During Lent our church has been hosting a series of guest preachers at our Wednesday night service. Last week it was a professor from the local seminary, and she offered what I thought was an interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying, rumination on the problem of evil (taking the appointed Psalm, number 77, as her text). Since her sermon seemed to express a fairly common viewpoint in contemporary Christian theology, I thought it might be worthwhile to think about just why I found it so unsatisfactory.
She started off by emphatically asserting that, contra the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Fallwells of the world, God does not cause natural disasters like tsunamis and hurricanes as a punishment for sin. Drawing on the book of Job and the story of the man born blind (John 9:1-41), she argued that such a stance is a form of “blaming the victim” for her suffering.
There is, she said, no such “explanation” for suffering. And she made what I thought was a very good point in saying that even if such an explanation was forthcoming, would we really find it satisfying? Would you really be satisfied to be told that your child was killed because it was part of God’s plan, or worse because of your sin or his? No explanation would really allow us to say “Oh, that makes sense! Now I’m satisfied that there was a good reason for my child’s death.”
Far from being the cause of, or offering an explanation for, suffering, God, she contended, is present in our suffering. God didn’t cause the Holocaust; God was suffering along with the victims. And so with all suffering in our world. The proper response is to seek the presence of he whom the granddaddy of process thought Alfred North Whitehead called “the fellow-sufferer who understands.” This notion of the suffering God has become very common in contemporary theology, to the point where it has been called a “new orthodoxy,” perhaps driven by a greater sensitivity to the victims of injustice and suffering. The traditional concept of God’s impassibility has given way to the idea that God suffers and grieves along with us.
I don’t want to deny that God suffers with us in some sense. Even the traditional view had to make room for that since Jesus obviously suffered and orthodoxy confesses him as “true God.” Though, I might mention in passing that I have a hunch that proponents of divine “passibility” are writing metaphysical checks they can’t cash. See here for a good argument for divine impassibility.
But what I find most unsatisfying about God’s suffering as a response to the problem of evil is that it lets God off the hook too easily. Take an analogy: if I lock you in a torture chamber, it’s no great commendation of my compassion if I agree to be tortured along with you. (If anything, it may be a sign of my derangement.) But God is the creator of the universe and so is responsible for what happens in the world in a way that no other “fellow-sufferer” can be. A God who can do nothing else than suffer along with us would seem to be a pretty pathetic (in both senses!) God.
The thing I found missing from this sermon was the idea that God’s response to evil is not merely to suffer, but to do something about it. In a way, the suffering God may be a reflection of our times when one can seize the moral high ground simply by professing to feel deeply anguished by some distant injustice and being deemed “uncompassionate” is the worst possible character flaw. The old Greek-influenced concept of God was one which identified the divine with reason. Now we have a concept of God defined by feeling.
But surely the good news that is the gospel is more than simply the assertion that God suffers with us, whatever truth there may be in that. Isn’t the good news that God has decisively acted in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus to deal definitively with the problem of evil in the world? Isn’t the bigger, bolder truth that not only does God suffer with us, but that God will in fact put an end to suffering, “wipe away every tear” and destroy evil once and for all?
A Thinking Reed 
Leave a reply to Joshie Cancel reply