The Theology of Suffering and Death

An Introduction for Caregivers

Natalie Kertes Weaver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136163159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book offers a theological foundation for engaging with the realities of suffering and dying. Designed particularly for practical theology students and trainee caregivers, it introduces the spiritual and theological issues raised by suffering and dying. The chapters consider:

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• how Christian theology deals with the problem of suffering and how the Bible treats these difficult issues
• post-biblical interpretations of Jesus' suffering and the Cross
• modern instances including ecology, poverty, discrimination and war
• comparative religious approaches and the depiction in popular culture.

Natalie Weaver relates theology to practical issues of caregiving and provides a 'toolbox' for thinking about suffering and death in a creative and supportive way.

1 Theodicy and the question

How can God allow pain?

Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. Take this cup away from me, but not what I will but what you will.

Mark 14:36

Introduction

Jesus’ words in the Garden of Gethsemane capture the essence of the dilemma of pain in Christian theology. God is completely powerful; he could spare Jesus the suffering of the Cross. “Take this cup,” Jesus pleads. Yet, the Father does not act. Jesus resigns his will to that of the Father, leaving to two millennia of followers the question: does the Father actually will this suffering? Was there no other option? The petition of Jesus repeats everywhere there is simultaneously suffering and belief in God. It exists everyday as people pray for this thing that has befallen them to pass. And, everyday, people rationalize their suffering, or the suffering of others, seeking to find meaning yet confounded in resignation that God has somehow willed human pain.

There is a disconnect, even for Jesus,¹ between the reality of suffering and the belief in God. This disconnect comes principally from the notion that God could do something about suffering yet chooses not to act. The divine inaction forces the question of “why?” Is God not powerful enough (and therefore not really God)? Or, is God so powerful that God is beyond good and evil (and therefore not really good)? Or, are human beings so bad that we deserve whatever we get (and therefore God is absolved of all responsibility)?

Theodicy is a theological term used to describe the effort to understand God’s fundamental nature, complicated by the logical difficulties posed by the reality of evil and suffering. God’s nature is understood in the long Christian theological tradition as bearing absolute qualities of power and goodness. Indeed, Goodness and Power in the absolute sense can be considered synonyms for God. The weight of these terms is clarified by thinking about “God” apart from them. Without absolute power, one has to accept a limited conception of God’s ability to act. If God cannot intervene, then God must be less powerful than bacteria or a man wielding a club or whatever else it is that ails one. Without absolute goodness, one has to accept a limit to the holiness of God. An all-powerful God that does not care unequivocally about goodness (and does not act in the face of evil) seems more demon than divine.

From a Christian theological perspective, the suggestion of either quality of goodness or lacking omnipotence seems patently erroneous. Yet, if God is all-powerful and all-good as the tradition asserts, why then is there so much suffering? What does suffering say about God’s power and goodness? Likewise, what does suffering say about the value of the world when the world is understood as having its genesis in a free act of creation? Could not God have created the world otherwise? Should there not have been some safeguard against suffering or, at the very least, the suffering of innocents?

While such questions can probably never be exhaustively addressed, this chapter intends to introduce some Christian responses to the question of theodicy as I have here described it. The first section offers a brief primer on theological terms used in this text. The next looks at some considerations of personal and corporate suffering. The third section considers the traditional explanation of human sin as the response to the philosophical problem of suffering. The following section considers the theology of the Cross, and the possibility of God’s suffering alongside humanity, as a second type of philosophical response to the problem of suffering. Finally, the last section considers some applied aspects of thinking about the meaning of suffering in the face of actual pain. The goal of this chapter is to establish a framework for discussing philosophical interpretations of suffering within a Christian framework and the spiritual issues to which they may give rise. Such a framework is critical in the effort to name and attend to key aspects of intellectual suffering that may lead to faith crisis and in turn compound suffering.

Brief primer on theological terms

The philosophical considerations of suffering in Christian tradition interweave a number of important theological concepts derived from both the Bible and also the post-biblical tradition of Christian writers. In advancing the discussion, a quick introduction of some basic Christian terms and doctrines will be helpful:

1 The Bible. The Christian sacred literature, comprised of the Old Testament and the New Testament.

2 Christian doctrine of Creation. This doctrine is important because it anchors the Christian belief that the world comes from God, that life and the world are essentially good, and that all things are in God’s providential care.

3 Christian doctrine of God as Trinity (or three distinct persons of FatherSon-Holy Spirit in one divine being). This doctrine is important because it can be used to explain how God could experience suffering and death (in the person of the Son) while simultaneously remaining God and extant (in the persons of the Father and Holy Spirit).

4 Christian doctrine of Jesus’ Incarnation, crucifixion and Resurrection. This doctrine locates the question of human suffering in the life of Jesus of Nazareth (4 BCE–30 CE), believed in the Christian tradition to be both fully human and fully divine. The doctrine of the Incarnation purports that God as Son (or second person of the Trinity) became incarnated in humanity, was born of the Virgin Mary, lived a fully human life, and died a real human death in the form of crucifixion. The Resurrection is the belief that Jesus was risen to new life (although what manner of new life remains mystery), proving that he was God. This doctrine is important because it underlies the Christian hopes in life beyond death and ultimate justice.

5 Christian doctrine of human sin, grace, and salvation. This doctrine explores the human condition as “fallen,” while holding at the same time that Jesus’ life and death provide correction to that fallenness in the form of grace. This doctrine is important because it suggests that sinful persons, corrected by Jesus’ grace, may yet hope for ultimate salvation in the form of one’s own resurrection after death.

Personal and corporate suffering

It is helpful to begin our investigation with the acknowledgment that there are many types of pains in the human life. Some pain is physical (a strained back; an infected tooth; labor in delivery). Physical pain often leads to psychological pain in the form of anxiety and fear (what if the pain in my back is from a malignant tumor? What if I or my child die in childbirth?). The most threatening kind of pain is ultimately the existential, to which all pains invariably give rise (what if I am not strong enough to endure these treatments? Will my children remember me when I am gone? Why was I born in the first place – only to die?).

The potential of existential pain is implicit in the very existence of the human form of life. To the extent that people reflect at all on the human condition, we become aware of the unsettling character of our contingent and limited existences. The experience of ultimate limit contrasts with our individual perceptions of self-definition, personal meaning, and ontological freedom. In the face of the essential limits that death imposes on the human life, we recognize ourselves to be somehow derivative and vulnerable to that from which we are derived. As the great German Jesuit Karl Rahner put it:

Whenever man in his transcendence experiences himself as questioning, as disquieted by the appearance of being, as open to something ineffable, he cannot understand himself as subject in the sense of an absolute subject, but only in the sense of one who receives being, ultimately only in the sense of grace.²

The noble pursui ts of truth, beauty, and goodness call us in our finer moments to contemp lation of the divine, but it is the limit and vulnerabi lity made obvious by serious illness, or the horror of violence, or the devastation of loss that destabilizes the mundane filter of normalcy and demands attention to both the physical and spiritual natures. Finite, contingent life, in “absolute dependency” in the thought of Friedrich Schleirmacher, leads the human to raise the fundamental theological questions.³

Pain that leads to suffering, of course, is not limited to individual experiences. Much, perhaps most, pain in the world is corporate and/or systemic. The past century demonstrates the shocking potential of corporate human suffering in staggering proportions (consider the mass murdering by the Bolsheviks, the incomprehensible scale of the Holocaust, the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur, the tsunamis of the Indian Ocean). Suffering on such a grand scale raises theological questions about the power and goodness of a seemingly reticent and retiring God.

What is more, since the 1960s, a turn to experience as a source and gauge of theological adequacy, characteristic of most liberationist approaches to theology today, adds layers to the concern over corporate suffering viewed through the lens of historical oppression and present struggle. Jon Sobrino, for example, in his article “Theology in a Suffering World,” suggests that any theology that is authentically attentive to experience will have to locate itself in the experience of the world’s suffering masses.⁴ Liberation theologies make explicit the strong connections between the socio-political realities of poverty, slavery, racism, sexism, exploitation, and so on, and the biblical belief that God has some vested interest in the concrete, real-time struggle for human freedom from structures of oppression.

Bringing a theological perspective to socio-political considerations (as well as personal dimensions) of human suffering is risky, and invoking God to explain and justify pain invites potentially devastating spiritual consequences. One thinks here of the biblical prophets, such as Habakkuk. Writing in the sixth century BCE, on the eve of the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians, the bewildered prophet complains to God (1:1–4):

How long, O Lord? I cry for help but you do not listen! I cry out to you, “Violence!” but you do not intervene. Why do you let me see ruin; why must I look at misery? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife and clamorous discord. This is why the law is benumbed, and judgment is never rendered; because the wicked circumvent the just; this is why judgment comes forth perverted.⁵

In this prophet, God is depicted as sovereign over all people, using the wickedness of one to punish the wickedness of another. Habakkuk represents the human urge: 1) to invoke the name of God to explain and justify one’s own suffering as well as the suffering of others; 2) to ask God for deliverance from suffering for self; and 3) to ask God to bring about the (presumably deserved) suffering of one’s enemies.⁶

Since the biblical era, and probably long before it, human beings have been tempted to justify actions that bring about the suffering of others in God’s name, just as they have confidently attributed to God hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, and all manner of disease .⁷ Human beings of all religious persuasions, moreover, postulate of God end-time scenarios, often elaborate, to brace themselves for final suffering and cosmic, apocalyptic warfare.⁸ This move consistently leads people to ultimate (and therefore theological) questions of the meaning and reason behind suffering. Indeed, this turn reveals suffering and death as the prime issues that drive the fundamental theological questions about life’s meaning.

The response of sin

Over time, Christians have offered a variety of suggested responses to the questions of suffering and dying. The most frequent classical explanation of suffering is attached to the notion of human sin, derived from the opening chapters of Genesis in the Bible. As depicted in this text, God created a perfect world for human beings, over which they had both power and stewardship:

God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them, saying to them: “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it” … “See, I give you every seed-bearing plant all over the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it to be your food; and to all the animals of the land, all the birds of the air, and all the living creatures that crawl on the ground, I give all the green plants for food.” And so it happened. God looked at everything he had made, and he found it very good.⁹

However, sin, in the form of the human couple’s disobedience to God’s directives in the Garden of Eden, led to expulsion from paradisiacal living and a series of hard consequences: hard work in tilling land; pain in childbirth; enmity between serpents and people; the first murder. These stories contrast the ideal of blessings and life with the perils of hardship and death, attributing the losses to human responsibility:

To the woman [God] said: “I will intensify the pangs of your childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Yet your urge shall be for your husband, and he shall be your master.” To the man he said: “Cursed be the ground because of you! In toil shall you eat its yield all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to you, as you eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face shall you get bread to eat. Until you return to the ground from which you were taken; for you are dirt and to dirt you shall return.”¹⁰

For Christians, the perspective that human beings are responsible for their own hardships was succinctly summarized in Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “For the wages of sin is death.”¹¹

In the post-biblical Christian writing, theologians put forth extraordinary efforts at understanding human culpability for sin, the corruption of human free will by sin, and the manner in which pain and suffering serve constructive ends toward redemption from sin. C. S. Lewis’ book The Problem of Pain ¹² represents a twentieth-century appropriation and summarization of this millennia-long theological endeavor.

Lewis responds to the theological problem that pain raises by reconsidering both ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Theodicy and the question: how can God allow pain?
• 2 Suffering in the Bible, Part I: old testament
• 3 Suffering in the Bible, Part II: new testament
• 4 Soteriology, Part I: historical interpretations of the meaning and efficacy of the Cross
• 5 Soteriology, Part II: revisiting the Cross in the contemporary period
• 6 Death in comparative perspective
• 7 Issues in spiritual caregiving for the suffering and dying
• 8 A toolbox for dealing with suffering and death
• Notes
• Index