Sniffing out the work of God in the world…
A year ago this month, a bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed. Why?
Here are two accounts from well-known Twin Cities ministers — one from a Calvinist and one from a non-Calvinist.
I continue to be puzzled with how one squares Calvinism with the apparent open-endedness of the world (including the choices the Bible calls on us to make) and with the problem of evil.
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Read this amazing conversion story about the author of “Basic Instinct.”
Yesterday we visited Hierapolis and Laodicea in the Lycus Valley of Turkey. There are amazing Greek and Roman ruins in Hierapolis. But a 10 minute hike up a hillside takes you to the remains of a 6th century church building that tradition says was built on the site where the apostle Philip’s body was buried after being crucified. This seems to be a fairly strong tradition (his death in Hierapolis, that is). We walked through remembering what Philip told his brother after meeting Jesus: “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote — Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.”. I wondered if he remembered those early words as he was put to death here
I’ll try to send one or two more short notes. I’m pecking out on my Blackberry, so they will be short!
“One of the greatest problems of the Western church, ever since the Reformation at least, is that it hasn’t really known what the gospels were there for. Imagining that the point of Christianity was to enable people to go to heaven, most Western Christians supposed that the mechanism by which this happened was the one they found in the writings of Paul . . . and that the four gospels were simply there to give backup information about Jesus, his teaching, his moral example, and his atoning death. This long tradition screened out the possibility that when Jesus spoke of God’s kingdom, he was talking not about a heaven for which he was preparing his followers but about something that was happening in and on this earth, through his work, then through his death and resurrection, and then through the Spirit-led work to which they would be called.” - N. T. Wright
God is great;
God is good;
Now we thank him
for our food.
And therein is the problem. If God is great (all-powerful) and if he is good, then why does this world so often feel God-forsaken? Why is there such great suffering? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why must infants suffer?
“If there is an all-powerful and loving God in this world, why is there so much excruciating pain and unspeakable suffering?”
This is the question that has haunted Bart Ehrman, a prolific writer and professor of religious studies at UNC, for most of his lifetime.
The result of his quest to answer that question is his newest book, God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question–Why We Suffer
He’s asking the questions I’ve been asking for many years. Those questions have led us in different directions, though.
Ehrman, once a student at Moody Bible institute and at Wheaton College and later a pastor of a Baptist Church while working on his Ph. D. at Princeton in New Testament studies, has decided that the answers for him do not lie in Christianity. “I now have lost [my faith] altogether. I no longer go to church, no longer believe, no longer consider myself a Christian.”
Then he explains, “The subject of this book is the reason why.” He had to finally admit to himself that what he was observing in life didn’t mesh with the claims of faith.
Ok, get ready for this: I like the book. I like it a lot. Maybe it’s not the kind of reading you want to give for May graduation gifts, but it strikes me as an honest journey — though a journey that ends in a very different place from where I am.
First, I appreciate how he honestly observes the pain and suffering in the world — from his personal experiences with suffering to the global agonies. Holocaust. Cancer. Starvation. Infant mortality. Tsunamis. Hurricanes. Diseases. Wars.
He remembers going to a Christmas Eve service during which they prayed for God to break into the darkness again.
Yes, I wanted to affirm this prayer, believe this prayer, commit myself to this prayer. But I couldn’t. The darkness is too deep, the suffering too intense, the divine absence too palpable. During the time that it took for this Christmas Eve service to conclude, more than 700 children in the world would have died of hunger; 250 others from drinking unsafe water; and nearly 300 other people from malaria. Not to mention the ones who had been raped, mutilated, tortured, dismembered, and murdered. Nor the innocent victims caught up in the human trade industry, nor those suffering throughout the world from grinding poverty, the destitute migrant farmworkers in our own country, those who were homeless and inflicted with mental disease. Nor to mention the silent suffering that so many millions of the well-fed and well-tended have to experience daily: the pain of children with birth defects, children killed in car accidents, children senselessly taken by leukemia, the pain of divorce and broken families; the pain of lost jobs, lost income, failed prospects. And where is God?
Sometimes when I’ve talked about suffering with my university students, I get the feeling that many of them — coming, perhaps, from comfortable, relatively pain-free lives — don’t yet get it. Darfur is too far away.
So, yes. I like his honestly. For me, it’s the great losses in my life; but it’s also the overwhelming flood of suffering in the world.
Second, I like his humility. Having read several of his other books, I think it maybe doesn’t come easily for him. (Couldn’t many of us say this about ourselves?) He points out that others who are equally aware and intelligent — including his wife, who is a distinguished prof of medieval English literature at Duke and a devoted Christian in the Episcopal church — come to different conclusions.
Third, I like his survey of how scripture attempts to answer the problems of theodicy, including these:
- The main voice of the Old Testament, which suggests that suffering comes because God is punishing us for being bad. At times, God is a fierce beast who rips his people to shreds for failing him (see Hosea 13 — the “prophet of love”). But does this really explain the suffering that we often see? Does that explain cancer that strikes godly people? How about babies who are perishing because they don’t have access to inexpensive malaria drugs?
- The implications of free will (emphasized in the novel The Shack, which I wrote about recently) — suffering as a collateral damage of the way we treat each other. But does this explain a tsunami? retardation? tornados? And if God SOMETIMES enters in to stop the suffering that might result (e.g., to protect a godly families from a drunk driver), then how do you explain that he doesn’t USUALLY seem to do that? If he EVER intervenes, isn’t that in some ways even more of a problem?
- The view that suffering is ultimately redemptive. “But I just don’t see anything redemptive when Ethiopian babies die of malnutrition, or when thousands of people die today (and yesterday, and the day before) of malaria, or when your entire family is brutalized by a drug-crazed gang that breaks into your home in the middle of the night.”
- The focus of some biblical authors that suffering is a kind of test. Think here of Job or Genesis 22 (God’s demand that Abraham sacrifice Isaac). Side note: his material on Job, and the important questions he asks, was worth the price of the book to me.
- The belief of some of the apocalyptic passages that suffering is caused by forces opposed to God. Ehrman says: “It is also rooted in a blind faith that eventually everything wrong will be made right — a nice thoguht, and one that I wish were true. But it is, at the end of the day, blind faith; and it can lead all too easily to social apathy: since problems won’t be solved until the end, there is no point in our working to solve them now.”
There is one biblical writer that he thinks gets it right: Ecclesiastes. In his reading of that book this means that suffering is mystery, this life is all there is, and that we should seek personal joy and joy for our fellow human beings as we live it.
Maybe you don’t want to read this book. I understand. It’s not for the faint of heart.
It’s called God’s Problem. But, as a believer in the Triune God, I have to ask this: does God really have a problem. Or do I?
So here, I think, are Bart’s Problems. (I say this with great respect for his scholarship. I’ve been blessed by reading several of his books.)
First, he believes that the earliest Christians didn’t understand Jesus of Nazareth to be God himself. Rather, he thinks that was a later development. For good reasons, I disagree. And if you disagree, that makes a lot of different. It does not solve the problem of suffering. I’m still confounded. Still searching. Still upset and flummoxed. But it matters deeply to me that I believe God came among us and suffered with us.
Second, despite his disclaimer in the beginning, it feels at times that he forgets that people with equal intelligence and courage have looked right into the monster of pain and have continued to believe. Even with questions and mystery swirling about them. Remember the story of Dr. Diane Komp? A pediatric oncologist, she actually came to faith in the midst of horrible stories of suffering. It wasn’t charismatic healing that convinced her; it was courageous, faith-filled suffering.
Third, and I know this is just kind of pragmatic, I think he’s advocating a view that won’t work for you when you die. Not after you die — but as you face your mortality. The end stories of unbelievers tend not to be pretty. Something in us insists that there is more. Our souls are, indeed, restless until they rest in him.
My journey to understand continues. I’m so thankful for Bart Ehrman as a conversation partner. If my son winds up doing his residency in North Carolina, perhaps we’ll have a chance to sit down some day and chat about it.
Here are a couple powerful stories of families who lost children born with Edward’s Syndrome:
Watch, weep, hope, pray.
My daughter-in-law pointed me to this excellent blog post by Jordan McCall, a young mother with cancer, who is trying to come to terms with her Bible class’s study of a Joel Osteen book.
This is one of the most honest, gospeled blog pieces I’ve read in a long time. (I’ll put the link in the comments.) I appreciate the McCalls letting me reprint her words here:
In our Sunday School Class, we have started a series of lessons on Joel Osteen’s “Your Best Life Now.” I have not read it, so as you read this post, please realize that it comes from someone who is mostly ignorant on what the book actually says. I only know of its ideas from other people who have read this book and the series that I mentioned. So, if you think the book is great and whole-heartedly believe it, then you should probably stop reading now. I am in a “hurting place” today and I think most of it is written to make Americans feel okay about themselves and their greed. I have to make this point first, I respect and admire the teachers that are presenting this study in our class. It is because of them that I haven’t just thrown up my hands and decided to skip Sunday School for six weeks. I am trying to have an open mind and looking for what God may be telling me through them. In the three weeks since they have started talking about this (I admit, we did miss one week because we were at Family Camp), I spend most of the class trying not to cry and leave feeling incredibly burdened. It’s hard to hear people talk about praying for a good parking space, and getting one, when most of your prayers are desperate pleas for God to take away your cancer, to give you a few more years to see your children grow up a little more, to ease the pain of your husband and children and parents if you do die. People who have cancer die of cancer. It may not be tomorrow or next year, but people with cancer do not live to see a ripe old age.I want to believe that God wants to pour out His favor on me, but it is so hard to find the favor when everyday is a struggle to be joyful and hopeful. Sometimes I feel like I am clinging to the edge of hope by my fingers and when I just can’t hang on anymore, I’ll fall into utter despair. I hold on with everything I have for Brad and Eli and Phoebe. Daily I pray for God to give me His hope, but so often I feel like I have to make myself feel it. Then we go to Sunday School where we hear to “be positive”, to “make today the day for your ’someday’ statements”, “you have to be specific about all your goals so you can make them”, and my favorite, “Look for God’s favor upon you this week.” I got a pretty bad sunburn on Monday at the pool because the Gleevec makes my skin very photosensitive. Monday night, the Gleevec made my back, hips, and legs ache so badly that I had to take prescription pain killer to get to sleep. Yesterday we learned that Phoebe has a hole in her heart that will require surgery when she’s two. I cannot claim to know the heart or plans of God, but it was pretty hard to hear. I am just not seeing the “favor.” Now most of this sounds very ungrateful. God has blessed us through all this mess. We have been showered with love and prayers. I have an uncle who writes me almost every week, just to say that he and my aunt are praying for me everyday. My side effects to Gleevec are pretty mild…I can mostly function (I say mostly because I have been expereincing some pretty heavy fatigue this last week). Our medical bills are not overwhelming us because Brad has a great new job. There are a hundred blessings, but it’s hard to see them through the hurt. I don’t feel like we are alone. I don’t know anyone who isn’t hurting in one way or another. I wonder if all of this “Best Life Now” stuff sounds shrill and hollow to them as well? More than likely, my attitude about the whole thing reveals more about me than about Joel Osteen and his book. But, this is my blog and I can write what I want. 
Last week I preached on doubt, insisting again that it isn’t the opposite of faith. I like Frederick Buechner’s insightful words: “Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith.”
Now word comes out about the doubts that tormented Mother Teresa, even as she continued doing the work of Christ. This doesn’t diminish my appreciation for her; rather, it strengthens it.
A few more quotes from Barbara Brown Taylor:
“At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.”
“Having tried as hard as I knew how to seek and serve Christ in all persons, I knew for sure that I could not do it. I was not even sure that I wanted to do it anymore, and I felt increasingly deceitful saying that I would. Feeding people was no longer feeding me. While I remained constitutionally incapable of walking past a hungry baby bird, it was the wild geese that were calling me. When I heard them coming, I hurried to the window, straining to see them through the branches of the tall pines overhead. Sometimes all I caught was a beating wing or an outstretched neck, but even that was enough to set me weeping again. No thoughts went with the tears. The tears simply fell out of my eyes, and it was not until the geese were gone that the words formed in the empty air. Take me with you.”
“After I left him in search of food [at a pool party], I wound up with a couple I had always thought I would enjoy but whom I never really got to know since they did not serve on any committees and were never, as far as I knew, in crisis. We sat down in adjacent rocking chairs with plates full of lobster and corn balanced on our laps, laughing so much that I spit food clear across the porch. I did not wonder why I had not sought them out earlier because I already knew the answer. By my rules, caring for troubled people always took precedence over enjoying delightful people, and the line of troubled people never ended. Sitting there with corn stuck between my teeth, I wondered why I had not changed that rule sooner.”
Some poignant words from Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith
These words sink deep.
“The call to serve God is first and last the call to be fully human.”
“I guess you could say that my losses have been chiefly in the area of faith, and specifically in the area of being certain who God is, what God wants of me, and what it means to be Christian in a world where religion often seems to do more harm than good.”
“On the subject of divine guidance I side with Susan B. Anthony. ‘I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do,’ she once said, ‘because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.’ Having been somewhat of an expert on the sanctification of my own desires, I try not to pin them on God anymore. At the same time, I recognize the enormous energy in them, which strikes me as something that God might be able to use.”
“As hard as I have tried to remember the exact moment when I fell in love with God, I cannot do it. My earliest memories are bathed in a kind of golden light that seemed to embrace me as surely as my mother’s arms. The Divine Presence was strongest outdoors, and most palpable when I was alone.”
“As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.”
“I know that the Bible is a special kind of book, but I find it as seductive as any other. If I am not careful, I can begin to mistake the words on the page for the realities they describe. I can begin to love the dried ink marks on the page more than I love the encounters that gave rise to them. If I am not careful, I can decide that I am really much happier reading my Bible than I am entering into what God is doing in my own time and place, since shutting the book to go outside will involve the very great risk of taking part in stories that are still taking shape.”
“Once I had begun crying on a regular basis, I realized just how little interest I had in defending Christian beliefs. The parts of the Christian story that had drawn me into the Church were not the believing parts but the beholding parts. ‘Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy . . .’ ‘Behold the Lamb of God . . .’ ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock . . .”
“The easiest thing was to tell [her friends who asked why she resigned from ministry] that I had always wanted to teach college, which was true, but behind the answer lay truths harder to confess. My quest to serve God in the church had exhausted my spiritual savings. My dedication to being good had cost me a fortune in being whole. My desire to do all things well had kept me from doing the one thing within my power to do, which was to discover what it meant to be fully human.”
“With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore.”
“Once, when I attended a workshop on teaching religion, a presenter talked about how he took his students on wilderness trips to give them a taste of life nearer the edge. Whether they went hiking or white-water rafting, the point was to step outside their high-carb comfort zones long enough to encounter the untamed holiness of the wild. ‘Excuse me,’ a member of the audience said, ‘but are there predators in those places who are above you on the food chain?’ ‘Well, of course not,’ the presenter said. ‘I wouldn’t put students in danger like that.’ ‘I wouldn’t either,’ the man in the audience said, ‘but don’t lull them into thinking that they have experienced true wilderness. It’s only wilderness if there’s something out there that can eat you.’”
A few nuggets from Erwin McManus’s The Barbarian Way
“If [John the Baptist] lived today, he would be medicated and diagnosed bipolar. He would be one more certified lunatic.”
“For years I have made it my mission to destroy the influence of the Christian cliche ‘The safest place to be is in the center of the will of God.’”
“So what is this good news? The refined and civilized version goes something like this: Jesus died and rose from the dead so that you can live a life of endless comfort, security, and indulgence. But really this is a bit too developed. Usually it’s more like this: if you’ll simply confess that you’re a sinner and believe in Jesus, you’ll be saved from the torment of eternal hellfire, then go to heaven when you die. . . . The call of Jesus is far more barbaric than either of these. It is a call to live in this world as citizens of an entirely different kingdom.”
“Jesus began his public ministry with a simple invitation: ‘Come, follow me.’ His closing instructions to his disciples can be summarized in one word, ‘Go!’ A quick survey of the modern church would lead you to believe his invitation was ‘Come, and listen,’ and his closing mandate would be summarized in the one word ‘No!’”
“After more than two decades of walking with Christ, I’m happy to say that while Jesus can wonderfully make you healthy, he has no ambition to make you normal. The healthier you become, the freer you are to simply be yourself. The more your identity is rooted in God’s value for you, the less you are controlled and limited by what others think of you.”
“How many stories do we need of children who grow up in church being forced to act like Christians rather than being won to the heart of God? Both are an effort to shape the character of our children. The first is an external force; the latter an internal force. The civilized Christian does what is right out of fear; the barbarian does what is right out of love. The Christian civilization is held together by rules and rituals; the barbarian revolt is fueled by the passion of God and guided by the mission of God. If our children are going to walk away from Christ, we need to raise them in such a way that they understand that to walk away from Jesus is to walk away from a life of faith, risk, and adventure and to choose a life that is boring, mundane, and ordinary.”
“With insects most of us know that bees are called swarms, and ants are called colonies. Among ocean life, I was aware that whales are pods, and fish are schools. Cattle are herds, birds are flocks, and if you watch Lion King, you know a tribe of lions is a pride. If you grew up in the country, you might know that crows are murders. Maybe the most unnerving one is an ambush of tigers. I was surprised to learn that a group of buzzards waiting around together to feast on leftover carnage is called a committee.”