Theological Worlds
Part 9, Welcome to My World
Guilt was never my obsessio. This put me in a different theological world from the stream of Protestantism I was raised in.
When you live in a different theological world from your faith tradition you grow up feeling like a bit of a weirdo. Things that resonate with the community around you don't resonate with you, and it makes you wonder if something's wrong with you. Why am I the only one not getting it?
My obsessio was Suffering. Not my personal suffering, but the suffering of the world. The horrific suffering of the innocent. This has been my deepest spiritual concern. During the early years of this blog, still in my season of deconstruction, theodicy is what I wrote the most about and most passionately. Seeking answers to the question of pain and suffering have defined my faith journey. Here's how Jürgen Moltmann describes it in Trinity and Kingdom:
It is in suffering that the whole human question about God arises; for incomprehensible suffering calls the God of men and women in question. The suffering of a single innocent child is an irrefutable rebuttal of the notion of the almighty and kindly God in heaven. For a God who lets the innocent suffer and who permits senseless death is not worthy to be called God at all...The theism of the almighty and kindly God comes to an end on the rock of suffering...
The question of theodicy is not a speculative question; it is a critical one. It is the all-embracing eschatological question. It is not purely theoretical, for it cannot be answered with any new theory about the existing world. It is a practical question which will only be answered through experience of the new world in which 'God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.' It is not really a question at all, in the sense of something we can ask or not ask, like other questions. It is the open wound of life in this world. It is the real task of faith and theology to make it possible for us to survive, to go on living, with this open wound. The person who believes will not rest content with any slickly explanatory answer to the theodicy question. And he will also resist any attempts to soften the question down. The more a person believes, the more deeply he experiences pain over the suffering in the world, and the more passionately he asks about God and the new creation.
This obsessio is my theological world. I seek the epiphania for this open wound.
The obsessio of Suffering has determined the shape my theological development. For example, in high school I started asking questions about hell. Eventually, I came to adopt a hopeful eschatology. It's not hard to connect the dots here. If the problem of pain haunted me it was difficult to imagine, with hellish visions of the afterlife, God causing and compounding the suffering of the world. You'll have a hard time trying to convince me of any theology where is God hurting people.
But again, this made me feel like a weirdo. My hopeful eschatology was a secret I kept to myself. The few times I shared it when I first arrived at ACU people looked at me like I was a Martian. And I was! I came from another theological world. When I started blogging in 2007 I found some online community. But I've always been a puzzle and an oddity within my faith tradition. I love my tradition, but I just never shared its obsessios. The things that have historically agitated the soul of the Churches of Christ have never agitated me. My concerns have been elsewhere.
Where do I experience epiphania? Well, that's hard. Does theodicy have an epiphania? As Moltmann describes, the best theology can do is help you survive, help you carry on, in the face of the open wound of life. Theology, for me, has always felt like this, as a means of coping. Now, is that a good foundation for theological reflection? Probably not. But I think every theologian, even the defenders of orthodoxy and the Great Tradition, has an obsessio that biases their thinking. My obsessio biases my thinking toward what helps me cope. My hopeful eschatology makes faith easier to carry given my weight of sorrow.
But I do experience intimations of grace. There's a passage from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov from the speech the elder Zosima delivers before his death to his fellow monks. Zosima's speech has become very dear to me, and I share it at the end of Hunting Magic Eels:
Love all of God’s creation, both the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love animals, love plants, love each thing. If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an entire, universal love...
Love is a teacher, but one must know how to acquire it, for it is difficult to acquire, it is dearly bought, by long work over a long time, for one ought to love not for a chance moment but for all time. Anyone, even a wicked man, can love by chance. My young brother once asked forgiveness of the birds: it seems senseless, yet it is right, for all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world. Let it be madness to ask forgiveness of the birds, still it would be easier for the birds, and for a child, and for any animal near you, if you yourself were more gracious than you are now, if only by a drop, still it would be easier.
This is my epiphania, the single drop of grace that makes the world easier. Life is so very hard and so very sad. But we can make it easier. Consequently, I've never resonated with a Christianity that makes the world harder for others. In my theological world, there are two kinds of Christians: those who make life harder for others and those who make life easier. And if that seems to you woefully simplistic or problematic, well, I suspect you and I come from different theological worlds.
This easing of the burden of life is my epiphania. Whenever I see this happen in the world, when I behold that drop of grace extended, the world shines for me. Some mercy flashes out, rescuing me all over again. Everything is transfigured.
The glimpse is fleeting, but for a moment, I can see.
Now almost twenty years ago, the tragic death of a college friend from cancer shortly after the birth of his first child was the catalyst for my period of deconstruction. Inexplicable suffering in the world had always vexed me--childhood diseases, natural disasters killing thousands--but my friend's death was scalding salt water on life's "open wound."
A few months later I read Lewis's A Grief Observed for the first time in years. Like Lewis, I never felt as if I questioned God's existence, but I certainly questioned what kind of God he was, and I could claim nothing more than an agnostic view of a number of faith claims people in my tradition proudly confessed.
Although I tend to recoil from the "God's ways are not our ways" response to tragedy and suffering, when it came to theodicy, I eventually reached the point where I conceded I would never find an intellectually and emotionally satisfactory answer to pain.
I recall an old post from Richard that still resonates with me a lot in which he said--and I'm paraphrasing--Jesus's teachings offer no explanation for suffering in the world, but they do tell us how we should respond to it.
‘The open wound of life’ - that’s a very evocative description of how ‘the problem of pain’ (chiefly that of others) seems to me - it’s a wound I’ve been tending for thirty and more years. At times it threatens to kill my faith altogether; at other times it almost closes over - but then something happens, or a fresh idea strikes me, and rips it open again. So thank you for writing. Currently I’m pondering Thomas Jay Oord’s ‘The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence’, and wondering whether his ideas ‘let God off the hook’ (of responsibility for suffering). It’s a quite different angle from which to approach the problem, and it’s taking quite a bit of effort to work out whether it fits other aspects of the ‘theological framework’ with which I try to make sense of my faith.