Human Suffering and Ecce, Homo
As I wrote yesterday, I have much to do around the house and need to catch up on my online class. But something occured to me during my vacation that I need to write down here. It's a little insight, but it marked a shift in my thinking on a critical issue. The nature of it is so obvious I'm embarrassed that I didn't consider the problem of pain from this perspective before.
Of course, my discussion depends on the reliability of the gospel tradition, at least in the sense that Jesus actually healed; for this discussion, I'll begin with the assumption that he did in fact heal in a unique fashion. Or, if you wish, I'll proceed as if Jesus truly healed.
Even some skeptical readers of the NT, Schweitzer and Sanders come to mind, have been impressed by the strong thread of miraculous content in the gospels. It is not my purpose in this post to examine the miracle stories, but I will say that those who attempt to point out that all religions have miracles, or that there were other ancient miracle workers in Judaism and in Paganism and that the gospel accounts should be viewed in parallel with these, these individuals are plainly mistaken. In ancient paganism and pre-Jesus Judaism there are exactly zero miracle workers who compare to Jesus. In fact, I am unaware of any religious literature, any literature at all, which makes the miraculous claims found in every strand of the gospel strata. Quick refutations of my point are possible, but close examination shows they are erroneous. The fact that an ancient deity descended to the underworld, dropped dead in the presence of the judges of the underworld, was hung on a hook on the wall and then rescued, brought back to life, by her lover after three days sounds impressive, but it has nothing to do with a man crucified by the Romans in Palestine, whose empty tomb (in reality, found less than three days later) and appearances to historical human beings began a new religion founded on not only his death and resurrection but the miraculous deeds of his life...I am getting off my topic, but I continue to be unconvvinced by those who claim the Jesus story is comparable with the pagan 'parallels' of Jesus. I am also unconvinved, at this time, by the mythicists, those who believe Jesus was not a historical person at all.
So, for my purpose here I will assume the numerous miracles attributed to Jesus have at least some veracity. His followers considered him a healer; Jesus considered himself a healer, and stories of Jesus healing even those close to him, in the presence of witnesses who knew those healed (Mark 1, John 11) contain some truthful threads.
If they do, if Jesus did heal, how does this relate to the problem of suffering?
Human, and animal, suffering is one of the most difficult questions Christians have to answer. The ancient Christian/Jewish tradition of a fall from grace which resulted in suffering and pain (and actually, the traditional Christian teaching requries some interpretation of the Genesis story) appears to be in trouble now that multi-million-year evolution is on the scientific scene. We could still have fallen sometime in our evolutionary history, but what if we didn't? What if we just evolved this way and awful suffering, microbes and cancer and kidney disease and natural disaster and death and grief, what if there are just part of the human package?
Perhaps, if we simply evolved this way, God is partially off the hook (sorry for the mytho-pun from earlier) for human suffering. Our suffering is simply a fact of our evolved existence. We compete with other organisms in the evolutionary scale, including bacteria and viruses, and sometimes we lose. Our pain sense, which is essential to avoid damage all over our body just walking through a wood, at times does more than it needs to. The pain of polio or bone cancer certainly is telling us something is wrong, the same as when I lean against a sharp stick in a tree trunk and my pain receptors tell me to ease up before I poke a hole in my back. Only with many diseases, barring recent medical treatments for which I am intently grateful, the pain cannot lead us to positive, alleviating action. We suffer, but we can't always step away from the sharp stick. A tooth rots and the pain receptors tell us the integrity of our system is threatened; they tell us that pretty acutely. If we didn't know how to pull the tooth, the pain would continue, nagging and hellish, until the infection spread to the blood stream itself. Someday, I surely hope, we will have cures for many diseases (and I echo the current enthusiasm of Buffet and Gates here: money and time may eventually fix much physical suffering). Until we do, some deadly sticks will poke us, hurt us more and more, until they kill us.
Which brings me to the other great problem: death. I know some people, my anthro colleague included, who believe that we will soon extend life to very long spans, perhaps indefinitely, live until we ourselves tire of living and wish to die. Will humans really cure death? Will pain and all disease, our fragile state in the evolutionary life-matrix, eventually be made pain-free and permanent?
I can't say and neither can anyone else. But what theist hasn't struggled with the problem of suffering? I think of a scene from "Sonny's Blues" where the young girl, fictional but representative of millions, is discovered by her parents contorted by polio, in so much pain she cannot scream right away; when she does catch her agonized breath and scream, the howl is horrifying. I think of the death of Darwin's own daughter, a piece in his own fall from faith. Of Lewis' loss of Joy and of the death of a the wife of one of the CADRE bloggers. One story which has always been challenging for my faith is the illness of the man who married my brother. He was a pastor, a nice enough seeming guy, met his wife in Bible college ('God brought us together'), had a church in the midwest...not long after my brother's wedding, not long after I met him, sat and watched him eat pancakes with honey and butter in true midwest fashion, he contracted encephalitis from a mosquito bite, here or back in the midwest I don't know. Was he prayed for during the illness? Almost certainly. Did he live? Yes, but the disease altered his brain, damaged it in some way so that his personality changed, his college-sweetheart wife eventually divorced him, he lost his family, his job, part of his mind. Where is he now? Is he better? I have no idea. But why would such an awful thing happen? Is this God's plan?
If God has a plan for individual events like this, I have no idea what it is and cannot guess. But I tend to think he doesn't. I tend to think this kind of suffering is simply part of being a human in the biologic universe. As C.S. Lewis says, the universe if 'no friend of man's.' The story of my brother's pastor-friend brings that into chilling perspective.
Why does God let this happen? Why doesn't he intervene when children suffer, either from disease or human evil, when a little girl gets cancer and dies or a man molests her (and I read just the other day of a nine year old, french kissed by her sixty something teacher). Why?
I don't know. I do not know. But I know two things. One is that God, Jesus, demands that humans do something concrete about the suffering of others. This is the heart of the gospel message; this, truly, is the Law which Jesus says God commands us to hold. It is a waste of time, and a great error, looking for proscriptive sin lists in the Bible. The essemtial Law is Love, but giving, sacrificing, step out of my way love for those who need help. Why doesn't God just take care of human needs himself? Why does he command me to do something about hunger when he is God? I don't know, but Jesus worked that way in the gospels and God works that way throughout the Tanakh as well. From Moses to Ezekial to the Seventy in the synoptics. We see the same thing in the epistles. Human agency. People are poor, hungry, sick, lonely, in prison, oppressed in an unfair economic system; I want you to do something about it. I can blame God for suffering if I want, for poor people starving and depressed people struggling alone, but what am I freaking doing about it? According to Jesus, God will ask. I need much greater action in my own life in this area.
The second piece of this (and surely human effort, at this time at least, cannot alleviate all suffering) is Jesus behavior while on earth. And this has been my shift in thinking this week: I felt the question of human suffering was unanswered. A painful, existential puzzle that I could not reconcile easily with my faith. But what did Jesus do on earth? He healed. He removed sickness, and even death, all the time.
The gospel writers, Mark at least (and Mt and Lk who took from him assuming they did) may have gotten the demonic possession thing wrong, or overstated; this is another issue. Still, Jesus casts out demons, frees minds from suffering, throughout the synoptics. But he also heals physical illnesses which clearly could not be mistaken. Deformed limbs, men known to be crippled or blind from birth, obvious skin diseases, even the dead. The point is that I do not know why we suffer, or why God, or his universe, allowed us to develop so that we do suffer and die, but I do know that the gospel Jesus, consistently and regularly, remedied these very things.
This in itself is a remarkable fact. The gospel writers seem to have missed it, even. In John, the miracles (not all of which are healings, true) are signs so that we may believe. In the synoptics, faith brings about the healing in many cases. But in all cases, unlike any previous figure in Jewish literature, Jesus removes suffering. Why does he do this?
The clues are sparse, but compassion and a desire to have all included in the religious cultus seem evident. Jesus healed, notoriously, on the sabbath; he touched those unclean when he healed them. We have a fixed number of miracles in the gospels (do I recall 17?) but both Mark and John note that Jesus performed many more such acts, healing from village to village those who needed relief from their pain and physical deformities.
In short, I do not know why God allows physical suffering and disease, but I know that Jesus, God's unique historical emissary, spent great energy alleviating it as he travelled. It mattered to him. He told his followers if must matter to them also.
It would be great if healings were as common in the church now as they appear to be in Jesus' time. It would sure make apologetics interesting. I don't know why they aren't, though I've heard some say they believe they are. No one less than Ben Witherington, BW3, has claimed to have seen physical deformities healed in response to prayer. I haven't been so lucky, yet. It seems Jesus came not to end all suffering and death immediately, nor to empower all his followers to do so miraculously in his absence. But the fact that he so consistently and supernaturally remedied human disease and suffering, even death, tells me a lot about the God he claimed to represent.
If the atonement is true, if Christ carried his mission beyond healing physical disease to giving his life to atone for our spiritual death, an infinitely more important deficit, than those who rail against God for allowing human suffering need to think about such a sacrifice, such suffering, given, again according to the earliest Christian documents we have, in place of our own, freely, by a loving God. Why God allows suffering I don't know. But in Jesus life, and perhaps death, I see a clear committment to ending it.
I believe it is Voltaire who says, "If God is God, then he's the Devil." Meaning if we have an omniscient deity who is also all-powerful, in some way he is responsible for the horrendous suffering of innocent people, if only because he does not stop it. But those who rail against God because of human pain, Voltaire and my own self included, need to consider two other things: Jesus' commands regarding suffering and his miraculous, frequent healings while on earth (apparently unnecessary in any direct way for his mission), and Jesus' apparent belief that he was being offered as God's sacrifice in place of others.
And finally, while God's response to Job may seem inadequate for many of us, I do consider it. God, in that text, points out to Job the things he cannot understand, large and powerful specimens of the animal kingdom, Behemoth and Leviathan. Job sees God is greater than him by reflecting on these animals. Primitive but interesting. But Job did not know the size of the cosmos, the unknowable vastness of billion-galaxied space. If God truly made all this universe, he must be something indeed. My own reason, perhaps, becomes dangerous when I try to compare it to his. For me, this might not be a satisfactory final answer. But when we look at human suffering and say there can be no God we are in fact saying something about God. No good God could allow this; we would not allow it, if we were God. Bold, even smug, thinking that. But to be fair we must also look at Jesus' actions and words. When God does break directly into our dim and scattered corner of the cosmos, he heals, and heals, and heals some more. He raises the dead. Then he tells us to get our butts in gear and do what we can to alleviate hunger and suffering with the means we have.
What did Voltaire do to help those individals around him who suffered? What have I done? What are any of us doing? Surely this is the highest of all calls. This is Jesus' ethical command. Before I blast God for not doing enough, why not look at myself, look at Jesus, pray and hope that the day will soon come when Christ will make all things right.
Of course, my discussion depends on the reliability of the gospel tradition, at least in the sense that Jesus actually healed; for this discussion, I'll begin with the assumption that he did in fact heal in a unique fashion. Or, if you wish, I'll proceed as if Jesus truly healed.
Even some skeptical readers of the NT, Schweitzer and Sanders come to mind, have been impressed by the strong thread of miraculous content in the gospels. It is not my purpose in this post to examine the miracle stories, but I will say that those who attempt to point out that all religions have miracles, or that there were other ancient miracle workers in Judaism and in Paganism and that the gospel accounts should be viewed in parallel with these, these individuals are plainly mistaken. In ancient paganism and pre-Jesus Judaism there are exactly zero miracle workers who compare to Jesus. In fact, I am unaware of any religious literature, any literature at all, which makes the miraculous claims found in every strand of the gospel strata. Quick refutations of my point are possible, but close examination shows they are erroneous. The fact that an ancient deity descended to the underworld, dropped dead in the presence of the judges of the underworld, was hung on a hook on the wall and then rescued, brought back to life, by her lover after three days sounds impressive, but it has nothing to do with a man crucified by the Romans in Palestine, whose empty tomb (in reality, found less than three days later) and appearances to historical human beings began a new religion founded on not only his death and resurrection but the miraculous deeds of his life...I am getting off my topic, but I continue to be unconvvinced by those who claim the Jesus story is comparable with the pagan 'parallels' of Jesus. I am also unconvinved, at this time, by the mythicists, those who believe Jesus was not a historical person at all.
So, for my purpose here I will assume the numerous miracles attributed to Jesus have at least some veracity. His followers considered him a healer; Jesus considered himself a healer, and stories of Jesus healing even those close to him, in the presence of witnesses who knew those healed (Mark 1, John 11) contain some truthful threads.
If they do, if Jesus did heal, how does this relate to the problem of suffering?
Human, and animal, suffering is one of the most difficult questions Christians have to answer. The ancient Christian/Jewish tradition of a fall from grace which resulted in suffering and pain (and actually, the traditional Christian teaching requries some interpretation of the Genesis story) appears to be in trouble now that multi-million-year evolution is on the scientific scene. We could still have fallen sometime in our evolutionary history, but what if we didn't? What if we just evolved this way and awful suffering, microbes and cancer and kidney disease and natural disaster and death and grief, what if there are just part of the human package?
Perhaps, if we simply evolved this way, God is partially off the hook (sorry for the mytho-pun from earlier) for human suffering. Our suffering is simply a fact of our evolved existence. We compete with other organisms in the evolutionary scale, including bacteria and viruses, and sometimes we lose. Our pain sense, which is essential to avoid damage all over our body just walking through a wood, at times does more than it needs to. The pain of polio or bone cancer certainly is telling us something is wrong, the same as when I lean against a sharp stick in a tree trunk and my pain receptors tell me to ease up before I poke a hole in my back. Only with many diseases, barring recent medical treatments for which I am intently grateful, the pain cannot lead us to positive, alleviating action. We suffer, but we can't always step away from the sharp stick. A tooth rots and the pain receptors tell us the integrity of our system is threatened; they tell us that pretty acutely. If we didn't know how to pull the tooth, the pain would continue, nagging and hellish, until the infection spread to the blood stream itself. Someday, I surely hope, we will have cures for many diseases (and I echo the current enthusiasm of Buffet and Gates here: money and time may eventually fix much physical suffering). Until we do, some deadly sticks will poke us, hurt us more and more, until they kill us.
Which brings me to the other great problem: death. I know some people, my anthro colleague included, who believe that we will soon extend life to very long spans, perhaps indefinitely, live until we ourselves tire of living and wish to die. Will humans really cure death? Will pain and all disease, our fragile state in the evolutionary life-matrix, eventually be made pain-free and permanent?
I can't say and neither can anyone else. But what theist hasn't struggled with the problem of suffering? I think of a scene from "Sonny's Blues" where the young girl, fictional but representative of millions, is discovered by her parents contorted by polio, in so much pain she cannot scream right away; when she does catch her agonized breath and scream, the howl is horrifying. I think of the death of Darwin's own daughter, a piece in his own fall from faith. Of Lewis' loss of Joy and of the death of a the wife of one of the CADRE bloggers. One story which has always been challenging for my faith is the illness of the man who married my brother. He was a pastor, a nice enough seeming guy, met his wife in Bible college ('God brought us together'), had a church in the midwest...not long after my brother's wedding, not long after I met him, sat and watched him eat pancakes with honey and butter in true midwest fashion, he contracted encephalitis from a mosquito bite, here or back in the midwest I don't know. Was he prayed for during the illness? Almost certainly. Did he live? Yes, but the disease altered his brain, damaged it in some way so that his personality changed, his college-sweetheart wife eventually divorced him, he lost his family, his job, part of his mind. Where is he now? Is he better? I have no idea. But why would such an awful thing happen? Is this God's plan?
If God has a plan for individual events like this, I have no idea what it is and cannot guess. But I tend to think he doesn't. I tend to think this kind of suffering is simply part of being a human in the biologic universe. As C.S. Lewis says, the universe if 'no friend of man's.' The story of my brother's pastor-friend brings that into chilling perspective.
Why does God let this happen? Why doesn't he intervene when children suffer, either from disease or human evil, when a little girl gets cancer and dies or a man molests her (and I read just the other day of a nine year old, french kissed by her sixty something teacher). Why?
I don't know. I do not know. But I know two things. One is that God, Jesus, demands that humans do something concrete about the suffering of others. This is the heart of the gospel message; this, truly, is the Law which Jesus says God commands us to hold. It is a waste of time, and a great error, looking for proscriptive sin lists in the Bible. The essemtial Law is Love, but giving, sacrificing, step out of my way love for those who need help. Why doesn't God just take care of human needs himself? Why does he command me to do something about hunger when he is God? I don't know, but Jesus worked that way in the gospels and God works that way throughout the Tanakh as well. From Moses to Ezekial to the Seventy in the synoptics. We see the same thing in the epistles. Human agency. People are poor, hungry, sick, lonely, in prison, oppressed in an unfair economic system; I want you to do something about it. I can blame God for suffering if I want, for poor people starving and depressed people struggling alone, but what am I freaking doing about it? According to Jesus, God will ask. I need much greater action in my own life in this area.
The second piece of this (and surely human effort, at this time at least, cannot alleviate all suffering) is Jesus behavior while on earth. And this has been my shift in thinking this week: I felt the question of human suffering was unanswered. A painful, existential puzzle that I could not reconcile easily with my faith. But what did Jesus do on earth? He healed. He removed sickness, and even death, all the time.
The gospel writers, Mark at least (and Mt and Lk who took from him assuming they did) may have gotten the demonic possession thing wrong, or overstated; this is another issue. Still, Jesus casts out demons, frees minds from suffering, throughout the synoptics. But he also heals physical illnesses which clearly could not be mistaken. Deformed limbs, men known to be crippled or blind from birth, obvious skin diseases, even the dead. The point is that I do not know why we suffer, or why God, or his universe, allowed us to develop so that we do suffer and die, but I do know that the gospel Jesus, consistently and regularly, remedied these very things.
This in itself is a remarkable fact. The gospel writers seem to have missed it, even. In John, the miracles (not all of which are healings, true) are signs so that we may believe. In the synoptics, faith brings about the healing in many cases. But in all cases, unlike any previous figure in Jewish literature, Jesus removes suffering. Why does he do this?
The clues are sparse, but compassion and a desire to have all included in the religious cultus seem evident. Jesus healed, notoriously, on the sabbath; he touched those unclean when he healed them. We have a fixed number of miracles in the gospels (do I recall 17?) but both Mark and John note that Jesus performed many more such acts, healing from village to village those who needed relief from their pain and physical deformities.
In short, I do not know why God allows physical suffering and disease, but I know that Jesus, God's unique historical emissary, spent great energy alleviating it as he travelled. It mattered to him. He told his followers if must matter to them also.
It would be great if healings were as common in the church now as they appear to be in Jesus' time. It would sure make apologetics interesting. I don't know why they aren't, though I've heard some say they believe they are. No one less than Ben Witherington, BW3, has claimed to have seen physical deformities healed in response to prayer. I haven't been so lucky, yet. It seems Jesus came not to end all suffering and death immediately, nor to empower all his followers to do so miraculously in his absence. But the fact that he so consistently and supernaturally remedied human disease and suffering, even death, tells me a lot about the God he claimed to represent.
If the atonement is true, if Christ carried his mission beyond healing physical disease to giving his life to atone for our spiritual death, an infinitely more important deficit, than those who rail against God for allowing human suffering need to think about such a sacrifice, such suffering, given, again according to the earliest Christian documents we have, in place of our own, freely, by a loving God. Why God allows suffering I don't know. But in Jesus life, and perhaps death, I see a clear committment to ending it.
I believe it is Voltaire who says, "If God is God, then he's the Devil." Meaning if we have an omniscient deity who is also all-powerful, in some way he is responsible for the horrendous suffering of innocent people, if only because he does not stop it. But those who rail against God because of human pain, Voltaire and my own self included, need to consider two other things: Jesus' commands regarding suffering and his miraculous, frequent healings while on earth (apparently unnecessary in any direct way for his mission), and Jesus' apparent belief that he was being offered as God's sacrifice in place of others.
And finally, while God's response to Job may seem inadequate for many of us, I do consider it. God, in that text, points out to Job the things he cannot understand, large and powerful specimens of the animal kingdom, Behemoth and Leviathan. Job sees God is greater than him by reflecting on these animals. Primitive but interesting. But Job did not know the size of the cosmos, the unknowable vastness of billion-galaxied space. If God truly made all this universe, he must be something indeed. My own reason, perhaps, becomes dangerous when I try to compare it to his. For me, this might not be a satisfactory final answer. But when we look at human suffering and say there can be no God we are in fact saying something about God. No good God could allow this; we would not allow it, if we were God. Bold, even smug, thinking that. But to be fair we must also look at Jesus' actions and words. When God does break directly into our dim and scattered corner of the cosmos, he heals, and heals, and heals some more. He raises the dead. Then he tells us to get our butts in gear and do what we can to alleviate hunger and suffering with the means we have.
What did Voltaire do to help those individals around him who suffered? What have I done? What are any of us doing? Surely this is the highest of all calls. This is Jesus' ethical command. Before I blast God for not doing enough, why not look at myself, look at Jesus, pray and hope that the day will soon come when Christ will make all things right.
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