Divine Love: So Unsatisfying
One of my students just called me in tears. Freaking out about the recent shootings here in CO churches and mission centers. She is connected to the shooter, who was raised Christian himself.
She’s been struggling with her faith, largely from being in my philosophy class (good job MEH), and this was a straw on the camel’s back. She’s almost broken.
“Why would God allow this? An all-loving, all-powerful God?” The basic question of theodicy again: the problem of evil.
The best I can give her: the free-will defense, which I “just so happened” (Read: God) to have been reading about again recently. I was able to phrase and wrap it in the nature of God this time: Love.
- God is love.
- God wanted to give creature the ability to love, which requires giving us freedom.
- Freedom also means we can create unlove (evil), etc.
You can see where this leads.
It’s a timeless argument, and I fully believe it, but as many an atheist has said over the centuries, “no theodicy should be posited which can not be said in the presence of burning children, or their watching parents.” i.e. Philosophy, no matter how true, doesn’t heal the hurting heart.
Does theology?
For that is what this is. “Words about God.” God IS love.
There are so many other concepts we didn’t discuss:
- Is God hurt by our unloving actions?
- Is creaturely freedom really worth all the evil in the world?
- Where does Jesus fit in?
- Where does the church fit in?
It goes on . . .
Regardless, the ‘truth’ seems so insufficient, so limited. Not comforting.
WTF?
You can’t approach the truth behind questions of theodicy without talking about incarnation. And incarnation is a messy affair.
It’s advent season now. Families are decorating trees, and churches are breaking out the Christmas stories. One story that you many not hear this holiday season happened some time after the Wise Men had exalted the new born King, the shepherds had proclaimed the good news, and the angels sang with the glory of God almighty welcoming the Savior to earth: it’s the story of what Herod did when he heard about it. Herod was terrified that this new king might threaten his political power, and so he ordered his soldiers to Jerusalem, and had them massacre all of the children under two years old.
‘A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.’
-Matthew 2:6
While the Shepherds were talking about the miracle that would change all of human history, a young mother in Jerusalem was washing blood out of blankets her family had given her to swaddle her very first baby. Where was God when Herod sent his soldiers to her door? Hiding in Egypt? What kind of an answer is that? Perhaps some families in Colorado this year will be able to relate to this Christmas story better than they can to the Shepherd’s version of events.
What I want to know is, when did the American church stop talking seriously about this? When did we start pretending that if we joined a happy church with great music, the sin which rots this world from within would stop having any effect on us? Old school theology of every stripe acknowledged that bad things happen to everyone, including God’s children, and they could happen to you. We have recorded in our own scriptures stories of evil things happening to the very best of us: Rachel wailed for her children. Paul, who saw the entire world turned upside down by the power of the Holy Spirit, died a prisoner, unjustly condemned. Jesus, the Son of God, who came to earth for our salvation, died a horrible death on the cross. When we fail to acknowledge in our churches that bad things happen to everyone, we lie. We lie and we fail people, and when they run into the horrible reality of sin they are unprepared. It is an incomplete, one sided gospel that does not enter completely and honestly into human suffering and sorrow. Christ did. Christ wept, and suffered, and died, and went down to the very depths of hell.
And do you know what he did there? Read Paul and you’ll find out: He broke it. He broke the power of sin, and vanquished death. It may be hard to believe by looking around you, but Jesus has already done this. Death has lost. Sin is powerless. Jesus is standing in the Eschaton, where God has already decided the ending: He won. And with that, God did a really strange thing… he created the body of Christ on this earth again, by the power of the Holy Spirit, in the very people who’s sin he died for in the first place. In the church, we get to see once again that incarnation is a messy thing. Sin still has a grip on the world. Paul had a vivid sense of the difficulties that attend life on this earth, and he didn’t sugar coat anything. Reading his letters, you get a sense of his faith in a promise that he couldn’t see completely, but that he believed because of the presence of the risen Christ within him and the other believers. He understood that the battle is won but we can’t come to victory party quite yet. He didn’t know exactly why. He left some hints, but not an emotionally and intellectually satisfying philosophical system. When it comes down to it, I don’t know why either. But what I do know is that because Christ is alive within us, we are part of that end time when death is banished to the pit and those who are sick have been healed. That’s what it means that people without Christ are dead in their sins, they aren’t at the party yet. And the fact is, we aren’t there yet either, which is why we who bear Christ are still capable of doing horrible things. But Jesus is there, and he is within us. While there may be a better answer to the theodicy than “You are not alone”, there won’t be a more ultimately satisfying one. The Gospel of John tells us that the Father and the Son abide in each other and through the Spirit they abide in us and us in them. This simply means that God lives within you. When you pray, you pray through the Spirit, in Jesus, to the Father, and you sit in the very heart of God, surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, every single new creation of Christ who has ever lived, or ever will. You are not alone.
Perhaps what we really shed when we face the theodicy is our childhood, a place where the endings are happy and the main characters never die. Where Old Testament bible stories are disinfected of blood and fear, scrubbed shiny-clean, and illustrated with big-eyed children and placid, fluffy lambs. Where children don’t suffer and people aren’t homicidally insane. Perhaps the hardest thing for us to relinquish as the world turns to shades of grey is the ignorance of that heart wrenching, violence-filled chasm between ‘already’ and ‘not yet’. We all have to loose our innocence at some point, but what we learn in the trial is the kind of faith that is produced by the power of the whole Gospel and will sustain us when things go completely to hell. Jesus has been there, too- and he has promised to redeem all of it.
One day Jesus will come again. And death will be no more. And he will wipe away every tear from our eyes. Why he won’t come now, I can’t tell you. And neither can anyone else. Sometimes all we can do is bow our heads in grief for this sin torn world and cry, ‘Come Lord Jesus’.
V said this on December 11th, 2007 at 4:51 am