Thanks, Bart, for a further characteristic (and as you say forceful) response and fresh statement. You\u2019ve taken a few more words this time (I\u2019m delighted to see) and I will happily do the same.
\nLet me begin by trying to clarify the first two matters which you picked up. I\u2019ll take them in reverse order for a reason which may become clear.<\/p>\n
Thanks, Bart, for a further characteristic (and as you say forceful) response and fresh statement. You\u2019ve taken a few more words this time (I\u2019m delighted to see) and I will happily do the same. Let me begin by trying to clarify the first two matters which you picked up. I\u2019ll take them in reverse order…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-is-our-pain-gods-problem"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nI wasn\u2019t suggesting you left the faith because you had an intellectualized understanding of it. I was wondering whether the argument of your book \u2013 there is so much suffering, the Bible doesn\u2019t explain it satisfactorily, I can\u2019t reconcile it with a good and powerful God \u2013 was the reason you left the faith, or if not, what was the reason, and how that reason relates to the argument of the book.
\nFrom what you now say it sounds to me as though you are saying you used to have a relationship with God through Jesus Christ and now you don\u2019t, and that the argument about suffering has as it were reinforced that sense of something that no longer works for you. (Or are you saying the argument precipitated the loss of the relationship? You say that perhaps you \u2018left for good reasons\u2019 \u2013 were these the reasons in the book? If so, how does that differ from an intellectual argument which reaches a conclusion?) I\u2019m certainly not trying to put words into your mouth or ideas into your head \u2013 I am (I trust) too experienced a pastor to suppose I can psychoanalyze even someone who is sitting in the same room and co-operating! \u2013 but simply to be sure I\u2019ve heard what you are saying. You do after all talk quite a bit, in the book and in your first posting, about your loss of faith, and I was wanting to be sure I heard what you were saying and how that loss related to the argument about suffering.
\nThis was why (your first point, my second) I was wondering about the force that is added to the case your book is making (or \u2013 a sudden thought \u2013 was your book not after all \u2018making a case,\u2019 but rather \u2018expressing an emotion\u2019?) by spending, say, twenty pages describing the Holocaust in detail rather than summarizing it in one or two. I\u2019m still trying to get a handle on the relation between the rhetorical strategy of your book (rubbing your readers\u2019 noses in great detail about the horrors of the world) and the actual substance of the case you\u2019re making. I am not at all saying that numbers don\u2019t matter or wanting to reduce things to cold logic . . .
\nSo to the more substantial points. I think we differ on what might be meant by \u2018the biblical view of suffering.\u2019 That phrase is, it now appears, quite ambiguous. You are trying to get at \u2018what the Bible says about why suffering happens.\u2019 I argued in my book that the Bible doesn\u2019t actually give us much of an answer to that question \u2013 why, to put it sharply, there was a snake in Eden in the first place \u2013 and that \u2018the biblical view of suffering\u2019 is more about what the creator God is doing about it and\/or with it. We may thus in fact be talking more at cross purposes than I had realised.
\nIn other words, I don\u2019t think (for instance) that Amos and the others were writing in order to address the problem of theodicy (\u2018Why are these bad things happening? It\u2019s because you\u2019ve been wicked!\u2019) but to say, \u2018Israel \u2013 YHWH has called you to be his holy people, and if you fail at that point, the world is out of joint, and you\u2019ll discover what that means!\u2019 In other words, the prophets were not, by and large, answering our philosophical question, but acting (so they seem to have believed) as mouthpieces for the covenant God. Clearly Job (and Psalm 73 and some other passages) are addressing the philosophical problem more directly, and I agree that the answers there remain puzzling, though I think the real answers there are actually, \u2018Here are some reasons why you won\u2019t ever be able fully to understand this in the present life.\u2019 Yes, I puzzle about the ending of Job, but my strategy for puzzling is different from yours, I think. (See my book Scripture and the Authority of God, published in the USA under the wondrous title The Last Word<\/a>.)
\nUnderneath a lot of this I resonate with a line from Bonhoeffer that has haunted me ever since I heard it as a student: that the primal sin of humanity, as in Genesis 3, is to put the knowledge of good and evil before the knowledge of God. This could just be a shrug of the shoulders (\u2018Who am I to understand such mysteries?\u2019), but it could and I think should be something more and richer: a recognition that the sort of creatures we are are never going to be in a position to set a moral bar and insist that God \u2013 if there is a creator God \u2013 jump over it. It is like recognising that the telescope I have, while very good at enabling me to see the moon, Jupiter, Saturn and other glories, won\u2019t ever let me see a black hole, or several other things that the high-energy physicists and astronomers tell me are there. The instrument in question \u2013 my creaturely and innately rebellious humanity \u2013 can\u2019t pick up the full mysteries of God and the world. Of course, there is continuity between God\u2019s view of good and evil and ours, or it would be chaos come again. But we are never in a position to judge God (if God there be). That\u2019s not a pious platitude, but a rather obvious ontological reality.
\nBut the main thing that the Bible has to offer, I still believe \u2013 and no, it isn\u2019t a canon within the canon, but rather the narrative offered by the canon itself! \u2013 is the call of Abraham as the one through whom the problem of the human plight will be addressed and resolved, and the long playing out of that call, and the story of Abraham\u2019s descendents, not as the explanation of why there is evil, suffering etc., but as the story of what the creator is now doing about it. I then hold the other themes within that, and I think that is a fair thing for a Jewish or Christian theologian to do. I appreciate that you don\u2019t read the Bible like this, and that\u2019s a larger conversation we might have some time. As I say, I think we need the big stories as well as the little details. And the details \u2013 including Amos, the Flood, Revelation \u2013 are held within that larger narrative, not isolated nuggets of philosophical statements (\u2018now I\u2019m going to explain what this suffering is about\u2019).
\nAs I say in the book, once God decides (with the call of Abraham) to work to address the problem of evil through people who are part of the problem as well as part of the solution, there is going to be an awful lot of messiness, which will reach its climax when God not only gets his feet muddy with the mess of the world but his hands bloody with the nails of the world. (But of course, I forgot: you don\u2019t think the NT, or its early parts, believes in the divinity of Jesus, do you? I am genuinely puzzled by that. It seems abundantly clear in Paul, as I and plenty of others have argued in various places.)
\nThis isn\u2019t of course a full answer but a signpost in one direction. And, just as a nudge \u2013 are you sure Ecclesiastes doesn\u2019t think there is a future judgment \u2013 in other words, a day of reckoning when the creator will sort things out? How do you read those passages (3.17, 12.14) which seem to say there is? And what do you do with the passages (e.g. 2.26, 5.6) where Ecclesiastes seems to share what you see as the \u2018prophetic\u2019 perspective, that God makes bad things happen to bad people?
\nBut the real dividing line, still \u2013 and you still haven\u2019t addressed it \u2013 comes with the resurrection. I do think, and I think the early Christians thought, and I think the evangelists (yes, in their different ways) thought, that the kingdom did come through the death and resurrection of Jesus. Not \u2018come\u2019 fully, of course; but, in the usual language, it was radically inaugurated. The myth of the \u2018delay of the parousia\u2019 has largely grown up in the modern world to fill the vacuum left when scholars insisted that the resurrection didn\u2019t happen. For the early Christians, God\u2019s new world \u2013 the world where God\u2019s writ runs \u2013 had already begun, and they were living in it by the power of the Spirit. Things did change. The early Christians did make a difference. (See Rodney Stark\u2019s remarkable book on The Rise of Christianity.) Yes, of course, earthquakes and tsunamis still happen. The NT writers knew that as well as we did, and they went on saying that Jesus was already Lord, not simply that he would become that one day. They weren\u2019t mostly offering, either, an analysis of \u2018why evil\/suffering happens,\u2019 but they were implementing Jesus\u2019 kingdom-work of challenging evil\/suffering in the power of God \u2013 not in a sudden all-powerful theocracy, banishing every evil at a stroke, but in their continuing work on the model of Jesus himself and his parables.
\nSo if you\u2019re saying I\u2019m missing things out, I think you are too \u2013 and rather important ones. Not only the resurrection, but also (I return to this) Paul\u2019s massive exposition of \u2018God\u2019s justice\u2019 in Romans. Romans is much, much bigger than \u2018how can sinners find a gracious God.\u2019 It\u2019s \u2018how is God seen to be righteous?\u2019, which is perhaps the closest, along with Job, that the Bible gets to a direct address to your question. Interestingly, Paul insists that the answer passes through the story of Abraham and, of course, the story of Jesus and particularly his death and resurrection. I would love to know how you deal with that.
\nSo, to answer your four propositions (noting as you say that propositions aren\u2019t the sum and substance of Christian faith!):
\nI don\u2019t think much of the Bible is actually addressing the question, \u2018Why is there suffering?\u2019, but rather the question, \u2018What is God doing about it?\u2019. When cause-and-effect sequences do occur, as in Amos etc., I read them within the prophetic call to Israel and the warnings, proper to humans in general and covenant people in particular, about the consequences of not going with the grain of the creator\u2019s purposes. (If I say to my teenage son, \u2018The reason you came off the road is that you were driving too fast round the corner,\u2019 I am pointing out a cause-and-effect sequence which he was apparently ignoring. I\u2019m not saying all your examples are like that but I think some of them may be.)
\nIf we insist on putting things the Bible says into a grid of our own questions, we will often find apparent contradictions. (This, by the way, is part of my answer about the gospels, but that would take a whole book to work out!) If I drive all round the perimeter of a big city, I will see several quite different signs to the city centre. They will say different things, because I am in a different place; but they are in fact all pointing to the same reality. Like all illustrations, that is of course inadequate but it offers a warning against presuming \u2018contradiction\u2019 where none exists. (Obvious example: Paul\u2019s \u2018negative\u2019 view of the law in Galatians and his \u2018positive\u2019 view in Romans. Has he changed his mind? No. It is we who have come to him with our question, \u2018Do you have a positive or negative view of the law?\u2019. Paul, however, is wrestling with the complex story of God\u2019s people, not checking boxes in a C17 dogmatic textbook.)
\nI don\u2019t think the passages you refer to are meant as stand-alone \u2018answers to the question.\u2019 Yes, they raise natural problems which I have tried to address in my book, but it won\u2019t do just to say, \u2018Well, that was a poor answer,\u2019 and leave it at that.
\nWell, good that we can agree on this at least! And this is of course at quite a deep level why I left the academy fifteen years ago and have tried, through energising the church more directly, to get exactly this on the agenda. But it leads me to my final question \u2013 to press a point I made in our radio interview: Why, granted your view of the world, should we bother? Why not \u2018eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die,\u2019 and thank our lucky stars that we can do so? The other side of the coin of \u2018the problem of evil\u2019 is, after all, \u2018the problem of good\u2019: if there is no God, no good and wise creator, why is there an impulse to justice and mercy so deep within us? Why is there beauty, love, laughter, friendship, joy? How do you then tell the difference between Ecclesiastes and Sartre? The Bible of course has some answers to those questions. But I\u2019d be interested to hear yours.
\nI guess this may be the end. But perhaps it\u2019s only a semi-colon. Thanks for the dialogue and the stimulus of debate. Frustrating to be so brief, but better than nothing. Thanks for putting up with an incorrigible theologian.
\nTom<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"