Barry's Blog

I was surprised to find a brilliantly written article this past Monday, in of all places, USA Today, on how we reconcile suffering and evil with a life of faith. It was written by Michael Novak, a distinguished and able theologian, who alluded to a June 9th issue of The New Yorker, where James Wood reviewed a recent book of Bart Ehrman's entitiled, "God's Problem."

Well, Ehrman has his own problems, having jettisoned his Christian faith in recent years, and who ironically, is a professor of religion at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But Wood's review in The New Yorker, as Novak discusses in his USA Today article, points out the need of all people to deal with human suffering and evil, and not just those who are Christians. Yet, we hear the age-old question, most frequently directed to Christians, of how a good and loving God could allow such unthinkable suffering and anguish in our world. And the spate of recent books by the "new atheists" (such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens) offers nothing satisfying, but only warmed-up gruel. Any thoughtful person will see that any religious worldview, not just Christianity, must give account for evil and suffering. Novak observes, 

"One of the oldest accusations against God in the Bible and in every generation since has been that there is too much evil in this world for there to be a good God. The pain is so intense. The irrationality and seeming cruelty at times seem unendurable. Of course, ceasing to be a Jew or a Christian does not wipe these evils away. They continue. They roar on...The rejection of God does not diminish evil in the world by a whit. Even under atheist interpretations of science, the vast suffering under ferocious competition for survival, for a vastly longer era than was known, far exceeds the evils earlier generations knew."

But as Novak so eloquently writes, for the Christian faith the interpretive key, the lens through which to see our world, is the Cross on which the only Son of God died in space-time history, some two thousand years ago. It is heilsgeschichte, "salvation history," as the German theologians have so aptly characterized God's love for us in this world. As Novak suggests: "For Judaism, it is the long, long exile and pain of the Jewish people. If God has so treated his only son, and also his own people, why should anyone else expect Easy Street? Suffering seeks everybody out. Death certainly does, Christian or not, atheist or not."

So at the end of the day, rebellion against a suffering world and the God who made it, while in vogue today, is really nothing new. When many Christians and Jews throughout history have been sorely tried, and we read the writings of the psalmists and prophets, who continually lament the long exile that their people has endured, or Job, whose faith was tested sorely -- were they not all close to the precipice of dismissing God? At the end of Novak's article, he offers a thought provoking question. Even as many Jews and Christians have wanted to throw-off God, he writes, "a counter-question kept nagging them: Would a conviction that our sufferings are meaningless, and due to blind chance, ease the pain of the poor and the unjustly tortured? Raging against the night seems to be an evasion of reality."

In James Wood's excellent piece in The New Yorker, he makes a telling statement about the hope of those who are Christians. He writes: "Christianity needs the concept of heaven simply to make sense of human suffering." So I want to know, where else is a reasonable explanation to be found for the problem of evil and suffering in this blighted planet of ours?

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow