Raging with Compassion

Pastoral Responses to the Problem of Evil

John Swinton

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781467425797
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Can we defend God's love, goodness, and power in a world scarred by violence and suffering? Do we need to? Traditional attempts to explain the problem of evil have mostly seen it as a philosophical and theological task. In this book John Swinton reminds readers that the experience of evil and suffering precedes pontification on its origin. Raging with Compassion seeks to inspire fresh Christian responses and modes of practice in our broken, fallen world.

CHAPTER ONE

The Problem with the Problem of Evil: Pastoral Perspectives

I remember it as if it were yesterday. It was six A.M. when I received the call from my neighbor. He was deeply disturbed and only barely able to speak. “She’s gone,” he whispered.

“Who has gone?” I asked; I was still half asleep and not at all sure what was going on.

“Gemma,” he said, “Gemma has gone.”

“What do you mean she has gone?” I replied, slowly beginning to realize that something awful had happened.

“Gemma … she’s … she’s dead. She was walking home after skating with her friends and she just dropped down dead! She was only eleven! Why has this happened? Why has God taken my Gemma? Why?”

I sat up in bed in stunned silence. What could I say? The little girl whom I had watched grow from a baby to a toddler and into a lively, vibrant child was gone. All that remained were devastation, sadness, and the question why?

What was I supposed to say to this man, my friend, who had had the heart of his life ripped out in an instant? The doctors had no idea why she died; “it was just one of those tragic mysteries,” they said. Her parents had no idea why she had died. I had no idea why she had died … but … surely, as a theologian, I should have something to say. Was this loss punishment for something the family had or had not done? Was it a test of their faith? Had God “taken Gemma home” for purposes that are beyond human understanding, purposes vague and unclear in the present but that will become clear in the grand scheme of things? Or was Gemma’s death nothing but a totally meaningless incident that has little real impact on a meaningless world ruled by cause and effect, a world within which the death of one small child will make little difference in the long run?

What could I say to Gemma’s parents, George and Martha? All of the formal resources I had studied, which claimed to enable me to explain and interpret suffering and evil, seemed like straw in the wind in the face of the raw pain of George and Martha’s experience. How could an all-loving, all-powerful God allow this to happen? The logic of formal theodicy, arguments to justify God’s goodness in the face of evil, floundered and was irreparably smashed on the rock of George’s lament: “Why, Lord?” The agonizing flow of his unrelenting anguish silenced me. I often wonder if I could have said more, if I should have told him that God loved him and told him that it was going to be all right … but it wasn’t going to be all right! It could never be all right; what had happened seemed inexplicably wrong, painful, and confusing. How could a God of love and power allow this to happen? I had nothing to say because there was nothing to say, at least nothing that would make sense or create logic in the midst of such apparent unreason.

For George and Martha, that day changed their lives. Things could never be the same. But it was also a day that changed my life. It was the moment when I suddenly and quite powerfully was forced to recognize that the theodical framework that I had built around me to protect me from the reality of pain, suffering, and evil was in fact the emperor’s new clothes. I thought the framework was there, real and sound. I tried to persuade others that it was real and effective, but when it came down to the wire, when it entered that very public world of pain and suffering, it vanished. Something was fundamentally wrong with the way I had been conceptualizing and dealing with the problem of evil and the reality of suffering.

Bad Things Happen to Good People

We live in a world that is profoundly marred by suffering and evil. Some of it seems “just to happen”; people get ill, they suffer, they die. Gemma’s death and her parents’ anguish are but small teardrops that reflect the reality of the daily rounds of suffering and evil that go on within our world. There appears to be no one to blame other than, perhaps, God.

But then again, much of the evil and suffering that goes on in the world is not “natural”; it does not have to happen. It exists only because human beings choose that it should exist. Bad things happen to good people because people behave badly. Much of the evil and suffering of the world is of a moral nature and human beings are solely responsible for its existence. Such suffering is, as Wendy Farley describes it, radical (unmerited) suffering.¹ Radical suffering refuses to be explained simply as punishment that is somehow deserved or as the just retribution for sin. Radical suffering is deliberately inflicted on one human being by another. When a company deliberately withholds information from its employees that the substances they are working with are carcinogenic, these people experience radical suffering. When a woman is raped as she returns from a shopping trip with her children, she experiences radical suffering. When a terrorist explodes a bomb in the midst of a group of innocent strangers, the terrorists are initiating radical suffering. When a child is abused by a stranger, its suffering is radical, unmerited, evil. Farley shares the following story of a Chilean torture victim, which illustrates well the nature of radical suffering:

At one point, I realized that my daughter was in front of me. I even managed to touch her: I felt her hands. “Mummy, say something, anything to make this stop,” she was saying. I tried to embrace her but they prevented me. They separated us violently. They took her to an adjacent room and there, there I listened in horror as they began to torture her with electricity! When I heard her moans, her terrible screams, I couldn’t take it any more. I thought I would go mad, that my head and my entire body were going to explode.²

Bad things very often happen in the world because people do bad things.

Why, Lord?

Our immediate response to such suffering is to ask why. “Why would an all-loving, all-powerful God allow this to happen?” “Why is there suffering in the world?” “Why does evil exist?” When we start to ask such questions, we are beginning to engage in the intellectual enterprise of theodicy. Put simply, theodicy concerns intellectual defense of the love, goodness, and power of God in the face of evil and suffering in the world. Practicing theodicy is a way to cope with the anxiety provoked by the reality of evil and suffering by using the intellect as an explanatory tool.³

At one level, the questioning of the goodness and power of God that comprises theodicy is an obvious response to the human experience of suffering and evil. Our world is ripped apart by a constant stream of pain, suffering, and struggle; evil and suffering are real, awful, frightening, and confusing. The question, “Why does God allow such things to happen?” appears to be a natural response to our tragic experiences in the world, so much so that we rarely doubt the legitimacy of the question.

Problems with Theodicy

Questions such as these are, of course, completely understandable and quite legitimate. Raw pain inevitably inspires hard questions. The problems arise when we try to answer them. When we attempt to create explanations that justify the goodness of God in the face of evil and radical suffering, we encounter aspects of theodicy that are theologically questionable and pastorally dangerous. As Farley points out in her commentary on the story of the torture victim mentioned above:

[T]he obscenity of such an event annihilates the possibility of soothing ourselves with theories that justify the ways of God in an evil world. In the wake of such wanton cruelty, defenses of a divine order of justice become bitter mockeries.⁴

If we were to offer the mother of the torture victim a well-thought-through theodicy that explained clearly the significance of human sin, the fall of humans, and the importance of human free will as the reasons for her experience, what good would it do? Even if she does ask why God allowed this to happen, would the answer really help her? Would it draw her closer to God, her only source of hope, or would it push her even further away?

Again, if we offered the idea that suffering is sent into the world to test us or to make us better people to the people of Sudan, who are trapped in the midst of a famine, torture, rape, and genocide, what good would this idea do? Would it draw them closer to God or take them further from God? Indeed, what sense would it make?

To tell a mother whose baby is dying of starvation that it is really for the good and that she will learn valuable lessons through the experience is to develop a theodicy that may be theoretically interesting, but that in practice is evil. What kind of God are we left with if we manage, through clever intellectual moves, to fit such obscene forms of cruelty and evil into a framework that somehow justifies it and draws it within the boundaries of the love and righteousness of God? When we try, we blame either the victim, for making bad choices (either her choices or the choices of others: free will), or God and in so doing reduce both God’s love and God’s power. Normally, the former, blaming the victim, is the safest and the easiest option. The pastoral implications of such a move will become clear below.⁵

In the light of these initial, intuitive reflections, we can note two fundamental ideas:

1. The traditional enterprise of theodicy is meaningless.
2. Practicing traditional theodicy does not bring healing and a deeper love for God but is, in fact, a potential source of evil in and of itself.

Given these ideas, then what might be a faithful alternative to traditional theodicy, and how can we resist this mode of evil and find a form of deliverance that will enable us to develop practices that will lead to resistance and redemption?

One of the main problems with theodicy is that, particularly in its academic form, it deals with a primarily intellectual dilemma. Suffering is viewed, first and foremost, as a theological and philosophical problem to be solved and only secondarily as a human experience to be lived with. For the most part, the theodicist attempts to answer the questions raised by the existence of evil. She would not consider it her role to respond to evil in an embodied, practical fashion.⁶ Consequently, the academic theodicist cannot experience the vital aspects of applying theodical thinking.⁷ Theodicy, then, assumes responsibility for producing convincing answers to the complex problem of evil, but it need not be responsible for reflecting on the actual impact of evil on the lives of real people or for developing active ways to resist evil and deal compassionately and faithfully with suffering.

Thus, the approach and assumptions of theodicy stand in stark contrast to the experiences of most of the world’s population. Those of us who live in the world of bodies and sentient experiences do not experience evil and suffering primarily as problems to be solved through the clever use of the intellect without any reference to particularity or context. Rather, we experience them as meaningful and painful human events that are profoundly spiritual and that often threaten to separate the sufferer from the only source of real hope: faith in a loving God who will bring liberation and redemption. In other words, the problem of evil for most people is not simply that it exists, but what it means for their lives, for the lives of their families, their communities, their nation. The problem, then, is not only why evil exists, but what it does. The issue, then, is that traditional theodicy is primarily an intellectual enterprise, while for most people in the world theodicy (their personal and contextual “study” of the problem of evil and how it affects their understanding of and relationship with God) has a relentlessly practical impact and meaning.

Important cultural and philosophical reasons explain why this split between the theory and practice of theodicy has come about. We will examine these in detail in chapter two. Here we will prepare the ground for that discussion by highlighting and reflecting on the limited and narrow way in which we have come to perceive the problem of evil. Could it be that by putting our faith in the explanatory powers of theodicy we have been coerced into looking at the problem of evil in the wrong way? In looking wrongly, have we been encouraged to focus on the wrong things? As we explore this suggestion, let us look at a concept that will help raise our consciousness to some important issues: reframing.

Reframing Theodicy

To reframe something is to look at it from a different angle, to change the frame of reference. By doing this, we often see things that we had never noticed before. As Stewart Govig puts it,

To “reframe” means to change the conceptual and/or emotional setting or viewpoint in relation to which a situation is experienced and to place it in another frame which fits the “facts” of the same concrete situation equally well or even better, and thereby changes its entire meaning.⁸

Reframing changes both the situation and the responses to that situation. Reframing renders the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Sometimes, when we reframe something, our original understanding is radically and unalterably changed.

When we change the frame of reference in which we see an event, we change the meaning of the event.⁹ The concrete facts of the situation remain the same, but the meaning alters significantly. Once the meaning has been changed, the range of our responses towards a particular event, action, or situation expands. Christ’s death on the cross is a good example of reframing. What appears to be suffering ending in failure, when reframed in the light of the resurrection, is seen to be victory and the defeat of death. The same facts have a radically different meaning when they are reframed in the light of the resurrection.¹⁰

The idea of reframing raises the question, Could it be that the problem of evil might look quite different if viewed from within a different frame of reference than the one chosen by ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Problem with the Problem of Evil: Pastoral Perspectives
• 2. The Problem with the Problem of Evil: From Philosophical to Practical Theodicy
• 3. Defining Evil
• 4. From Theodicy to Resistance: Developing the Practices of Redemption
• 5. Why Me, Lord … Why Me? The Practice of Lament as Resistance and Deliverance
• 6. Battling Monsters and Resurrecting Persons: Practicing Forgiveness in the Face of Radical Evil
• 7. Practicing Thoughtfulness: What Are People For?
• 8. Friendship, Strangeness, and Hospitable Communities
• Conclusion: Practicing Faithfulness in the Face of Evil
• Bibliography