Dare One Read the News?

I once had a friend in England who, in order to justify his habit of reading the admittedly gossip-laden newspapers each day, tried to pray for each catastrophe he read about.  “It got too tiring,” he said, “there were too many sad things: murders, rapes, deaths, lies, and more”.  One can understand the sentiment: sometimes it’s simply easier to keep the hardships of the world at arm’s length.  One’s own personal problems are more than enough to shoulder after a certain age. 

Nor is this pure selfishness.  T.S. Eliot rightly noted that human kind cannot bear too much reality.  To drink in all the world’s woes, to be sensitive to every ounce of suffering even in one’s family and friends, can overwhelm one’s basic psychological equilibrium.  The psychologists themselves find that those most prone to depression are often also those most responsive to sufferings which are not their own; it pays off in happiness, psychologically at least, to restrict one’s own concern about the problem of evil to oneself.  One can hardly bear more than one’s own burdens without real sanctity.  

But people of faith do wonder why a good God would allow suffering – close or distant – and the philosophers and the theologians have much to say to us.  Christians do want to address the intellectual problem of suffering since suffering invades all aspects of life, bodily, spiritual, and intellectual.  Here are some admittedly academic distinctions I have found to be very helpful. 

The problem at hand is the so-called “problem of evil”: the assertion that the type, degree, and extent of evil in this world makes God’s existence improbable.  God may exist – but the extent of suffering in the world makes it less likely that He does.  A “theodicy”, in response, attempt to give positive, factual, reasons to believe in God despite such abundant evils in the world.  One here thinks of the famous “free will” theodicy which attempts to account for our world’s suffering as a result of misused free will – the very free will which a good God gave us and whose abuse neither negates His goodness nor jeopardizes His existence. 

Theologians, unlike many philosophers, often find such terms off-track.  They often deem it impious to try, as Milton famously put it, “to justify the ways of God to men”.  The sheer ambition of a theodicy to show the logical compatibility of a loving God alongside suffering appears too great for finite, fallen, creatures such as we are.  Is it not prideful to attempt to account for God’s ways or to create a calculus which could weigh the values of the goods and evils of the world?  Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man articulates these misgivings as elegantly as any. 

Nevertheless, theologians need not (nor ought to) shrink from the task of addressing the problem of evil.  If full-scale theodicies seek to answer the problem of evil, what scholars call “defenses” are less ambitious.  Defenses do not attempt to know God’s thoughts or know the universal picture from the Divine vantage point.  Rather, defenses simply give models of why it might be that God’s existence is not implausible given human suffering.  Defenses  (unlike theodicies) do not try to give the knock-out blow to the problem of evil, but simply shore up the mind with reasons for the probability of a good God despite contrary data. 

A classic “defense”, from a Christian perspective, is not to run away from suffering in terms of faith but towards it.  In other words, it is through human suffering, though evils themselves, that God meets us in a distinct way.  It is not only the good and beautiful things of the world which potentially mediate God’s goodness, but all things.  Or, to use theological language, all things are ‘sacramental’ – God will use every tool – and the Cross itself witnesses powerfully to how God will take the evils of this world as the very means of communion and connection to Him.  Evil and suffering are real: but God’s ability to take the worst the cosmos can throw at us and transform it is more real still. 

Nevertheless, such theological language can obscure the fact that most of patients in the hospital I meet – and probably most normal Christians – are, understandably, not formulating either “theodicies” or “defenses”. Rather, they often ask why God allows this evil to happen to me.  When it comes to the wider woes of the world, from earthquakes in China to greed on Wall Street, the threat of suffering to our souls is most acute when it is close to home.  So, naturally, the questions are more like, ‘why did my daughter have that car accident, my grandfather that cancer, or my spouse that breakdown?’  People regularly show a desire for meaning in personal, particular suffering. 

And quite rightly do we turn to God for answers.  Surely meaning can be found from the Maker of meaning.  The problem grows worse, however, when He (apparently) offers no answer.  Divine silence in response to our own suffering makes that suffering only worse.  Or does it?  As Metropolitan Anthony Bloom astutely notes, meeting God is no light matter and hearing the Divine voice is a terrifying experience.  Every meeting with God in Scripture, much less an angel, is a crisis.  Remember Job.  Do we really want the Divine answer as to why we or a loved one suffer?  Would it “satisfy” us?  If it does, and this is a perilous question, who is judging Whom?  We risk placing God in the defendant’s position when we ask for answers, as if we were to judge the Judge of all.   

The tempered humility in realizing our limitations to arrive at or assess an answer, and yet the persistent hope that meaning can arise from suffering create a peculiar situation.  It forces us to wait.  As with mothers who miscarry a child or spouses who lose their beloved, so often the process of grieving ends up after considerable time revealing a good which could not have been had in any other way.  But it takes time.  A certain communion with God is possible (if sought) which has a different tenor from communion with Him in sunnier circumstances.  So often those answers take years and come upon us like an unexpected dawn.  And that’s why one has to keep reading the news; the process of redemptive suffering is exactly that – a process.  Even at the end of one’s life, when there are no more earthly chapters to be written, one trusts in Him who has the first and the last Word.

St. Nicodemus

Comments

[Dawn]

Beautiful post. Glad I stopped by!

[anon]

Many theologians have made heavy weather of the fact that offering theodicies is somehow impious or inappropriate for Christians. I appreciated your more measured approach. Certainly, if it's ok for the fathers of the church to speculate on matters such as the personhood of Christ or the nature of the Trinity, it's also ok for us to think hard about the reasons why there is evil and why God might permit it.

[Thomas More]

I'm reminded of Gen. 50:20. That verse, however, is difficult to translate to practical comfort when sitting with a friend in a hospital, or hearing of wars and woes.

[Muggeridge]

The body of this article is excellent. Loved the stuff about defences as opposed to theodicies; about the characteristically Christian ability to move towards suffering sometimes, and not always away from it; the possibility of mercy in divine silence (because God's voice would be yet more terrible); the impiousness of trying to judge the Judge of All.

Less convinced by the conclusion that "one has to keep reading the news". That doesn't really follow from what has been said in the rest of the article. Most news reports are deeply inaccurate. Much of what passes as newsworthy is just gossip or schadenfreude. Even where it's factually accurate and of genuine public interest, one has to question the news editors' priorities in highlighting bad news as much as they tend to do. What about the scriptural exhortation to think on things that are pure, lovely, noble, honourable, etc? Newspapers, even where they are at their best, rarely encourage that attitude.

But apart from this point, the article was very good, I felt: interesting, thoughtful, humane, articulate, theologically informed, pastorally sensitive. Thank you.

[Philomena]

Thank you St Nicodemus. This is an excellent post. It brings two things to mind-

A TV doctor this morning made the point that the recent swine flu outbreak is causing panic simply because we have too much information. We know when the first case is recorded, the second, the third, then how many countries it's spread to...it's too much fuel for our imaginations. We should be taking care of our health, of course, but in this case the non-relevant details are making us more anxious.
It also reminds me of a question a Sunday school teacher friend of mine asked me recently. A friend of hers had advised her to avoid teaching from the Old Testament, because it was full of events too traumatic for children. She asked me what I thought of that. I was stunned by the question and strongly disagreed with her friends advice. I suggested there were ways to present the OT stories in age-appropriate ways, stressing the themes of God's judgement, protection, deliverance, faithfulness etc. But this raises another question: To what extent do you protect children from the news, or even the harsh realities of scripture? Can we encourage them to take the defensive approach you describe, St. Nicodemus?

[nicodemus]

Thanks, all, for so many interesting comments. Like Thomas More, it seems more and more apparent to me that one has to distinguish the Theological, the Apologetic, and the Pastoral dimension of "defenses". What works for Xians isn't necessarily what works for non-Xians and neither are generally pastorally suitable for people amidst suffering. Also, to clarify for Muggeridge, I wasn't implying that human news was worth reading per se - so much of it is propaganda! It's also strangely addictive. Instead, I meant that "we have to keep reading the news" in that news, good news, i.e. the gospel, is yet to be perfected in full force. The very God who "makes all things new", our Editor in Chief, gets the last words in on history. The long-term, i.e. eschatological, hope concerning evil & suffering is required and the content of that hope is yet to be revealed.

Like you, Philomena, I think it best to give OT stories in an age-appropriate fashion, and not omit them. As our children don't even have a TV in the house, you can imagine what I think about exposing children to contemporary affairs. I prefer to stake the tree and let it grow roots before exposing it to the hurricane....