Losing My Place in the Winner’s Inner Circle

Column by Brian McLaren on 17 November 2022 1 Comments

Mainline Protestants were part of America’s most successful form of Christianity until the tide began to turn in the late sixties and early seventies, and now, they are no longer the successful majority.

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Question

How can I help my fellow parishioner who, after a long and debilitating health issue, is struggling with feelings of anger and disappointment with God and is feeling abandoned, or unloved by God?

Answer

Dear Reader,

Whether trying to help someone else, or trying to help oneself, it helps to realize that we are not alone in our bewilderment about suffering and that others have agonized over the same problem. The New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, facing the “problem of evil”, ie, the issue of undeserved suffering, turned his back to Christianity and became agnostic. Robert Duvall, in his 2003 movie, Open Range, lost one of his cowboys in an ambush. When asked if he wanted to offer a prayer to God at the funeral, Duvall responded, “I don’t want anything to do with that son of a bitch.” Job, of course, is the embodiment of the ultimate innocent sufferer. Most readers don’t realize that there are three parts to this book: prologue, epilogue and main poem, the last being the first written. The image here is of a man ravaged by physical and social torment. His friends try to sooth his confusion and frustration, but his anger at God finds no comfort as he shakes his fist at the heavens and demands that the All Powerful come down and be tried in court. Readers of this poem in later years were so upset by Job’s reaction that they added a softener, a prologue and epilogue that cast the whole scene as a wager between God and Satan wherein Job remains faithfully patient and so is rewarded manifold. Not the original story. 

You may remember the “solution” of the poem, where God does indeed answer Job and speaks out a whirlwind. “Where were you when the foundations of the earth were created…?”, which, of course, is no answer at all. When we remember that the voice is a literary gimmick and not the actual voice of God, it becomes clear that when confronted with the question, “Why do the innocent suffer?”, Job’s answer is, “I don’t know. I just don’t know”. Shaking her fist at the heavens my very own mother couldn’t wait to meet God and give him a piece of her mind. Dismay at innocent suffering in the world creates in us an unremitting anger with a God who permits such to happen. 

The problem arises when we assume that god is both loving and omnipotent. If a loving god can stop suffering and chooses not to, what kind of god are we dealing with? For myself, I answer the question on two levels, the immediate and the long range. In the context of current suffering, we need to get away from the idea that god can fix everything. No prayers for a new bike, a victory at a game or in a war, no cure for that which is presently incurable. God is not omnipotent. That’s one of the lessons we learn from Jesus: the way the divine is related to the world is not through the brute force of intervention, but through the persuasive power of love. This perspective necessitates that we forgo the notion that Jesus violated the order of nature by walking on water and turning water into wine. God does not intervene to prevent innocent suffering.

The long term perspective is different. When it comes to how we view the universe, we have three choices: the cosmos is immoral, meaning that the devil rules, so to speak, or it is amoral, meaning that suffering comes and goes with no meaning and no cause for dismay, or the universe is moral. The morality of the universe means that the undeserved suffering and death of an innocent two year old, for example, is not the end of the story, that somehow, some way, some time, God makes it all right. The referred to persuasive power of love is not a mushy sentiment but rather a statement about the essence of the universe. That, of course, is a statement of faith, but a statement to the contrary is, for me, not acceptable.

Struggling with health and loss is painful, but also mitigated when we realize that we are not alone and that others share our confusion and our pain. God also shares our pain in the here and now, a God in and with us, not presenting miraculous cures, but beyond our understanding assuring us that love will win the day.

~ Dr. Carl Krieg

 

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