Christianity in the Midst of Suffering
twitter.com
Some timely encouragement from Tim Keller in his book Walking with God through Pain and Suffering:
In ancient times, Christianity was widely recognized as having superior resources for facing evil, suffering, and death. In modern times — though it is not as publicly discussed — it continues to have assets for sufferers arguably far more powerful than anything secular culture can offer. Those assets, however, reside in robust, distinctive Christian beliefs.
The cross also proves that… God is for us.
The first relevant Christian belief is in a personal, wise, infinite, and therefore inscrutable God who controls the affairs of the world—and that is far more comforting than the belief that our lives are in the hands of fickle fate or random chance. The second crucial tenet is that, in Jesus Christ, God came to earth and suffered with and for us sacrificially—and that is far more comforting than the idea that God is remote and uninvolved. The cross also proves that, despite all the inscrutability, God is for us. The third doctrine is that through faith in Christ’s work on the cross, we can have assurance of salvation—that is far more comforting than the karmic systems of thought. We are assured that the difficulties of life are not payment for our past sins, since Jesus has paid them. As Luther taught, suffering is unbearable if you aren’t certain that God is for you and with you. Secularity cannot give you that, and religions that provide salvation through virtue and good works cannot give it, either.
But resurrection is not just consolation — it is restoration.
The fourth great doctrine is that of the bodily resurrection from the dead for all who believe. This completes the spectrum of our joys and consolations. One of the deepest desires of the human heart is for love without parting. Needles to say, the prospect of the resurrection is far more comforting than the beliefs that death takes you into nothingness or into an impersonal spiritual substance. The resurrection goes beyond the promise of an ethereal, disembodied afterlife. We get our bodies back, in a state of beauty and power that we cannot today imagine. Jesus’ resurrection body was corporeal — it could be touched and embraced, and he ate food. And yet he passed through closed doors and could disappear. This is a material existence, but one beyond the bounds of imagination. The idea of heaven can be a consolation for suffering, a compensation for the life we have lost. But resurrection is not just consolation — it is restoration. We get it all back — the love, the loved ones, the goods, the beauties of life — but in new, unimaginable degrees of glory and joy and strength. It is a reversal of the seeming irreversibility of loss that Luc Ferry speaks of.
natural evil… confounds those who don’t believe we are all sinners needing salvation by sheer grace.
If one does not find consolation in these Christian doctrines, then I think total disbelief in God is better preparation for tragedy than the thinned-out, secularized belief in God that is so common in our Western world. Many people today believe in God, and may go to church, but if you ask them whether they are certain of their salvation and acceptance with God, or whether the idea of Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross is real and profoundly moving to them, or whether they are convinced of the bodily resurrection of Jesus and believers — you are likely to get a negative answer, or just a stare. Western culture’s immanent frame weakens intellectual belief in God, and it makes heart certainty even more difficult to come by. But this partial Christianity or theism is far more difficult to hold in the face of horrendous suffering than is atheism. As Taylor has shown us, natural evil offends those who believe in a God who exists for us, and confounds those who don’t believe we are all sinners needing salvation by sheer grace.
Atheist writer Susan Jacoby wrote in The New York Times that “when I see homeless people shivering in the wake of a deadly storm, when the news media bring me almost obscenely close to the raw grief of bereft parents, I do not have to ask, as all people of faith must, why an all-powerful, all-good God allows such things to happen.” She is right, of course, at one level. If you don’t believe in God at all, you don’t struggle with the question of why life is so unjust. It just is — deal with it. But you also have none of the powerful comforts and joys that Christian belief can give you, either. Jacoby says atheism makes you “free of what is known as the theodicy problem” not needing to “square [terrible] things” in this life “with an unseen overlord in the next.”
But as we have seen in philosopher Charles Taylor’s writing, the “theodicy problem” is largely the product not of a strong belief in God and sin, but of a weaker form of belief. It is as we get larger in our own eyes, less dependent on God’s grace and revelation, and surer that we understand how the universe works and how history should go that the problem of evil becomes so intolerable. And it is only as God becomes more remote — a God who is all-loving only in the abstract, not in the sense of having suffered and died for us to rescue us from evil — that he seems unbearably callous in the face of pain. In short, theism without certainty of salvation or resurrection is far more disillusioning in the midst of pain than is atheism. When suffering, believing in God thinly or in the abstract is worse than not believing in God at all.