diseases and even raise the dead. All those things for God are a snap. What does God spend all of his time struggling with, frustrated with, battling (often unsuccessfully) with, getting angry about? Our hearts. Jesus does incredible miracles but in his darkest hour demonstrates that he has not managed to convince even his inner-most circle of the most basic things he wished to impact them with.
All of this leads me back to suffering and God. Keller has the right take on our cultural perspective on suffering. We see it as antithetical to the existence of God and an intrusion into this world that may even lead us to deny our assumptions about God entirely. There is of course some truth to that, God us not the author of evil and therefore not the source of suffering in our lives or in our world, yet the Bible and Christians have long held that God in fact uses pain and suffering for his own purposes.
Before I go any further let me also say that I think we must avoid explaining suffering or justifying suffering. We can’t really do either. There is a mystery to much suffering, it is beyond us. Explaining the causes of suffering and speculating on specific moral deservedness for suffering puts us in league with Job’s friends who were clearly out of favor with God despite their pious God-defending Job-accusing observations. We cannot do the math to connect or justify reasons for suffering or often good outcomes of suffering as justifications.
Having said that we can in fact observe good outcomes for some suffering without justifying it. One of the curious things we see is how suffering establishes a sense of moral authority. That is a more curious thing that I think we generally notice. If you look at nature, the lame horse or the wounded rabbit have no moral authority. They may be creatures that we pity or seek to rescue, or they may become food for predators or scavengers, but their suffering affords them no moral authority. In the world today, however, those who suffer are afforded a moral authority that seems nearly universally recognized.
At first glance I suspect this might be the result of Christianity but in thinking longer on it I think it is not. One interesting example of this is the widow and the judge in Luke 18. In many societies and cultures the ones who are recognized as being most powerless are afforded a voice. Common morality in many civilizations (Egypt, Babylon, etc.) all recognized the duty of the monarch or god to protect the weak and listen to the plea of the powerless. Their suffering conferred upon them an authority inversely proportionate to their power. There is something deep within us that “gets” this.
I have also observed that because of this those who have been victims in the past speak out with their authority and use their authority to demand redress or change. Again, this is generally a good thing. Justice comes when the weak are lifted up and the strong are brought down. I have also noticed that too often the formerly weak with their new position of authority and therefore power use their new-found power to instead of establishing justice overstep and put into place the next unjust regime. This too is an old story. Yesterdays oppressed become tomorrow’s oppressors. Suffering yields authority which begets power leading to tyranny that produces more suffering.
How does Christ’s suffering interrupt the cycle? In the Philippians 2 Christ song Jesus’ suffering does lead to exaltation but he is a unique kind of sufferer. First he suffers voluntarily and he suffers not for himself, but rather in submission to the Father and on behalf of the lost. Much of our suffering is involuntary are rarely for the benefit of anyone else. Christ-like suffering is a specific kind of suffering.
Is this helpful? Keller in one of his sermons also notes that forgiveness is a form of suffering and I think he’s right on this. When we forgive we voluntarily decide NOT to seek retribution but rather to absorb the wrong and carry the load of the evil done against us. Forgiveness can in fact therefore transform common suffering (involuntary and not for anyone one else) into Christ-like suffering (voluntary and on behalf of our neighbor/enemy/adversary). Christ shows the way to transform common suffering into redemptive suffering.
A second factor to look at how Christ changes suffering is in terms of grace. The reason that yesterday’s victims become tomorrow’s moral or immoral tyrants is because they transform the suffering done against them into currency of moral credit. Because suffering confers moral authority they see that authority as a moral capital from which they can draw to “lord it over” another. The moral authority gained by suffering in the possession of the human heart, addict of natural religion, easily transforms the sufferer into a moral crusader. They easily see themselves as morally superior to those who have not suffered as they have suffered. They and those around them who have suffered similarly have gained the moral status through their suffering to transform the world into their vision of justice and retribution. They alone can be trusted because those who have caused their suffering have clearly showed themselves NOT to be trustworthy.
It would be nice to believe that simply being the victim of suffering would make one able to now govern properly but we all know that not to be the case. Many tyrants are moralists of one stripe or another seeking to rectify some past abuse.
How does Christ change this? Only a position of one saved by grace has a chance at short-cutting the victim-moralist. You can’t take credit for your suffering? By grace you learn to extend forgiveness and by grace you can resist asserting your moral authority over the perpetrators and seek community beneath reign of the only one who truly has been given the right to rule.
It’s late, I’m tired, enough for now. I just wanted to sketch out some of these ideas.
The Loss of Awareness of God's Wrath and the ironic resultant loss of gratitude
This is a repost from September 2007. Since reading NT Wright’s book on Justification and continuing my study in Revelation for our adult Sunday School class I’ve got more thoughts God’s wrath, and I might tweek some of my statements in this post, but I’ll let it stand for now. It also has a section that is a bit ranty. Rants are fun while you’re doing them but sometimes don’t wear well after the emotional rush is gone.
In terms of projects I think doing some thinking and cultural/biblical translation of the idea of God’s wrath is greatly needed for our churches today. Just yelling about “God’s wrath” in church doesn’t help. Ignoring this massive theme in the Bible or writing it off as “unenlightened, archaic, outdated” doesn’t honor Scripture and simply expresses our own form of cultural provincialism. More work needs to be done in this area.
Here is the repost. I think I originally posted it on CRC-Voices.
A Chimes protest on re-working “In Christ Alone” at Mars Hill Church in GR
The notion of God’s wrath has become unintelligible to our contemporary culture. Willimon in one of the sermons on the CTS CEP archive summarizes Harold Bloom’s assessment of American Religion that “God loves us and is just dying to get close to us.” Christian Smith calls it moralistic, therapeutic deism. God has a cosmic therapist/butler. This is striking because if you do a survey of ancient religious belief the assumption of God’s rather and the need of its satisfaction is near universal. Even in MesoAmerican recent archeological discoveries sees human sacrifice as an attempt to keep the wrath of the gods from destroying their civilizations. Many of us read the Old Testament in horror. “I just can’t buy a god who kills people, orders genocide, etc.”
Why has it gone out of fashion?
Modern psychological critique of guilt and religion. All those ancient societies lived in fear of the gods due to their mythologizing the cosmos. God is fear writ large. Now that we are so much smarter than the ancients we know that hurricanes don’t hit because the gods are upset with us, its all just weather patterns. Continued cultural advancement of pantheism and panentheism. How can God be angry with itself? If you see evil you fail to understand or see through the illusion. Use the force Luke! The success of evangelicalism. “The wrath of God is satisfied.” Join the church, tithe, watch your ten commandments, love Jesus, you’ll be fine.”
Is this a bad thing? If the wrath of God has been satisfied why should we worry about it. Do we fret about small pox now that it has been eradicated? If evangelicals respond: “Only people in good standing in church live in the satisfaction zone. All other are still vulnerable to God’s wrath” the world will cry “foul! Intolerance! Sectarianism!” They’re not buying that just like their not buying the wrath business. Are we fretting that we’re going to miss out on being gods over our very own planets and preparing having spirit babies for them with our dozens of wives? Deciding first to teach wrath so you can then teach the solution to wrath doesn’t seem promising. That perhaps is Mars Hill’s point, right or wrong. Should the loss of consciousness of God’s wrath be something to be mourned?
I hear in the voices of some the desire to resurrect a consciousness of God’s wrath to motivate morality and church attendance. “If they’re scared of God’s wrath they’ll seek the solution.” The scared straight approach. What is also interesting is that while God’s wrath has been forgotten we have elevated God’s responsibility for the mess of this world while both denying our responsibility AND assuming that God is impotent or uninvolved in actual events beyond giving us feelings of peace and meaning. Notice the following:
We can’t believe in God because of pain and suffering in this world OR we’re angry with God over pain and suffering in this world. In my experience people seem to do both of these quite easily and simultaneously without noticing the inconsistency. I’ve had numerous people tell me both at once. We expect that if God existed or if God is good he would fix everything down here to our liking straight away or have prevented the world of pain and suffering we currently see. We are unbelieving or dissatisfied BECAUSE God is not demonstrating any sort of intervention we believe is justified and currently demand. If in fact God would intervene we imagine that he would intervene by stopping OTHER bad people. He would certainly not get involved against us in any way. If he did so we would certainly protest that he has overstepped his bounds and violated our rights by meddling in what we have decide are private or personal matters. “My money, my body, my time are my affairs. Stay out!” This is because we of course believe that we are not doing anything that needs to be stopped.
This is a ironic state of affairs actually. Let’s imagine we’re praying to end poverty in the world. Let’s imagine God opened the clouds and simply took away 80% of our assets and redistributed them to the poor of the world. I think we’d simply complain that God is unfair and he should have left well enough alone. YET we’re disbelieving in this God BECAUSE he fails to intervene and we decide he is not either powerful or not good. When in the Bible we do have stories of God actually intervening we imagine that either these stories are bunk written by the types of primitives who did all those silly things like human sacrifice. We have obviously outgrown this type of thinking. God wouldn’t do something like that BUT we’re still disbelieving and angry because we think he should be angry at the state of the world today AND he doesn’t intervene.
What should this teach us about ourselves? We believe that serious sin and real evil are things that other people do. GK Chesterton summarized it quite nicely. “Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”
Now apply Pascal’s wager. If God’s wrath is not real but you believe it is, what is the downside? Compare that to the situation if God’s wrath is real but you believe it isn’t. Our society wagers that any democratic sense on the subject must be wrong. Most cultures have assumed the wrath of God or the gods. We simply believe they are all wrong.
I’m not one to promote the scared-straight approach to God’s wrath. I don’t think fear produces goodness or shalom, I think it only really sometimes produces short term compliance. What is lost by the loss of the sense of God’s wrath? Ironically it is happiness. Gratitude is the surest stimulant to happiness and joy. Happiness, joy and freedom come when we see ourselves as being blessed.
Read the Sermon on the Mount. We have by asserting our own righteousness (and God’s unrighteousness or non-existence) AND our dissatisfaction with the world AND God’s responsibility for the current state of affairs placed ourselves in a position where we cannot feel much gratitude at all. We are both more moral and more wise than God BUT every attempt to actually be God and fix the world fails. Look at the two sons in Luke 15. One knows himself to have been the cause of much ruin in the father’s household. The Father’s wrath is clearly justifiable. When instead he receives the Father’s mercy what does he experience? The older son ironically is angry because he thinks his father is not as wrathful as he should be AGAINST his brother. In his mind the Father is the problem. He knows no gratitude. He knows no joy.