On September 11, 2001, my wife woke me up and told me she was pregnant with our first child.
Later that morning, I went downstairs, poured a cup of coffee, and turned on the tv. A plane had crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. A few minutes later, it happened again.
What a world this child would come to know.
One of the most important moments of my life and one of the darkest moments in American history would take place within a few minutes of each other. The juxtaposition of joy and terror was bewildering. It’s no wonder so many philosophers of the twentieth century regarded life as absurd—meaningless, incoherent, futile. We can fulfill our heart’s desire in one moment, and in the next human suffering can overwhelm us with its ferocity. Even in the mundane day-to-day of our lives, we experience good and evil, joy and heartache, pleasure and pain. We go to great lengths to keep the evil, heartache, and pain away, but these inevitably find us in time. How, then, can we make sense of such an up-and-down existence?
I’ve written elsewhere of two streams of Christianity of which I’ve been a part. On the one hand, there is mainline Protestantism, which has been strongly influenced by theological liberalism. Within the mainline denominations, one doesn’t normally encounter a strong sense of divine agency. In other words, there’s not much of a sense that God actually does anything. This is in large part because of the focus among Protestant liberals on the question of “theodicy”: how can a good, loving, and just God allow so much suffering in the world? In many cases, theologians traded the God of the Bible for a God who is largely powerless. If we view God as unable to do very much, we will never really expect God to bless us. God just sends good thoughts and positive vibes.
On the other hand, I’ve also been involved in Pentecostal-charismatic (PC) Christianity. I include among this group those Christians who not only believe in the gifts of the Spirit recounted in 1 Corinthians 12 and Romans 12, but expect these gifts to become manifest within their communities of faith. This may involve tongues, prophecy, healing, and apostolic forms of leadership. Charismatics definitely believe in divine agency. They’re quite comfortable talking about blessings, and rightly so, since God does bless his people. In my experience, however, these traditions struggle to make sense of suffering. What happens if your blessing doesn’t arrive? How should we think about the people who don’t get healed? How is it that such a powerful God allows so much suffering in the world?
Blessings and suffering…. It’s one of the many paradoxes of our faith that life in Christ involves both. Yet Christians can neither wallow in pessimism nor frolic in optimism. Pessimism, after all, is a worldview without hope. The pessimist expects that things will always go wrong, and go wrong in the worst way. Pessimists will “catastrophize.” In other words, it’s all going to pot, whether we like it or not.
Equally problematic, however, is naïve optimism. (Everything is awesome!) We must account for the devastating effects of sin. Christians can’t turn a blind eye to the suffering all around us—poverty, abuse, war, disease, betrayal, hatred. To do so is to turn our backs on “the least of these” (Matt 25:40). If we consistently look away from the brokenness of this world, all our vaunted Christian compassion is simply pretense. And sometimes the pain of this life can knock the optimism right out of us.
The Christian faith involves elements of both pessimism and optimism, but it can’t be defined by either. Christians understand that the world is broken, but God is making all things new. Think of it this way: everything God has created is good, but sin came into the world, and now everything is skewed. Nothing is really as it should be. God’s good creation is marred by evil and death, and we humans live with the consequences. Nevertheless, God hasn’t left us forever in this sorry state. Rather, God is making all things new through Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. And so in the midst of this world so warped by sin and death, we also see goodness, joy, and love, all of which anticipate the fullness of God’s new creation in the age to come. Put more simply, we can be a part of God’s healing of creation now, and we will see all things entirely healed when Christ returns.
Christians understand that the world is broken, but God is making all things new.
Sometimes our wounds in this life are self-inflicted. Augustine would say this is because we love the wrong things. In the Confessions he wrote,
The good things which you love are all from God, but they are good and sweet only as long as they are used to do his will. They will rightly turn bitter if God is spurned and the things that come from him are wrongly loved. Why do you still choose to travel by this hard and arduous path? There is no rest to be found where you seek it. In the land of death you try to find a happy life: it is not there. How can life be happy where there is no life at all?
A considerable amount of life’s pain, then, comes from loving the wrong things, and loving in the wrong way.
At other times, we suffer because other people love the wrong things and love in the wrong way. In other words, we live with the results of the sins of other people.
This is called moral evil. People sin, and sin has consequences. Evil, said Augustine, isn’t a thing in itself. It is the privation (absence) of the good. Thus when we sin, we deprive ourselves and others of God’s good ordering of all things. The result is that, whether we see it or not, we harm ourselves and other people.
It’s too simple, however, to draw a straight line from individual sin to suffering in all cases. Sometimes we simply find ourselves bearing the weight of a broken creation. A tornado hits. We get a bad diagnosis. A friend drops dead. The world is not as it should be, and not as it will be in the age to come. As opposed to moral evil, theologians sometimes call this natural evil. It might seem strange to call a tornado or cancer evil, since neither a tornado nor a cancer cell has a will by which to make decisions that are righteous or sinful. The idea behind calling these natural evil is that the world isn’t the way it should be. Sin isn’t just something you or I do, but all the gone-wrongness of creation. Things are out of whack, and as a result we experience suffering and death.
Yet in the midst of this world so marred by sin, we can see God forming a new creation.
The world is broken, but God is making all things new. When we understand this, we can achieve a particular kind of happiness. By “happiness,” I don’t just mean good feelings. I mean a sense of peace, purpose, and fulfillment. Our lives have a telos—a goal—in the kingdom of God. We live in this imperfect world now, and in the age to come we will be with God forever. This kind of happiness may involve letting go of things we thought made us happy before, but which in fact kept us in a loop of desire and dissatisfaction. When we see the world through the lens of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, all of life comes into focus. We know what is important and what isn’t. We know that suffering is real, but suffering is not the end of all things. The world is broken, but God is making all things new.
The baby about whom my wife told me on that fateful day is about to turn twenty-two and graduate from college. He’s a biochemistry major at Asbury University, headed to med school, and an Anglican. (I know…he should be a Methodist, but I did try. Come to think of it…that may be why he isn’t a Methodist.) A lot has happened in his life and the life of our family across these two decades. Some of it’s been really challenging, but I’ve learned that with patience, we can see God working in the midst of even the most difficult things we’ve been through. All creation is broken, but God is always at work, raising up a new creation.
That first sentence. It's a real open-the-morning-paper-and-halt-with-your-breakfast-fork-suspended-midair-over-your-plate kind of sentence. Alternatively, a real "nesting doll" of a sentence.
My last sentence in the previous should’ve been ; hasn’t creation always been broken, fractured, incomplete. Along this same line , hasn’t there always been death? (I always worried about walking in the Garden and stepping on bugs. )