Ethical Concerns in Jewish and Christian Theologies of Suffering

ETHICAL CONCERNS IN JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN

THEOLOGIES OF SUFFERING

A thesis by Miriam Y. Attia

Presented to The Faculty of the Graduate Theological Union in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Berkeley, California May 2015

Committee Signatures

Naomi Seidman, Coordinator Date

Gregory Love, Member Date

Suffering has to come because if you look at the cross, he has got his head bending down – he wants to kiss you – and he has both hands open wide – he wants to embrace you. He has his heart opened wide to receive you. Then when you feel miserable inside, look at the cross and you will know what is happening. Suffering, pain, sorrow, humiliation, feelings of loneliness, are nothing but the kiss of Jesus, a sign that you have come so close that he can kiss you. Do you understand, brothers, sisters, or whoever you may be? Suffering, pain, humiliation – this is the kiss of Jesus. At times you come so close to Jesus on the cross that he can kiss you. I once told this to a lady who was suffering very much. She answered. ‘Tell Jesus not to kiss me – to stop kissing me.” That suffering has to come that came in the life of Our Lady, that came in the life of Jesus – it has to come in our life also. Only never put on a long face. Suffering is a gift from God.

“Christ’s Compassion for the Suffering”, attributed to Mother Teresa of Calcutta

For my parents, who gave me the tools, For my teachers, who showed me the way, And for Aaron, who gave me the purpose

Introduction: Popular Theology’s Failure to Respond to Severe Suffering

The problem of human suffering is universal, and equally universal is the struggle to make sense of it. Those who turn to religion in their suffering receive mixed results. Depending on the character of the person and the nature of the suffering, some religious teachings about why we suffer can help the afflicted survive and respond productively even to unspeakable anguish, while other teachings can prolong or worsen their painful experiences even while they offer support to those who find their suffering more manageable. How we talk about what our suffering means is thus a matter of crucial importance for members, and especially leaders, of religious communities. For those who want to embrace only those teachings about suffering that their religions’ scripture and tradition support, having multiple options may help them find an approach that suits their purposes and brings needed relief to pain. In order to better equip Jewish and Christian clergy and others who want to comfort people in pain, I propose to demonstrate the range of what these religions’ texts teach the modern reader about why we suffer, and to consider which of these texts will help each kind of sufferer most.

By “suffering,” I mean the subjectively determined state of unwanted physical or emotional pain or hardship that pushes the boundaries of what the subject can tolerate, whether in degree or in duration. Some people can respond productively to some experiences of suffering, but prolonged, severe suffering what Simone Weil calls affliction and what Wendy Farley calls radical suffering1 isolates the sufferer and

1 Wendy Farley defines radical suffering as whatever afflicts an undeserving victim such that the victim is dehumanized, unable to defy the source of the suffering, and unable to anticipate any relief. Wendy Farley, Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), 5359. Fo o e o Fa le s theolog of suffe i g, see Chapte III.

damages the sufferer’s sense of self and the strength of will needed to resist further damage. Simone Weil, in her book Waiting on God, writes,

As for those who have been struck by one of those blows which leave a being struggling on the ground like a half crushed worm, they have no words to express what is happening to them. [People they meet] who have never had contact with affliction in its true sense can have no idea of what it is, even though they may have suffered a great deal. Affliction is something specific and impossible to describe in any other terms, like the sounds of which nothing can convey the slightest idea to anyone who is deaf and dumb.2

Dorothee Soelle, in her book Suffering, supports Weil’s observation when she writes, “one of the fundamental experiences about suffering is precisely the lack of communication, the dissolution of meaningful and productive ties. To stand under the burden of suffering always means to become more and more isolated.”3 To connect with others, we need mutual understanding, but radical suffering damages our ability to connect. Perhaps the sufferer lacks the words to adequately describe her experiences so that others can understand, or others lack the capacity for empathy despite the sufferer’s articulate self-expression. Affliction can send the sufferer into emotional shock, leaving her unable to process her experiences, which makes her unable to narrate them to herself and others. She is cut off from the healing power of human connection.

But suffering does more than isolate. It also attracts irrational contempt, both from the sufferer and from everyone else. Weil continues,

Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt and defilement which crime logically should produce but actually does not. … If Job cries out that he is innocent in such despairing accents, it is because he himself is beginning not to believe in it, it is because his soul within him is taking the side of his friends. He implores God himself to bear witness,

2 Simone Weil, Waiting on God trans. Emma Craufurd (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 39.

3 Dorothee Soelle, Suffering, trans. Everett R. Kalin (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 75.

because he no longer hears the testimony of his own conscience; it is no longer anything but an abstract, lifeless memory for him.

Men have the same carnal nature as animals. If a hen is hurt, the others rush upon it, attacking it with their beaks. This phenomenon is as automatic as gravitation. Our senses attach all the scorn, all the revulsion, all the hatred, that our reason attaches to crime, to affliction. Except for those whose whole soul is inhabited by Christ, everybody despises the afflicted to some extent, although practically no one is conscious of it.4

Concealed in our more praiseworthy natural instincts lurks the reflex to despise whoever is so unfortunate as to be helplessly in pain, even if it is we who are so unfortunate. The reflex operates whether or not the sufferer deserves the anguish. We can work against it, but some people justify it to themselves instead of working against it. The sufferer risks their contempt if she tries to speak to them about her pain, which only isolates her further.

To compound the horror of this situation, the afflicted can lose touch with her sense of self distinct from her suffering. Her new identity as “a sufferer” can take over

To an observer, she will appear uninterested in improving her situation. Weil explains:

Another effect of affliction is, little by little, to make the soul its accomplice, by injecting a poison of inertia into it. In anyone who has suffered affliction for a long enough time there is a complicity with regard to his own affliction. This complicity impedes all the efforts he might make to improve his lot; it goes so far as to prevent him from seeking a way of deliverance, sometimes even to the point of preventing him from wishing for deliverance. Then he is established in affliction, and people might think he was satisfied. Further, this complicity may even induce him to shun the means of deliverance. In such cases it veils itself with excuses which are often ridiculous. Even a person who has come through his affliction will still have something left in him which impels him to plunge into it again, if it has bitten deeply and for ever into the substance of his soul. It is as though affliction had established itself in him like a parasite and were directing him to suit its own purposes. Sometimes this impulse triumphs over all the movements of the soul towards happiness. If the affliction has been ended as a result of some kindness, it may take the form of hatred for the benefactor; such is the cause of certain apparently inexplicable acts of savage ingratitude.5

4 Weil, 40.

5 Weil, 40-41.

Wendy Farley supports Weil’s observations in her discussion of radical suffering, which she defines as whatever afflicts an undeserving victim to the point that the victim is hopeless, broken, and dehumanized, and can no longer resist the source of anguish.6

While it is beyond the scope of this work to provide a complete taxonomy of human suffering, it is useful at this point to introduce two types of sufferers, whom I will call Ms. Green and Ms. Brown. The initial cause of Ms. Green’s suffering is irreversible. Perhaps she grieves over the death of a loved one or deals with past trauma. She may live with a physical or mental condition that bars her from the life she wants to pursue. The best Ms. Green can do is find ways to cope, perhaps by surrounding herself with a community of loving, supportive people who honor her grief and help her find joy and fulfillment in whatever she can pursue. By contrast, whatever causes Ms. Brown’s suffering is ongoing, but it does not need to be. She may be married to an abusive spouse or impoverished and living on the streets, or she may live with a treatable physical or mental illness. Ms. Brown, like Ms. Green, might like to know that someone is witnessing her plight and cares about what she is going through, but her life can also improve in another way: whatever force perpetuates her suffering can be neutralized.

Suppose these women are inclined to take to heart whatever their religions teach them about the meaning of their suffering, and their well-meaning minister pays them each a pastoral visit. The minister gently explains that undeserved suffering is something God permits because of its good purpose: it develops our spiritual, moral, and intellectual personality from our rather poor natural state to one in which we have the potential for excellence, so that we can ultimately come to know and choose to have a loving

6 Farley, 53-59.

relationship with God.7 Or perhaps the minister imparts a view of undeserved human suffering as the painful but worthwhile refining process that God puts us through in order to improve us. Through it, we change from being displeasing to God, albeit with fine potential, to being fully lovable in God’s eyes.8 Either way, the minister’s view of human suffering rests upon the idea that God provides us with painful experiences in order to achieve divine purposes, and the minister shares this view with Ms. Green and Ms. Brown when they divulge how they have suffered.

Apart from the compassionate gesture of the visit itself, how are this minister’s words likely to affect each woman? Ms. Green may feel comforted by the thought that her inescapable suffering has redeeming value. Moderate pain becomes more bearable when we believe it has a good purpose.9 Perhaps she will even conclude that the pain she has borne qualifies her for divine approval over and above other people, a reassuring (if self-centered) thought, although it could just as easily leave her confused about why her measure of pain is so much greater than that of others. But if her suffering is unmanageably severe if she has endured the sort of affliction that Weil and Soelle describe then she might conclude that something is wrong with her, since all her pain has left her not better but worse isolated, self-hating, and stuck. She may blame herself:

7 Joh Hi k p ese ts o e e sio of this ie i his A I e aea Theodi i Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, ed. Stephen T. Davis (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 46-48.

8 Lewis articulates this view in his book, The Problem of Pain. C.S. Lewis, The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers, 2002), 570-574. See the final section of Chapter I for more on his view.

9 A University of Turin study found that deceiving subjects into believing some moderate pain would benefit their health gave their subjects greater physical tolerance for that pain than subjects who e e told, a u atel , that the pai ould o fe o e efit. The de ei ed su je ts odies eleased o e pain-killi g opioids a d a a i oids tha the othe su je ts odies. F. Be edetti et al., Pai as a Reward: Changing the Meaning of Pain from Negative to Positive Co-Activates Opioid and Cannabinoid “ ste s., Pu Med, No e e , 012, accessed January 28, 2015, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23265686

she must have responded in the wrong way to her suffering, by developing inadequately or failing to become more pleasing to God. (While we cannot know the original source of the longstanding belief that suffering implies guilt, we can say that Ms. Green has a motive to blame herself: by doing so, she can justify the pain-induced self-hatred which Weil says she instinctively feels.) But once she has justified her self-hatred, it will be harder for her to recognize its basic irrationality and work against it. Underneath everything else, Ms. Green may feel troubled that God both loves His human children and requires them to suffer so severely. Even if the end goal is good, could God really find no alternative plan, one that did not require people to endure such protracted pain?

Ms. Brown is unlikely to fare much better. Not only will she face the same difficulties Ms. Green will face; she will also confront the question of whether to pull herself out of her harmful situation. If, for example, her spouse abuses her, she may struggle to discern whether God wants her free from abuse or whether she ought to remain with her partner. Her own self-preservation instinct, if she still has access to it, will urge her to leave, but her religious leader’s teachings might not. If she believes all suffering is God-given for our improvement, she may attack her own desire to flee as unrighteous, and she may believe her abusive spouse to be an instrument of God. If God wants to improve her through suffering, it would be impious to seek relief! To the extent that staying with her abusive partner allows her to feel virtuous, leaving would make her feel guilty. And if she only finds her situation marginally tolerable because she believes her pain has a good purpose, then she may find herself trapped in part by her own coping mechanism. To decide to leave her situation would require her to first adopt the belief that her pain will not bring a good end, and that new belief might be unbearable. Without

the comfort of the old belief, the severity of the pain she feels might worsen so quickly that she would be unable to bear it even for the short time it would take to secure her escape. Purely for reasons of short-term self-preservation, she may cling both to her pain and to the belief that it serves a good purpose.

The pressure upon Ms. Brown to remain in her harmful situation might come not only from herself but also from others. One man whose father abused him and his family wrote about his efforts to get help from his church community, saying,

I found that when I did try to share my story with [fellow church] members or the Bishop, they would always try to pull out the silver lining, as if there are benefits to being severely abused and that I should somehow be grateful. The community that should have [offered support] completely and utterly failed me. Every leader or member that knew what was going on and never called social services, or the police, or continued to place [family unity] over the well-being, safety, and care of my mother and us children completely failed us.10

The members of his church community refused to rank his family’s need for safety over the ideal of family unity, instead insisting that their suffering must be valuable to them.

Another survivor of domestic abuse offers a similar account, saying “I stayed far too long [because] my bishop pressured me into staying in a physically abusive marriage. He told me God gave me this challenge and eternity is about the bigger picture.”11 For Ms. Brown to seek protection from domestic abuse is hard enough, even with the support of her religious leader and the community. If she instead receives well-intentioned pressure to keep things as they are for the sake of her family’s unity, and if that pressure finds

10 N K, Ja ua , : p , o e t o “to ies of Wo e A d Me Who Feel The Ha e Bee Ha ed Mo o Pat ia h , Mo o “to ies Pod ast, Ja ua , , a essed Ja ua 24, 2015, http://mormonstories.org/stories-of-women-who-feel-they-have-been-harmed-by-mormonpatriarchy/comment-page-1/#comments

11 Fe i ist Mo o House i es Dis ussio G oup, Fa e ook, No e ber 4, 2014, accessed January 24, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/groups/fmhsociety/permalink/763064730434125/?comment_id=763107333 763198

support in the belief that God must have a reason for her suffering, then seeking protection anyway becomes monumentally more difficult. Responding wisely to people in pain about the meaning of our suffering can mean saving lives. When we can save a life at so little cost to ourselves, why would we not do so?

That cost need not involve teaching what goes against our own religious commitments. Most religions give multiple explanations for why we suffer. In the following pages, I intend to investigate several categories of religious responses to suffering from Jewish and Christian scripture and tradition. I will consider how well each would support Ms. Green’s efforts to cope with her situation and how well each would help Ms. Brown change hers for the better.

Differentiating these religious responses to suffering becomes easier when we consider them in relation to the classic philosophical puzzle, the problem of evil. The problem’s central paradox rests on three premises that cannot all be true at the same time: (1) the world is unjust, (2) God is all-good, and (3) God is all-powerful. If God wields absolute power, He can create and maintain the world so that it is exactly as He wants it to be. If God is perfectly good, He must want the world to be governed according to principles of justice. Yet people on earth suffer, uninterrupted by the sort of just and irresistible divine intervention we would expect to see if those two claims about God were true. To logically resolve the paradox, we must give up at least one of the three claims either that the world is unjust, or that God’s goodness is perfect, or that God has absolute power. Each possibility forms the basis for a logical resolution to the problem of evil: (1) God causes or allows us to suffer because God knows that our suffering has purpose or value, or (2) God inflicts unjust suffering upon us because God is not always

completely good, or (3) God would like to protect us from our unjust suffering, but needs our help to do so. I devote a chapter to each of those three approaches. There are three other popular responses to suffering that I will investigate more briefly. One combines elements of the first and third resolutions, saying that (4) God suffers with us in order to bring an end to our suffering. The next one says that (5) even though we suffer unjustly, and even though we have no good explanation for it, we maintain faith that God is allgood and all-powerful. The shadow side to this fifth approach is the usually non-theistic view that (6) our suffering has no explanation at all.

Each of these six approaches has an advantage and a weakness. First, if human suffering is justified because it produces some essential good, then we can move through life with the assurance that come what may, all is well, but what justification have we for our individual, communal, and societal efforts to alleviate human suffering? If we believe that the rampant human suffering we observe is God’s will, should we not work instead to increase its reach? The commendable religious imperative to relieve suffering, common to Judaism and Christianity, loses some of its force when pain is interpreted as valuable to its sufferer. Second, if God is not wholly good, then we are freed from the troubling belief that we are obligated to obey and worship one who appears to be abusing us, and we have a sort of religious license to protest injustice, but we must also live in constant insecurity, knowing that no matter how we behave, we cannot be sure that God will grant us the stability and control over our own lives that we desire. Third, if God is not supremely powerful, then we can interpret our unjust suffering as coming from some power other than God’s. We can protest against it with the assurance that God, who loves justice, is on our side. However, we must confront the fear that the good of creation is

doomed to remain forever in the control of powers that exceed God’s. Fourth, if God suffers alongside us and survives to rescue us from our suffering, then our suffering never isolates us, we can see ourselves as beloved by God rather than contemptible, and we have hope of future paradise. However, we bear some responsibility for God’s suffering, a heavy burden for anyone to bear, and even though He descends into affliction with us, it is unclear whether God knows firsthand how fully suffering can break us Fifth, if the meaning of our suffering is beyond our capacity to understand, or sixth, if it simply has no explanation, we are freed from the sometimes maddening (and potentially fruitless) quest to make sense of the pain life brings us. But these approaches may also leave us worse off: with no hope of finding purpose for our suffering, we may be permanently unsettled by a resulting lack of closure, as if life were a three-act play stuck in act two; or we may see no point to life at all if we think it is not worth the pain.

In the following pages, I will make the case for two points: first, that Christian and Jewish scripture and tradition support all five of these conflicting approaches to human suffering; and second, that what most benefits one type of sufferer may harm another. From those premises, and from my underlying assumption that we all ought to relieve our fellows’ suffering especially when we can do so without harming ourselves or others, I will conclude that religious leaders and community members have an obligation to respond wisely to each sufferer to whom they minister. Comforting people in pain requires us to set aside our own favorite beliefs and consider which approaches will be most effective at bringing them relief. In this way, we can empower them to move back toward wholeness without jeopardizing their connection to God in the process.

Chapter I: Suffering Has Positive Value

The idea that all is as it ought to be, and therefore there must be some good reason why people suffer, is one of the most popular responses to suffering among traditional Jews and Christians. According to some, it is the only acceptable response. In this chapter, we will see religious justifications of suffering describing it as consequences of sin, divine pedagogy, and advance payment for future reward, and we will consider whom those justifications might help.

Scriptural Support for Theologies of Justified or Redemptive Suffering

Those seeking support for this response to suffering find plenty of it in biblical texts. Many passages lend weight to the idea that suffering is useful, whether because it gives just punishment to a sinner or because it improves the person who suffers or because it allows for God to be particularly generous with His future gifts. Some early expressions of the idea that suffering is the deserved consequence of sin appear in the book of Deuteronomy, when Moses, in his final address to Israel, describes the divine rewards and punishments associated with the laws he has given them. In Deuteronomy 11:26-28 and 30:15-20, we read that we will receive good or bad results according to whether we obey or stray from God’s commandments. This view appears not only throughout the Hebrew Bible but also in the writings of other Ancient Near Eastern civilizations.12 In this view, God organizes the world in such a way that each deed plants

12 Some understandings of justice in the Hebrew Bible are akin to the Ancient Egyptians idea of Maat. Maat was both a prominent goddess and an abstract concept of the world order. In Ancient Egyptian myth, the world was perfect when created, but its continued perfection depends upon right human behavior. For natural forces to work predictably, all people, whatever their place in the hierarchy (but especially the ruler) need to perform their prescribed roles. Through proper behavior, they sought to maintain the world or return it to its original perfection. Ancient Egypt was not alone in its deification of stability. Philo of Byblos writes that the Phoenician gods included a sister-and-brother pair, Sydyk (cognate to the Hebrew for righteousness) and Misor (cognate to the Hebrew for straightness). Some

a seed which is pre-determined to blossom into its just consequence. There is no room here for the possibility of undeserved suffering; to say that someone suffers undeservedly would be tantamount to questioning God’s wisdom. The author of the book of Job implicitly protests this view by having Job’s friends adopt it and apply it inappropriately (for which God rebukes them in Job 42:7). The clearest example of this inappropriate application appears in Job 22:5-11, when Eliphaz insists that Job must have sinned egregiously to deserve his torment, even though the reader knows from the book’s prologue that Job is blameless. But in spite of the challenge the story of Job poses, the idea of suffering as the deserved result of sin remained influential.

In other biblical texts, the accusation is toned down and suffering’s value is presented as something excruciatingly precious. God afflicts us because He loves us. In Proverbs 3:11-12, the author explicitly interprets hardship as special chastisements: God gives them to us as a father would correct his favorite son, to perfect the son’s moral character. That viewpoint does not explicitly appear again until we close the Hebrew Bible and open the apostle Paul’s writings of the first century CE. In Romans 5:3-4, for example, Paul writes that he and his fellows “rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,” (Rom 5:3-4)13 a hope that will surely be fulfilled.

scholars believe that the people of Israel worshiped a god like Sydyk until the time of King David. For Maat, see Ja es P. Alle , Essa . Maat i Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 115-117. For Philo of Byblos, see G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren, and Heinz-Josef Fabry, eds. Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, trans. Douglas W. Stott and David E. Green (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co pa , , . Fo Is ael s o ship of a god like “ d k, see E st Je i a d Claus Weste a , eds. Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament, trans. Mark E. Biddle (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 1997), 1054.

13 This and all following biblical texts, unless otherwise noted, are in the Revised Standard Version.

The story of Joseph’s youth and rise to power in Egypt can lend support to the idea that suffering is advance payment for future reward. In Genesis 37, Joseph is presented as an innocent, if insufferable, lad who does not deserve all the abuses to which his brothers subject him. Joseph’s encounter with Potiphar’s wife in Genesis 39 is similarly told: to the reader, he clearly bears no guilt, and yet God allows him to be thrown into prison. But we read in Genesis 39:20-21 that in spite of his imprisonment, he maintains a faithful certainty that God is with him, and indeed he seems to lead a charmed life. It is not long before he rises from prison cell to throne room, and at last, with God’s help, he sees his formerly abusive brothers humbly dependent upon him. Joseph willingly endured undue hardship, trusting in God, and indeed God catapulted him into prosperity: he gained power over Egypt, the ability to provide a livelihood for his family, and the privilege of seeing generations of descendants. Unlike the favored son in Prov. 3:11-12, whose suffering improves his character, Joseph carried a special gift all along. He did not need to endure chastisements to be made into someone great; he merely had to wait for the trials to be over so that he could ascend to his rightful greatness. Psalm 73 bears a similar message: the psalmist begins by lamenting the injustice of the world the righteous suffer while the wicked prosper but later says that all the prosperity the wicked enjoy will come to nothing (73:18-20). God is with the righteous throughout their trials and will eventually lead them into glory, rewarding them with closeness to Himself, the only treasure that really matters (73:23-26). The story of Joseph in Egypt differs from Psalm 73 in that the former rewards the sufferer with worldly prosperity (for him and his children), while the latter promises spiritual compensation, but in both, undeserved suffering precedes, and is justified by, future reward.

Again and again in religious writings, we read that suffering has value, whether because the victim deserves the pain or a good person needs to improve or God wants to reward us later. In the remainder of this chapter, I will show how this idea appears in a passage of Talmud, some theological writings of John Calvin, and the theodicy of C.S. Lewis. After analyzing each text, I will consider its effect on Ms. Green and Ms. Brown.

Approaches to Suffering in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Berakhot 5a-b: Affliction is Extra Credit, and I Can Quit Any Time With Your Help

Of all the texts I have seen that attribute positive value to suffering, the only one I might recommend to a friend in pain comes from a passage of the Babylonian Talmud, a collection of transcribed conversations and commentaries compiled between the third and fifth centuries CE. Any religious text that calls suffering valuable comes with an unfortunate logical implication: if it has such great value, it might be unwise, or even morally wrong, to seek relief from it. One ought not to reject a gift from God, even if it comes in painful packaging! The afflicted might feel pressure to continue suffering even if they could make it stop. But folio 5 of the Babylonian Talmud’s Tractate Berakhot avoids that implication. It explains why we suffer beyond what we deserve without suggesting that the suffering should continue.

While it is not a theodicy in the formal sense—defending God’s goodness and power in the face of undeserved suffering is not the authors’ primary concern—this text nevertheless resembles a theodicy in the problems it deals with and the way it addresses them. Unlike other texts we will examine, this one maintains God’s reputation without implying that when God afflicts good people, they ought to appreciate and embrace their affliction regardless of their own wishes. Unfortunately, the text will achieve this feat in part by relying upon the easily refutable claim that God will end a person’s suffering if

the person declares a desire for it to end. In that regard, the text denies the reality of unjust suffering. Still, there is some truth in the resulting myth: we will see that its point of view is so compassionate, and shows such understanding of what is needed to address the human experience of suffering, that it remains relevant to us all.

On 5a, the text introduces the basic problem by acknowledging that some suffering cannot be seen as fair punishment for misbehavior.

Rava (some say R. Hisda) said: If a man sees afflictions come upon him, let him scrutinize his deeds, as it is said [Lam 3:40]: “Let us search our habits and examine them and return to God.” If he examines and does not find [any misdeeds], let him attribute it to failure to study Torah, as it is said [Ps 104:12]: “Happy is the man whom you afflict, O God, and whom you teach from your Torah.” If he did so attribute it, and did not find [any failure to study Torah], then he can know that these are afflictions of love, as it is said [Prov 3:12]: “For the one God loves God rebukes.”14

It is here that the text first mentions “afflictions of love,” presenting them as a last resort to explain why a person might be suffering when he is both blameless and a faithful student of Torah. In its own context, the line from Proverbs suggests that God rebukes His beloved people in order to train them properly. But because the gemara has just taught that the afflicted ones are blameless (and therefore would not need any improving or corrective feedback for the sake of their future), this passage seems to be using the line from Proverbs to mean simply that when God afflicts His beloved creatures, the affliction is itself an expression of love.

The text supports that interpretation of “afflictions of love” with another verse.

14 Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 5a: lines 43-49 (my translation in consultation with Soncino). All Talmud line number references in this section follow the numbering system at http://www.sefaria.org/Berakhot.5a and http://www.sefaria.org/Berakhot.5b.

Rava, quoting R. Sahorah, quoting R. Huna, said: The Holy One, blessed be He, crushes with afflictions each person in whom He is pleased, as it is said [Isaiah 53:10]: And God was pleased with the one whom he crushed with disease.”15

This line from Isaiah 53, the famous “suffering servant” section, is used to suggest that because God was pleased with His servant, He afflicted him. The question of why God would express His pleasure with His servants by afflicting them is not addressed here. What is important at this point is that when a person suffers, it does not necessarily mean that the person deserves to suffer. Far from implying such low status, it could mean that God especially loves that person. The text’s underlying lesson here, for the afflicted and their friends, is to be wary of supposing that suffering indicates low moral status. Outwardly, opposite statuses may look the same. This reversal of Deuteronomy’s teaching that suffering is punishment for sin while comfort is reward for virtue could help protect the merely unfortunate from being judged as deserving of hardship.

The text continues with a new theme:

One might have thought: [God sends afflictions to the one in whom He is pleased] even if he did not receive them with love. Thus it is taught [Isaiah 53:10]: “if his soul would make of itself a guilt-offering.” Just as the guilt-offering [must be given] willingly, so the afflictions [must be received] willingly.16

If the afflicted person does not receive the afflictions willingly, God stops sending them. God would no more force someone to endure undue pain than accept a guilt-offering brought unwillingly. Why, then, would anyone agree to accept these afflictions?

And if he received them, what is his reward? [Isaiah 53:10:] “He will see seed, he will lengthen his days.” And only this much more: his Torah learning endures through him, as it is said [Isaiah 53:10]: “God’s desires will succeed through him.”

15 Berakhot 5a: 49-51

16 Berakhot 5a: 53.

God repays innocents who endure God’s loving afflictions by giving them precious gifts: sons, 17 long life, and a lasting positive influence upon the world. God makes no such promises to the morally adequate man who endures no undue suffering he might have sons, long life, a lasting positive influence, or some combination of the three, but only the morally blameless person who accepts God’s afflictions of love can be sure of receiving them all. The extravagance of the promised reward is crucial: it both makes the reward attractive and preserves the acceptability of not pursuing it. To see how, let us consider its effect on Mses. Green and Brown

If Ms. Green believes God is bringing her afflictions of love with her consent so that He can reward her richly later, she may enjoy several significant benefits. First, she might find it helpful to think of her afflictions as proof of God’s love, perhaps to counteract the shaming she might suffer at the hands of people who suggest she deserves her misfortune. Second, she might feel more in control of her own life if she believes she can determine how long her pain goes on. A renewed sense of control may be especially dear to her because her condition robs her of control. Even if her belief is wrong, believing it can still comfort her. Third, if she believes that her pain has a purpose that she endures it for the sake of the precious reward God has in store for her she may be more able to tolerate it. Believing one’s lifelong, inevitable pain to be neither punitive nor pointless nor beyond one’s control can make it more manageable.

For Ms. Brown to accept her condition would be terribly unfortunate, but the claims Berakhot 5a makes do not require her to do so: the same premises can lead her to a different outcome. Targets of abuse frequently feel shame or responsibility for their

17 Wording elsewhe e o p. suggests that seed ea s so s; daughte s appea ot to e a e a d f o God. The te t efe s t i e to the t agi deaths of ‘. Yoha a s sons, with no mention of daughters, and R. Isaac is quoted as likening male children in the womb to treasure that fills the belly.

abuse, as if they deserve it, and that feeling goes along with their justifying the prolongation of the abuse. But Ms. Brown can combat her feelings of shame or responsibility by affirming that her afflictions are an expression of God’s love for her, and that her pain is not deserved. Second, Ms. Brown can think of her pain as something she has no obligation to accept. Though the pain may be a gift from God for the sake of great future benefit, accepting it would go beyond what she is morally required to do. She does not need to be a hero in order for God to continue loving her. Undue suffering is an option God offers to His beloved creations, like extra credit work in grade school. In this way, Ms. Brown can reject the extravagant reward God offers, and then she can begin the difficult process of either fixing or fleeing her situation.

The text is even more supportive of Ms. Brown on 5b. It gives three accounts of venerated sages doing as Ms. Brown might, rejecting pain along with its promised reward. But these sages do not simply end their pain of their own accord by deciding they no longer want it; the text’s picture of how we emerge from suffering is deeper than that.

Let us begin with the first two accounts: one rabbi falls sick and a second one visits and heals him; then the second falls sick and a third rabbi visits and heals him.

(1) Rabbi Hiyya bar Abba became sick. R. Yohanan went to visit him. He said to him: Do you cherish your afflictions? He said to him: Not them and not their reward. He said to him: Give me your hand. He gave him his hand and he raised him.18

(2) R. Yohanan became sick. R. Hanina went to visit him. He said to him: Do you cherish your afflictions? He said to him: Not them and not their reward. He said to him: Give me your hand. He gave him his hand and he raised him. Question: Why did R. Yohanan not raise himself? They said: The one imprisoned cannot release himself from prison.19

18 Berakhot 5b: 25-30

19 Berakhot 5b: 30-45

In these two accounts, we infer that God sent R. Hiyya and R. Yohanan undeserved physical afflictions so that they could enjoy great rewards later, but neither R. Hiyya nor R. Yohanan desired such costly rewards. Earlier, quoting Isaiah 53:10, the text suggested that God only inflicts undue pain on the willing, but now it adds a layer of complexity: the sick men were free to declare that they wanted their sufferings to end, but they could not end them alone. They continued to ail until their friends arrived and saw what they were undergoing. The text’s spare wording belies a deep understanding of how suffering isolates, as Dorothee Soelle observed in Suffering. For a variety of reasons, ongoing pain makes maintaining relationships more difficult. But by coming to their sick friends’ homes of their own accord and witnessing their pain, the visitors showed that they cared for their friends’ well-being, that they were aware of their pain, and they were prepared to share the burden with them. Simply by showing up and paying attention, they helped combat the isolation that suffering imposes.

But the visitors went beyond just showing up and witnessing. They also asked the sick men a crucial question: they asked how they related to their conditions. With that question, they invited their sick friends to distance themselves from their suffering by relating to it as a subject does to an object, or by thinking of it as a condition that need not be permanent. Wendy Farley explains the importance of this move: “Compassion mediates a sense of the contingency of the suffering and the absoluteness of the [person’s] dignity and in this way becomes an agency to resist the dehumanizing effects of suffering.”20 Because of their friends’ compassionate words, the sick men were subtly reminded to think of themselves as having full personhood separate from their suffering. Their illnesses do not define them; they are passing conditions which they can be rid of.

20 Farley, 80.

That self-perception may be normal for those of us who live in relative comfort, but those who suffer from ongoing pain (of whatever sort) may find that their suffering comes to feel inextricable from their identity. For someone else to see them as separate from their suffering can be a vital and empowering boost to both their hope and their self-image. In response to their visitors’ questions, the sick men say that their suffering is unwanted and so is the associated reward. This simple statement makes them at once vulnerable and powerful. The vulnerability comes from admitting that things are not as they want them to be, and that they have failed to steer their lives along their preferred trajectories. But voicing their desires is also powerful: they implicitly declare that their desires matter, even when compared with the importance of gratefully receiving God’s proffered gift of future reward. This declaration, coming as it does from the mouths of venerated sages, provides a model for the Ms. Browns of the world who are considering prioritizing their own current needs over the promise of any reward that they expect to receive from continuing to suffer.

But even though the text presents the afflicted person’s vocal rejection of avoidable, unwanted suffering as perfectly acceptable, if not necessary, the responsibility to end that suffering does not rest on the shoulders of the afflicted. The sick people must present their hands to the visitors when asked, but it is the visitors who must seek them out, witness their pain, compassionately empower them to distance themselves from their suffering, invite them to choose whether they want the suffering to continue, ask for their hands, reach down and take them, and lift them up. This is the meaning of the analogy at the end of the second account: just as the prisoner who has stated a desire and readiness to leave jail still relies upon someone outside the cell to unlock the door, Ms. Brown may

have managed to reach the point of voicing her desire to improve her marital situation, but she will still rely upon help from others as she moves toward improving her family life. She is not expected to achieve change singlehandedly, and if she has no help but is left to her own devices, she is not to blame for failing to break free. This point is made especially clearly in the texts by placing R. Yohanan first in the role of visitor and healer and then in the role of the sick man. By the time we encounter him in the second account, we already know he can heal others. That he does not heal himself supports the text’s conclusion that healing is to be done through relationship, not alone. If these two accounts are to be taken as I have been reading them, as models for how the gemara proposes we can best ameliorate the pain of others, then one of their foremost lessons is that the obligation to restore the health of people who are suffering rests not upon the sufferer but upon everyone else.

In the third account, R. Eleazar is sick and R. Yohanan is again visitor and healer. Where the first two were spare, this one is rich in its development of their relationship.

(3) Rabbi Eleazar became sick. Rabbi Yohanan went to visit him. [R. Yohanan] noticed that [R. Eleazar] dwelt in a dark house. [R. Yohanan] exposed his arm and light fell from it. Then he noticed that R. Eleazar was crying. He said to him: Why do you cry so? Perhaps you did not study enough Torah? But we learned [in Menahot 13:11] ‘Whether one does much or little is all the same, provided one’s heart is directed toward Heaven.’ Perhaps you don’t have enough food? It is not for everyone to merit two tables. Perhaps it is the lack of children? This is the bone of my tenth son [that I buried]! [R. Eleazar] said to him: It is because of this beauty [of R. Yohanan’s body] that will turn to dust that I am crying. [R. Yohanan] said to him: For that reason you may well cry! And the two of them cried. After a time, he said to him: Do you cherish your afflictions? [R. Eleazar] said to him: Not them and not their reward. He said to him: Give me your hand. He gave him his hand and he raised him.21

The opening is the same: a caring friend seeks out and visits a sick man at home, where he witnesses his condition. But here we have more detail: consistent with the importance

21 Berakhot 5b: 45-65.

given earlier to the visitor combating the isolation of suffering by paying attention to the sufferer, R. Yohanan immediately notices R. Eleazar’s condition. He understands without having to ask that his friend would like more light, so he rolls up his sleeve, letting his beautiful arm light the room. While R. Yohanan is described elsewhere in the Talmud as extraordinarily beautiful, the symbolism here is hard to miss: R. Eleazar is shrouded in the darkness of isolation; R. Yohanan shows sympathetic understanding of his friend’s needs and expresses compassion through service; and the compassion that shines through that service combats R. Eleazar’s isolation.

But when a visitor offers sympathetic companionship to someone suffering and isolated, he must be prepared to confront a great well of sadness. R. Yohanan continues to pay attention to R. Eleazar’s condition, so he notices the tears appearing on his ailing friend’s face. When he asks about them, he does not stop with the question, “Why are you crying?” He also offers three possible answers. Perhaps he does so to give his friend (who might be too overcome with grief to speak) the option to simply indicate “yes” or “no,” but it may also be to show that he is focused on the sick man’s situation and prepared to offer comfort for whatever may be grieving him.

But after R. Yohanan fails a third time to guess why R. Eleazar is crying, R. Eleazar voices the source of his grief: it is not his lack of Torah learning, food, or children; it is the mortality of his beautiful friend, R. Yohanan! Now we understand why R. Eleazar was hesitant to speak. Most people are not overcome by grief when they see their dear friends looking full of vitality, but R. Eleazar’s illness has forced him to confront his own mortality, and that has sensitized him to the mortality of others. He has been dwelling on the dark truth that all of us will turn to dust, a meditation that may well

make him isolate himself if only to avoid causing inescapable distress to anyone else. Just as it might be heroic, but not required, of someone to remain sick for the sake of the reward God has in store, it might be heroic of R. Eleazar to keep his grief to himself, but he is permitted to choose whether he will do it or not. R. Yohanan demonstrates his willingness to share his friend’s grief, and at last R. Eleazar accepts the invitation. Thus the gemara gives us another example of a venerated sage opting not to prolong his own suffering by taking the help someone else has gone to some effort to offer. At the same time, the text also emphasizes that comforting a sufferer may be a multi-step process.

R. Eleazar’s words catch R. Yohanan off guard. A moment before, he was ready to offer a cheering response to whatever R. Eleazar might say, but R. Eleazar has hit upon words to which R. Yohanan has no comforting response. Confronting the arresting specter of his own death instantly draws R. Yohanan into the dark meditations that have been occupying his friend. His sympathetic reaction could not be more genuine. He can do nothing but mourn for his own mortality, which brings him into instant sympathy with the plight of his friend. The symmetry is elegant: R. Eleazar, whose illness forced him to consider his own mortality, sees his friend’s health and thinks of the other man’s mortality as well. R. Yohanan, his thoughts having just been directed to his own mortality, feels viscerally what R. Eleazar has been experiencing, and so is better able to help his friend feel less alone. Each one moves from thinking of himself to thinking of the other. When they reach a point of mutual understanding, they can weep together.

Only now that he understands R. Eleazar’s suffering so deeply can R. Yohanan invite him to think of that suffering as contingent, not intrinsic to his identity, and to choose whether it will continue for the sake of his future reward or end for the sake of his

present well-being. At last R. Eleazar accepts R. Yohanan’s hand and is raised from his sick bed to restored health, but in context, the words “he raised him” leave us thinking, “For how long was he on his feet until he sickened again and died?” In spite of the happy ending, the image of death coming inexorably to turn us all to dust remains vivid before our eyes. If, as I suspect, these three stories teach that the responsibility to lift people out of their suffering rests upon us all, and given that we may only be able to offer real help after first demonstrating compassion, the thought of our shared fate might remain not only a sober reminder of reality but also a tool for connecting with one another.

These passages from Berakhot carry three distinct messages. First, they tell us that God invites, but does not force, the blameless to suffer, and if they accept, God rewards them with the finest rewards He can. Although easily disproved, this story can still offer real comfort to a believer in Ms. Green’s situation. It combats feelings of shame, returns to her some control over her own life, and reframes her pain as being for the sake of something better. All three of these stories can ease the psychological component of her lifelong pain, a worthy end despite the questionable means. Second, they tell us that God does not require us to undergo avoidable suffering. In context, the teaching that God will not force us to suffer undeservedly takes on a different cast: while it returns to Ms. Green a sense of control over the life she cannot change, it gives to Ms. Brown the freedom to transform the life she can change. She is not bound to stick with, find meaning in, or appreciate the suffering God lovingly gave her; God will still love her even if she rejects it. Third, these passages give touching demonstrations of how to show compassion to sufferers. Beneath these demonstrations lie implicit reminders that the person who has suffered long is not responsible for rescuing herself; her community is responsible not

only for ultimately extending the hand to lead her to freedom but also for first helping her reach a state of mind in which she can once again conceive of herself as free.

The first message, which so appeals to Ms. Green, would not be particularly out of place among other theologies of suffering that are popular today, but the second message is revolutionary, and in our society’s opposition to it, we risk closing ourselves off to the third one. We tend to be deeply uncomfortable with the permission the second message gives to abandon the search for meaning we would rather continue the search even if it requires prolonging pain so the idea that we can evaluate our afflictions, decide they are useless to us and we want nothing more to do with them, and throw them off forever will strike some people as a waste, the wrong answer, or displeasing to God. Consider, for example, how Carol Hausman interprets the visiting rabbis’ question. She invites her reader into her topic by asking, “What does the question ‘Are your sufferings beloved or meaningful to you?’ mean?” (A more faithful translation would omit the words I italicized; Hausman appears to have included them in order to make the text as much about meaning as about individual choice.) She answers, “This question means something like ‘Have you reached the spiritual and psychological point of acceptance, growth, and the ability to be more mindful of your blessings?’” As she sees it, there is a preferred answer to the question of whether the sick rabbi’s sufferings are beloved to him, and that answer is “Yes.” We are supposed to find meaning in our sufferings. Any other answer reveals a personal failing: failure to accept what is, failure to grow, or failure to be grateful. She concludes, “Since the answer in our text is, ‘neither they nor their reward,’ the sufferer is offered the healing power of community, bikkur holim, study

and empathy to help him reach that point of transformation.”22 In her interpretation, the rabbi is wrong to view his sufferings negatively, and the community’s role is to transform the rabbi’s perspective so that he comes to see them positively. This story will not reach a satisfactory conclusion until the ailing rabbi finds value in his suffering. The task of his community is changed: instead of focusing on bringing him relief, they must focus on helping him make the desired transformation, even if it means prolonging his suffering.

Interpretations like Hausman’s may be well designed to help Ms. Green, who cannot escape her predicament, but as attractive as it is to find meaning in everything we experience, people like Ms. Brown are better served by the complex message that emerges from the passages I have analyzed: suffering might offer extraordinary rewards, but we are always welcome to leave it and its presumed meaning behind, and other people are obligated to help us do it.

John Calvin’s Theology of Suffering

No one outdoes sixteenth-century theologian John Calvin in his conviction that God is in control an impressive feat given that he lived amid religious tensions so high that they often erupted into violence. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin argues that “nothing at all in the world is undertaken without [God’s] determination.” 23 If a falling tree branch happens to kill a traveler, God must have wanted him to die. If we plan to act against God’s will, God will either repurpose our actions to make them serve

22 Ca ol Haus a , What does the uestio A e ou suffe i gs elo ed o ea i gful to ou? ea ? i Ha a Pe so , ed. The Mitzvah of Healing: An Anthology of Essays, Jewish Texts, Personal Stories, Meditations, and Rituals (New York: UAHC Press, 2003), 58.

23 Joh Cal i , GOD BY HIS POWER NOURISHES AND MAINTAINS THE WORLD CREATED BY HIM, AND RULES ITS SEVERAL PARTS BY HIS PROVIDENCE, i Book I of Institutio Christianae Religionis [The Institutes of the Christian Religion], trans. Ford Lewis Battles Pu li Do ai , u de “e tio : God s providence especially relates to men, a essed De e e , , http://divdl.library.yale.edu/dl/FullText.aspx?qc=AdHoc&q=3154&qp=15

divine ends or prevent us from performing them at all. So complete is God’s power and sovereignty that nothing will frustrate His will. This teaching is intended to reassure us that no matter how worrisome the events of the world may be, ultimately all will be well.

Of course, for most people who exist in this world, all is decidedly not well. To assert such an ironclad faith in God’s sovereignty, Calvin addresses the problem of evil in the seventeenth chapter of the Institutes by counseling his readers to interpret even apparent evils as acts of special providence and revelations of God’s secret plan

God may reveal his concern for the whole human race, but especially his vigilance in ruling the church, which he deigns to watch more closely. …although either fatherly favor and beneficence or severity of judgment often shine forth in the whole course of providence, nevertheless sometimes the causes of the events are hidden. So the thought creeps in that human affairs turn and whirl at the blind urge of fortune; or the flesh incites us to contradiction, as if God were making sport of men by throwing them about like balls. [But careful thought reveals that] God always has the best reason for his plan: either to instruct his own people in patience, or to correct their wicked affections and tame their lust, or to subjugate them to self-denial, or to arouse them from sluggishness; again, to bring low the proud, to shatter the cunning of the impious and to overthrow their devices. Yet however hidden and fugitive from our point of view the causes may be, we must hold that they are surely laid up with him… For even though in our miseries our sins ought always to come to mind, that punishment itself may incite us to repentance, yet we see how Christ claims for the Father's secret plan a broader justice than simply punishing each one as he deserves. For concerning the man born blind he says: "Neither he nor his parents sinned, but that God's glory may be manifested in him" [John 9:3]. For here our nature cries out, when calamity comes before birth itself, as if God with so little mercy thus punished the undeserving. Yet Christ testifies that in this miracle the glory of his Father shines, provided our eyes be pure.24

God causes us pain for mysterious reasons, and if we lack comprehension, we risk adopting impious beliefs. We are enlightened by recalling that suffering might be divine punishment for our sins, a lesson sent for our improvement, or (as with the man born

24 Cal i , HOW WE MAY APPLY THIS DOCTRINE TO OUR GREATEST BENEFIT, i Book I, under “e tio : The ea i g of God s a s, a essed De e e , , http://divdl.library.yale.edu/dl/FullText.aspx?qc=AdHoc&q=3154&qp=17

blind) a condition put in place to teach others of God’s greatness. Regardless of its purpose, Calvin assures us, our pain testifies to God’s concern for our ultimate welfare.

As for the work of relieving other people’s pain and suffering by providing for their physical and emotional needs (feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, mourning with mourners, etc.), any interest Calvin has in it is only indirectly expressed in the Institutes through a general zeal for obedience to God’s commandments, some of which do pertain to providing for those in need. But Calvin seems more interested in propagating the sort of relief from suffering that comes from uprooting one’s attachment to worldly life and focusing on life in heaven instead:

But monstrous it is that many who boast themselves Christians are gripped by such a great fear of death, rather than a desire for it, that they tremble at the least mention of it….it is wholly unbearable that there is not in Christian hearts any light of piety to overcome and suppress that fear, whatever it is, by a greater consolation.”25

[T]he entire company of believers, so long as they dwell on earth, must be "as sheep destined for the slaughter" [Rom. 8:36] to be conformed to Christ their Head. They would therefore have been desperately unhappy unless, with mind intent upon heaven, they had surmounted whatever is in this world, and passed beyond the present aspect of affairs [cf. I Cor. 15:19].26 He says elsewhere that we may delight in the wholesome earthly pleasures God has provided for our use and enjoyment,27 but here he emphasizes that good Christians should look to death, not life, for true happiness. He calls hope of heaven the only enduring and reliable source of comfort.

25 Cal i , MEDITATION ON THE FUTURE LIFE, i Book III, u de “e tio 5: Against the fear of death! accessed December 12, 2013, http://divdl.library.yale.edu/dl/FullText.aspx?qc=AdHoc&q=3154&qp=44.

26 Cal i , MEDITATION ON THE FUTURE LIFE, in Book III, u de “e tio 6: The comfort prepared for believers by aspiration for the life to come, accessed December 11, 2013, http://divdl.library.yale.edu/dl/FullText.aspx?qc=AdHoc&q=3154&qp=45

27 Cal i , HOW WE MU“T U“E THE P‘E“ENT LIFE AND IT“ HELP“, i Book III, u de “e tio : The ai p i iple, a essed De e e , , http://divdl.library.yale.edu/dl/FullText.aspx?qc=AdHoc&q=3154&qp=46

Calvin sees humanity as constantly inclined to sin. He asks us to consider…how great is the wanton impulse of our flesh to shake off God’s yoke if we even for a moment softly and indulgently treat that impulse. [The flesh is like] mettlesome horses. If they are fattened in idleness for some days, they cannot afterward be tamed for their high spirits; nor do they recognize their rider, whose command they previously obeyed. ...Thus, lest in the unmeasured abundance of our riches we go wild; lest, puffed up with honors, we become proud; lest, swollen with other good things either of the soul or of the body, or of fortune we grow haughty, the Lord himself, according as he sees it expedient, confronts us and subjects and restrains our unrestrained flesh with the remedy of the cross.28

To make us less selfish and more obedient, God sends us a steady diet of pain. Seeking relief would be foolish, like throwing away medicine we need to recover from illness.

According to Calvin, when we hurt, we should interpret our pain as a gift sent with love from a sovereign god who is aware of, and has a plan for, each of us. While we cannot ever know why we are experiencing any specific instance of pain, broadly speaking, humans need to suffer for the sake of their and their fellows’ moral correction and improvement. Helping others physically and emotionally is less important than seeing to their spiritual refinement, which is done in part by reminding them to look to heaven rather than investing too deeply in earthly life. In his effort to assure us that all is right with the world, Calvin describes a system in which humans, deeply flawed, require frequent affliction to become good, and in which God’s love looks to humans like abuse. If all events on earth are going according to God’s plan, then the plan itself—and, by association, the character of its author is profoundly troubling.

If Mses. Green and Brown embraced the view examined here, how would it affect them? If one element of their suffering were a fear that their lives are out of control or that they will never achieve God’s purposes for them, then this view would comfort them.

28 Cal i , BEARING THE CROSS, A PART OF SELF-DENIAL, i Book III, under “e tio 5: The cross as medicine, a essed De e e , , http://divdl.library.yale.edu/dl/FullText.aspx?qc=AdHoc&q=3154&qp=41

They would enjoy the assurance that God has it all in hand and nothing will stand in the way of His plan, no matter how senseless and broken the world may appear. They might find their pain more tolerable or more productive of good results if they believed it came from a good source for a good purpose.

But believing that the source and the purpose of their pain are “good” will bring them little comfort if they have begun to doubt whether God’s idea of goodness coincides with their own. Just as God’s plan for the world remains so shrouded in mystery that what looks like divine failure is, they are told, just another step on the path to divine triumph, so also God’s idea of goodness may appear so heavily veiled that they might be unable to distinguish between the pain God sends them for their own good and the pain that destroys them. If they can no longer trust that God’s goodness is truly good, the absoluteness of God’s control will be of no use.

Now let us suppose that part of what hurts Mses. Green and Brown is that they are apparently alone in their suffering that no one else understands or cares. If so, Calvin’s words here may only confirm their fears. His teachings focus on how to reconcile human suffering with God’s power and wisdom, but reconciliation comes at a high cost: it stands in the way of emphasizing the importance of helping one’s fellow in need wherever possible. Calvin shows concern for our spiritual well-being, but urges us to detach ourselves from our natural desire for worldly comfort. If God sends us physical or emotional pain, rather than trying to resist its cause, we are encouraged to feel good about how our suffering will make us better people in the eyes of God.

It may be well for Ms. Green, who cannot end her hardship anyway, to see it as having positive meaning, but if what she craves is the validation of someone else telling

her they wish things were otherwise for her sake, her pain will increase at the thought of God and her Calvinist community looking upon her suffering and nodding their heads with approval. Ms. Brown will be susceptible to the same increased pain, but in her case, the lack of religiously-backed group opposition to the cause of her hardship will generate passive encouragement for her suffering to continue. That passive encouragement will make it much more daunting for her to try to improve her situation. On top of that, Calvin’s teaching that suffering can serve as medicine for the sinful nature of the human condition, when coupled with the belief that God is precise in the execution of His plan, could lead Ms. Brown to wonder whether God is specifically afflicting her to protect her from growing morally deficient. She might, not unreasonably, fear that if she improves her wretched situation, her hope of moral excellence will edge further out of reach. In this way, the theology she and her community adopt can imprison her in a life of pain.

C.S. Lewis’ Theodicy: Pain is God’s Megaphone to Rouse a Deaf World

In The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis presents Christianity’s treatment of the relationship between God and human suffering as he understands it. Like Calvin, Lewis takes the position that our suffering comes from God, who loves us so deeply that He afflicts us for our own good. Throughout the book, Lewis labors to emphasize two points that he expects his reader to find objectionable (or perhaps which he himself finds hard to accept). First, humans are fallen creatures whose thoughts, desires, and behaviors are out of harmony with God’s wishes, and who are thus displeasing to God. Even though God is pure love, because of our fallen state, God cannot easily love us as we naturally are. Second, pain forces us to realize that something is wrong. Stubborn creatures that we are, pain works better than any other stimulus at reminding us of our dependence upon God.

No painless experience can replace it. When we remember our dependence upon God, we are motivated to love and obey Him rather than indulging our own desires. God lovingly causes us pain in hopes that we will learn to subdue our own will and become the sorts of creatures God can love without impediment. The Problem and the Purpose of Pain

Lewis begins his argument by framing the problem: “If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.”29 He then explains how God is both good and almighty even though His creatures are not happy. Even though God is almighty, He cannot do the impossible, and it is impossible to “create a society of free souls without at the same time creating a relatively independent and ‘inexorable’ Nature.”30 Living within a system of fixed, knowable rules lets us interact with beings other than ourselves and make moral choices in a way that we could not if our environment lacked causality. Lewis gives a version of the free will defense when he acknowledges that a fixed natural system in the hands of people bent on abusing it allows for evils that God could theoretically protect against, but if God were to protect against them all, it would be impossible for us to make the moral choices God wants us to make. He writes,

We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of his abuse of free will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound-waves that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void; nay, if the principle were carried out to its logical conclusion, evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral

29 Lewis, 560.

30 Lewis, 562.

matter which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to frame them. All matter in the neighbourhood of a wicked man would be liable to undergo unpredictable alterations. That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behavior of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part of Christian faith; but the very conception of a common, and therefore stable, world, demands that these occasions should be extremely rare. 31

Miracles may happen, but to eliminate all suffering would obstruct the laws of nature.

Lewis then surmises that every scientific advancement will defend God’s creative choices by further proving that the world could not have been created any differently.

With every advance in our thought the unity of the creative act, and the impossibility of tinkering with the creation as though this or that element of it could have been removed, will become more apparent. Perhaps this is not the ‘best of all possible’ universes, but the only possible one. Possible world can mean only ‘world that God could have made, but didn’t.’ The idea of that which God ‘could have’ done involves a too anthropomorphic conception of God’s freedom.32

God is not like us in that He does not work in possibilities; He only does exactly what must be done. Therefore, God needed to create the world with its attendant flaws.

Lewis continues discussing God’s alterity by considering what “goodness” means for humans and what it means for God. Surely, God’s goodness is not identical to ours, but if they were entirely different from each other, we would have a theological disaster:

If God’s moral judgement differs from ours so that our ‘black’ may be His ‘white’, we can mean nothing by calling Him good; for to say ‘God is good’, while asserting that His goodness is wholly other than ours, is really only to say ‘God is we know not what’. And an utterly unknown quality in God cannot give us moral grounds for loving or obeying Him. If He is not (in our sense) ‘good’ we

31 Lewis, 565. If Le is see s eedlessl ui k to lu p togethe God s e su i g that weapons do o ha hi h ould i u s i e f eedo of a tio ut ot f eedo of ill ith God s aki g it impossible for human minds to think evil thoughts (which would indeed negate freedom of will), let us remember that his stated goal is to explain and support Christian teachings on this matter as faithfully as he can. Distinguishing between freedom of action and freedom of will (and addressing the problems with the free will defense more generally) appears to be outside the scope of the goal Lewis set for himself. For more on the free will defense, see my discussion of it in Chapter III.

32 Lewis, 566.

shall obey, if at all, only through fear and should be equally ready to obey an omnipotent Fiend.33

We escape the threat of amoral obedience because when we encounter God’s goodness, we intuitively recognize it as the ideal we have always been striving for.34

Four Analogies for the Way God Loves Us

Moving to the problem of how God’s love can feel like affliction, Lewis draws a parallel distinction between our notion of “love,” which dwells on kindness and indulgence, and God’s love, which aims to perfect our souls no matter how the growth process may hurt.

By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness the desire to see others than the self happy .What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, ‘What does it matter so long as they are contented?’…I do not claim to be an exception: I should very much like to live in a universe which was governed on such lines. But since it is abundantly clear that I don’t, and since I have reason to believe, nevertheless, that God is Love, I conclude that my conception of love needs correction.35

Lewis’ interpretation of suffering depends upon his belief that God is love. Things are not as he wishes they were, but his certainty of God’s goodness is stronger than his concern for what he sees, so when he faces the contradiction between our idea of love and the nature of the world, he assumes the fault must be in us. The alternative that God is imperfect is unacceptable. Accordingly, he distorts his definition of love until it resembles the infliction of pain, and he ascribes that new definition to the love of God.

There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not cotermimous, and when kindness…is separated from the other elements of Love, it involves a certain

33 Lewis, 567.

34 Lewis, 568.

35 Lewis, 569.

fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt of it. Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. As scripture points out, it is bastards who are spoiled: the legitimate sons, who are to carry on the family tradition, are punished [Hebrews 12:8].36

Love and kindness overlap, but they are not the same. It may be kind to remove a creature’s pain, but it is not loving. The loving choice, Lewis implies, would be to improve the creature, whether or not the creature wants to improve. Lest we say such a choice is selfish and controlling, not loving, Lewis responds that for God to love us in selfish and controlling ways is appropriate. God’s desires are better than ours, so God should be in control.

Anticipating that we will find it difficult to accept his stark characterization of how God relates to us, he gives us four analogies. First, God is the artist and we are the masterpiece, so out of His desire to make us perfect, God will “take endless trouble” over us. It may hurt us to be “rubbed and scraped and recommenced for the tenth time,” and we may wish we were a mere thumbnail whose final form God did not care about so much but when we reconsider, we will be glad God loves us so deeply that He insists on our perfection, no matter what it takes.37

Second, God is like a human owner and we a pet dog, “one of the ‘best’ of irrational creatures” but not maximally lovable in its natural state because “it has a smell, and habits, which frustrate man’s love.” Therefore the owner “washes it, housetrains it,

36 Lewis, 569-70.

37 Lewis, 571.

teaches it not to steal, and is so enabled to love it completely.”

38 Lewis stresses that even though it suffers pain at the hands of the owner, the enlightened dog must be grateful for the good owner’s love, both for selecting it from among all the animals as worthy to live by the owner’s side and serve the owner, and for the benefits the owner confers upon the dog, such as better health and longer, more comfortable life. He adds that the owner “takes all these pains with the dog, and gives all these pains to the dog, only because it is an animal high in the scale because it is so nearly lovable that it is worth his while to make it fully lovable. He does not house-train the earwig or give baths to centipedes.”

39 Note how the dog’s sufferings are attributed to its flaws. If the dog is suffering, we can be sure it is not quite good enough yet for the owner to love it completely.

Third, God is the father and we are the son but God is not a father in today’s sense, where being a father might imply being indulgent and almost apologetic to one’s son. Rather, God is the father in the ancient sense, when fatherhood typically meant exerting total authority and demanding complete obedience. “Love between father and son, in this symbol, means essentially authoritative love on the one side, and obedient love on the other. The Father uses his authority to make the son into the sort of human being He, rightly, and in his superior wisdom, wants him to be.”40 In this model, to the extent that a son’s own will differs from his father’s plans for him, that will is afforded no importance. The father decides what the son will be. The son must reshape (or crush, if necessary) his own will until it perfectly duplicates his father’s.

38 Lewis, 571.

39 Lewis, 572.

40 Ibid.

Fourth, and most troubling of all, God is the husband and we are the wife. Lewis acknowledges this analogy’s limits, but he is enthusiastic about the truth it reveals:

Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved….When we fall in love with a woman, do we cease to care whether she is clean or dirty, fair or foul? Do we not rather then first begin to care? … Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.41

God loves us regardless of our foulness, but because God loves us, He prefers us to be perfect, so He is keen to effect our perfection. Lewis himself sounds conflicted about the resulting picture of God. He concludes, “You asked for a loving God: you have one.”

42

Over and over Lewis emphasizes our state of flawed greatness: we will be masterpieces, but we still look wrong; we are noble dogs, but we stink and we steal; we are sons who will carry on the family name, but we must overcome our own tendency to disobey; and we are beloved wives, but we must not appear unattractive. We have been afforded high status, but we do not deserve it in our current state, nor could we want to, because our standards are higher than that.

We cannot even wish, in our better moments, that He could reconcile Himself to our present impurities no more than the beggar maid could wish that King Cophetua should be content with her rags and dirt, or a dog, once having learned to love man, could wish that man were such as to tolerate in his house the snapping, verminous, polluting creature of the wild pack. What we would here and now call our ‘happiness’ is not the end God chiefly has in view: but when we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy.43

Like a pedigreed dog or a firstborn son, we are capable of greatness, but at the moment we are disgusting, and if we have the good taste to notice it, we will disgust ourselves.

But God is going to take, and put us through, great pains in order to make us into what

41 Lewis, 573.

42 Ibid.

43 Lewis, 574-75.

we ought to be so that we can finally be happy. We may find the transitioning process unbearably hard, but we cannot will for the process to stop, because then we would remain disgusting forever instead of realizing our intended purpose and becoming creatures whom God can love fully. Lewis calls God’s attentions “the intolerable compliment”: it is a great love we almost cannot bear.

Responses to Objections

Lewis addresses several objections one might mount against God’s plan for us. First, to the one who protests that she is good enough as she is, and does not need such a painful training process to become lovable, Lewis argues that none of us are good enough as we are. We are all fallen creatures whose wills are out of alignment with God’s will for us. God would not afflict us so if we were good enough. Second, to the one who says that no matter how unlovable she is now, she has no interest in achieving perfection if it means undergoing such pain, Lewis writes that the perfection toward which God is inexorably pushing her is the purpose for which God first created her and her only hope of real happiness.44 She would be foolish not to continue on God’s path for her. In spite of how heavily Lewis emphasizes the necessity of human free will to God’s plan, in a very real sense, every human is trapped. There is one way forward in life the way toward God and it is full of pain, but refusing to progress is not a viable option. The third objection is that if we really are insufficient in our natural state, and if we have no real choice to turn down the process of being perfected, then at least God should improve us without subjecting us to protracted, severe hardship. Why pain, specifically? Lewis addresses this question in three ways. First, he says, ridding ourselves of our particular types of imperfections is going to be painful for us no matter what.

44 Lewis, 577-578.

We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved: we are… rebels who must lay down our arms. [T]o render back the will which we have so long claimed for our own, is in itself, wherever and however it is done, a grievous pain.45

We are attached to our own egotistical self-reliance, and losing it will hurt us no matter how gently God tries to pry it from our fingers, yet lose it we must if we are to become lovable. Lewis compares the need for God to make us let go of our ego to the way parents and nurses before his time spoke of breaking a child’s will as the first step to raising the child properly.46 Nor is it enough to do it only once; it must be done over and over, or else our willfulness will rebelliously rise up again, as bad as it was before. Herein, Lewis writes, lies “the necessity to die daily: however often we think we have broken the rebellious self we shall still find it alive. That this process cannot be without pain is sufficiently witnessed by the very history of the word ‘Mortification’.”47 Our rebellious ego must be killed we must be mortified frequently, if we are to return to God. Pain is effective in getting us to wake up and realize that something is wrong, whereas we simply do not respond as reliably to other methods God has at His disposal, such as pleasure and the promptings of conscience. “We rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and…we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists on being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”48 Pain makes even the most rebellious hearts pay attention.

45 Lewis, 602-603.

46 Lewis, 603.

47 Ibid.

48 Lewis, 604.

Lewis concedes that sometimes pain will have an unwanted effect—it can “lead to final and unrepented rebellion” in the most stubborn of cases—but it must be used nevertheless, because “it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment.”49 Lewis seems aware of, though unconcerned about, the risk that some will respond to pain with angry rebellion. But he does not address the possibility Weil raises, that pain can trigger feelings of self-hatred so destructive that all hope of personal betterment becomes absurdly out of reach. Lewis concedes that pain does not always succeed in conquering our rebellious souls, but he nevertheless holds that the alternatives are so ineffective as to be hardly worth discussing.

All Lewis’ talk of rebellious souls is sure to make his reader wonder what he thinks of the suffering of the innocent. To address this point, he gives his second response to the question of why God must use pain, specifically, to perfect people. He stops short of saying that no one in pain is innocent, but he does say that people may not be as virtuous as they appear.

We are perplexed to see misfortune falling upon decent, inoffensive, worthy people on capable, hard-working mothers of families or diligent, thrifty little tradespeople, on those who have worked so hard, and so honestly, for their modest stock of happiness and now seem to be entering on the enjoyment of it with the fullest right. How can I say with sufficient tenderness what here needs to be said? … Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for the moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and that if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands between them and the recognition of their need; He makes that life less sweet to them.50

49 Lewis, 605.

50 Lewis, 606.

As difficult as it is to say, Lewis finds it must be said: no matter how virtuous and deserving of reward they may appear, some people nevertheless need to rely upon God more than they do if God is to love them without impediment. Lewis adds that “this illusion of self-sufficiency may be at its strongest in some very honest, kindly, and temperate people,” and therefore it is especially upon them that “misfortune must fall.”51

No matter how well-loved someone may be, if she feels complete without God, then she remains sorely imperfect. God inflicts pain upon her to destroy her sense of security and make her realize that she relies upon Heaven alone.

Lewis’ third response to the question, “Why pain?” is that God seeks our obedient service, but in our fallen state, we cannot easily dedicate ourselves to serving God for its own sake. We do not naturally derive joy from obedience to God in itself. If God commands us to do what we would enjoy doing regardless, our doing it cannot demonstrate our obedience. Perhaps we simply did something we enjoy. To prove our obedience, we must obey God’s commandment to do something that we would not otherwise have done that is, something painful. Our will to obey God must overcome a desire not to do as God commands.

We cannot therefore know that we are acting at all, or primarily, for God’s sake, unless the material of the action is contrary to our inclinations, or (in other words) painful, and what we cannot know that we are choosing, we cannot choose. The full acting out of the self’s surrender to God therefore demands pain: this action, to be perfect, must be done from the pure will to obey, in the absence, or in the teeth, of inclination.52

It is so important to God that we totally submit to Him that he commands us to do what is painful to us, and that commandment may be given simply to establish proof (to

51 Lewis, 607.

52 Ibid.

ourselves, and not to God whose omniscience requires no tests) that we are submissive to Him.53 Even though Lewis holds that God commands us to do things because they are good (rather than things being good to do because God commands them),54 he also holds that “one of the things intrinsically good is that rational creatures should freely surrender themselves to their Creator in obedience.”55 It can be good for us to obey God, even if the results of the action God commands would have a different moral value had there been no commandment at all. Lewis does not say that as soon as we begin to enjoy obeying God, our obedient actions lose their virtue he allows that we may take virtuous pleasure in obedience but he also holds that there is one right act that of self-surrender which cannot be willed to the height by fallen creatures unless it is unpleasant…and…this one right act includes all other righteousness…. [T]he supreme cancelling of Adam’s fall…must be when the creature, with no desire to aid it, stripped naked to the bare willing of obedience, embraces what is contrary to its nature, and does that for which only one motive is possible. 56

The capstone act of obedience cannot be pleasant. It must go against all our inclinations except for one, our love for God, if we are truly to move beyond our fallen state.

Our Suffering Must Be Ongoing and Others Must Not Act Too Indignant

Having explained that God finds humans insufficient in their natural state and that He afflicts us so that He can love us without impediment, Lewis has two more minor points to investigate. First, we might have thought that since God afflicts us in pursuit of a particular goal, eventually we will have reached our goal and we can be done enduring

53 “ee Le is dis ussio of the i di g of Isaa o Le is, .

54 Lewis, 608.

55 Ibid.

56 Lewis, 609.

pain. But we are not so fortunate: although Lewis does not say that we will always need a steady diet of suffering to remain in good relationship with God, he does say that a little bit now and then is not enough.

My own experience is something like this. I am progressing along the path of life in my ordinary contentedly fallen and godless condition…when suddenly a stab of abdominal pain that threatens serious disease, or a headline in the newspapers that threatens us all with destruction, sends this whole pack of cards tumbling down. At first I am overwhelmed, and all my little happinesses look like broken toys. Then, slowly and reluctantly, bit by bit, I try to bring myself into the frame of mind that I should be in at all times. I remind myself that all these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world and my only real treasure is Christ. And perhaps, by God’s grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources. But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys: I am even anxious, God forgive me, to banish from my mind the only thing that supported me under the threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days. Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. Let Him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed. And that is why tribulation cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.57

Even though reliance upon and obedience to God is the state which He intended for us, and the one where we are happiest, our natural state and the state that we quickly revert to again and again is the one in which our mundane activities absorb us and we pay little heed to God. Because we are so quick to revert to it every time the pain lets up, Lewis seems to be presenting us with a situation in which God needs to inflict pain upon us frequently, permanently if we are lucky. If we are not lucky, God will give up on us entirely, putting us beyond help once we die.

The final point concerns how others ought to respond to people suffering around them. On this topic Lewis has two apparently contradictory things to say. On one hand,

57 Lewis, 612-13.

he wants us to temper our natural desire to express sympathetic outrage at the pains others suffer, saying that “Indignation at others’ sufferings, though a generous passion, needs to be well managed lest it steal away patience and humanity from those who suffer and plant anger and cynicism in their stead.”

58 He goes on to explain that if we give sufferers the idea that they have a right to be angry about their pain, they may lash out at the world indiscriminately, but if we are more moderate in our sympathy, they can respond to their pain by growing in virtue. We must be careful not to spoil the good effect that suffering can have upon others. On the other hand, he also writes that the Marxist and the Christian both “paradoxically [demand] that poverty is blessed and yet ought to be removed.”

59 If we knew nothing else about Lewis’ view other than what we had read here, the idea that poverty or any other form of suffering ought to be removed comes as something of a surprise, given how it appears in a single line in a later chapter of the book, unsupported by examples or reasoning, well outmatched by full chapters written in support of the idea that pain is the only thing that can turn us to God. Nevertheless, Lewis takes it as given that although God’s role may be to inflict pain upon us, our role is to relieve some suffering in other people.

Lewis’ Impact

Although C.S. Lewis lacks the official authority of John Calvin, his writings on Christianity are read and quoted by believing Christians of a variety of denominations. If the enduring popularity of his books is a reliable indication, his words have a broad influence on how Christians conceive of God, themselves, and their religious life.

Supposing Mses. Green and Brown take Lewis’ teachings in The Problem of Pain to

58 Lewis, 613.

59 Lewis, 614.

heart, how are they likely to be affected? If Ms. Green or Ms. Brown fears her pain means that God does not love her, then Lewis’ words bring a message of sweet reassurance. The core of his message is precisely that God is love, and all the rest is a defense of that stance in light of how we suffer. She can find comfort in the thought that whatever she suffers can be understood as a message of love to her personally from God as He tenderly, if uncompromisingly, traces her progress through life. She may also feel empowered, at least in her less excruciating moments, by the thought that she can use her experience of suffering to make herself into a better person. Ms. Green especially might be relieved to think that all her suffering has a purpose and she can trust God to administer pain wisely and lovingly. If she can feel sure that her life is progressing as it ought, and that only good will come of it, perhaps she will be more able to tolerate her painful experiences.

But if what either woman really needs is a message of support and encouragement for her fading impulse to curtail the source of, or cope better with the effects of, the pain that has dogged her for so long, Lewis’ book will not help her. Instead, she will find in it a positive insistence that without regular doses of pain, her piety would lapse and she would return to selfishness. Lewis claims that God needs to afflict humans in order to bring them back into proper relationship with Him. Lewis does not say so explicitly, but Ms. Green or Ms. Brown may reasonably conclude that if she does not continue to suffer, God will find her harder to love.

For sufferers like Ms. Brown, for whom the source of pain could be curtailed, Lewis’ teachings may impart or strengthen a false sense of helplessness. If Ms. Brown’s suffering is what Weil and Soelle call affliction and Farley calls radical suffering if it

breaks down Ms. Brown’s will to the point that she can no longer fight back—then in order to heal, one of the first things she needs is someone else who can compassionately impart hope to her. As discouraged as she feels, she needs to believe there is a reason to resist her condition before she can move herself to attempt it. No doubt Lewis himself would be the first to help her if given the option, but the message we find in The Problem of Pain is not so encouraging. He may have been writing for an intended audience of people grappling with their own manageable pain by helping them reconcile it with their beliefs about God, but that will not prevent misguided religious leaders and community members from enthusiastically sharing the message with Ms. Brown in hopes that it will help her, too. From them she will learn that God needs to afflict her in order to make her the sort of person whom He can finally love without impediment, and that because God does not inflict pain except to solve the problem of human rebelliousness, the very continuation of her pain is an indication that she is not yet good enough and needs further affliction. Against such a view, how can she advocate for herself, and how can she argue for seeking to replace her destructive situation with a more benign one, if she can find the strength to speak on her own behalf at all? If she dares to do so, others may see it as further proof of her continued rebellion against God, and justification for her suffering.

Ms. Brown will also learn that others would be right to show little sympathetic outrage on her behalf, even though sympathetic outrage from others might be precisely the empowering offering that she needs if she is to move herself toward healing. As Weil, Soelle, and Farley emphasize, suffering isolates, and to counteract its effects, the sufferer needs to be seen and understood by a sympathetic witness. But Ms. Brown will be starving for others’ understanding if those who witness her suffering carefully temper any

outrage they feel on her behalf. When what she craves is to see reflected in their faces the hurt and anger she feels about her situation, she may be left instead with the impression that they think her suffering is acceptable.

C.S. Lewis himself found, while enduring acute grief later in life, that the explanation for suffering he presented in The Problem of Pain could not give him the spiritual and emotional support he needed. As he writes in A Grief Observed, the beliefs that had seemed to be stable safeguards for his faith in the face of suffering did not help him when he needed them most.

One Sufferer’s Meat is Another One’s Poison

Given how detrimental to the afflicted it can be to teach that suffering has irreplaceable positive value, one might wonder how this family of teachings ever gained such a place of honor in the halls of popular wisdom. To better understand its appeal, let us consider the type of person who can work, or has worked, through her suffering. I will call her Ms. Gray. Ms. Gray has experienced hardship, but she has not been crushed by it. Instead, she has been able to process it and has gained something thereby: perhaps she feels absolved of guilt, or she is more driven to improve the world, or she finds herself free from her former fears or dependencies, or she has discovered within herself a deeper capacity for compassion or a greater understanding of the precious value of life. Perhaps her hardship took something from her, but it also gave something in return. When she was in the midst of the worst of it, and not sure she would make it through, all she wanted was to stop her pain however she could. But she relied upon God, or she drew upon reserves she did not know she had, and she persevered. At last, things grew easier. As the pain ebbed, she started seeing the fruits of her suffering. Most theologies that ascribe

positive value to suffering are written with her in mind, or if not, they are promoted most fervently by her type. She evangelizes the teaching that suffering has positive value because she wants it to help others as it has helped her, and because using her pain for a good purpose helps her process it.

Ms. Gray also deals with the terrifying memory of her darkest period by asserting to herself that the power she depended upon to overcome it remains accessible to her. When she sees others caught in severe suffering and not recovering, rather than reawakening her terror by asking herself, “What if that were me?” she tells herself that everything turned out all right for her, and not by chance; rather, it was her choices and God’s enduring goodness that freed her from her suffering. Not wanting to go through the stressful process of reexamining the views that help her feel secure, she interprets everyone else’s suffering as a condition from which they, too, could emerge if they just make the right choices.

Nearly everyone undergoes hardships, but not all of us face pain’s destructive extreme. In our prosperous country, many live comfortably, and those who do not are largely segregated from those who do. Crushing hopelessness, self-hatred, isolation, change of identity, and loss of ability even to desire recovery may be largely unknown to millions of comparatively fortunate people who experience their struggles as islands in a sea of relative stability. When they encounter others undergoing severe suffering, they may want to sympathize, but that desire will compete with their interest in maintaining the beliefs they depend upon for basic security—a security the “other half” does not enjoy. They might believe that a person who fails to emerge from hardship must not have really wanted to get better.

Their belief is based on the temptingly empowering premise that ultimately, we get the lives we choose. This premise is so attractive that it appears again and again in texts that purport to teach universal wisdom.60 The covenant between God and the people of Israel in the book of Deuteronomy tells us that we can be sure of living the good life if we choose to obey God. Berakhot 5a tells us that virtuous people can choose to renounce suffering at any time. Calvin’s relationship to free choice is complicated by his views on the bondage of sin, but in place of asserting that we live the lives we choose, he promises us something better: God orchestrates all that occurs, and we can trust that God always has our best interests in mind. It is as if God is selecting for us all the choices we would have selected for ourselves, were we perfectly just. And Lewis, in addition to teaching that pain helps us overcome our rebellious nature so that we can choose to follow God’s will over our own, also teaches that God only inflicts pain upon us until we triumph over our own fallen nature, which implies that we can make the pain stop by becoming what God wants us to be. In spite of their many redeeming qualities, these texts share a potentially damaging message: we all choose (or deserve) our situations. Thus, even severe suffering is consistent with a just world.

As distressing as it is for Ms. Gray to admit it, the pain Mses. Green and Brown are undergoing is not necessarily a direct result of their poor choices. The vast majority of us have less control over our lives and less assurance of access to a good end than Ms. Gray believes. While it may be true that the best we can do to improve our lives is to keep trying, effort does not guarantee success, and failure does not imply insufficient effort. We depend upon good fortune more than Ms. Gray realizes. She may feel renewed

60 Fo a dis ussio of se ula appli atio s of this sa e p e ise, see “usa “o tag s e a i atio of how society blames cancer patients for their own diseases in Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1978).

hope, determination, or security when she reads religious texts saying that good always wins out, that we get the lives we choose or the consequences we deserve, that how things are is how they ought to be, or that everything happens for a reason, but such texts can at best give only limited support to Mses. Green and Brown. They might appreciate reading that God loves those He chastises, that their suffering is terribly important, or that God will set everything right in the end, but the hope those teachings might initially kindle in them could later lead to bitter disappointment and doubt about God’s supposedly perfect justice and love. What’s more, their suffering is prone to be compounded if they internalize the belief that no one suffers without deserving it, or that they have failed to suffer properly until they appreciate and find meaning in their pain. And claims of suffering’s precious value may leave Ms. Brown or her community believing it would be wrong for her to be freed from the root cause of her pain. Instead of insisting for Ms. Gray’s sake that suffering has positive value, in spite of the implications for Ms. Brown and Ms. Green, let us consider now how else Jewish and Christian scripture and tradition respond to the problem of human suffering.

Chapter II: Humans May Protest Against God’s Unjust Governance

Some texts suggest that good people suffer undeserved pain because God, who can rule in any way He wishes, sometimes acts unjustly. But to call any of God’s actions unjust implies that something other than God’s will determines the nature of justice, which will sound incoherent to any who take as given that God determines morality itself. Although this premise finds some support in the Hebrew Bible, the opposing view—that morality is distinct from God’s will (and thus that God can be wrong)—finds more support in both the Hebrew Bible and later rabbinic writings. This daring view is largely missing from Christian theology, a lack that leaves Christianity stronger in some ways but poorer in others.

Biblical Stories of Prophetic Protest Bringing Divine Mercy

Whether we define justice according to axiomatic moral principles or according to God’s will is a question with which Abrahamic religions and moral philosophy have long been grappling. The latter view, called Divine Command Theory (DCT) by moral philosophers, claims that God, the creator and ruler of the universe, must also be the ultimate determiner of justice. According to this theory, an action is right precisely because God commands it, or wrong precisely because God prohibits it. Some hold this view because they believe it to be a result of God’s absolute sovereignty: if God lacks the authority to decide what is and is not just, they reason, there must be some other authority making that decision, and if another authority exists, God’s sovereignty is not absolute. But from a logical perspective, we can only make God sovereign over right and wrong at the expense of God’s justice. If God’s will, without reference to any independent moral principles, determines how we define “right” and “wrong,” then God’s judgment must be

arbitrary and God’s justice ultimately empty. It is a mere tautology to call divine commandments “just” if by “just” we mean nothing more than “divinely commanded.”

In considering DCT, we must face the distressing question that Abraham faced when God commanded him to slaughter Isaac: is it always wrong to kill one’s beloved child regardless of God’s commandment, or is it always right to obey God faithfully, no matter how our own moral sense may protest? According to DCT, if God commands Abraham to slaughter Isaac, Abraham ought to do just that that is, until God commands the opposite. Parts of the Hebrew Bible can be interpreted as supporting DCT, but in other passages, God announces one course of action and then switches to a different course, usually in response to human plea.

The Case for Divine Command Theory: Psalms 51 & 143 and Job 28 & 40

As J. Gericke points out in “Beyond Divine Command Theory,” there is a wellestablished tradition of assuming that biblical morality begins and ends with defining goodness according to God’s word. Gericke writes, “in their theological claims [biblical scholars] seem to imply that in ancient Israelite religion the divine will was assumed to be the ultimate foundation of morality, i.e., that human actions were considered morally good if and only if YHWH willed or commanded them….”61 This tradition has good reason for persisting.

First, in Psalm 51:4, the psalmist writes, “Against You, You alone, have I sinned, and what is evil in your eyes have I done; that You will be righteous in your speaking

61 Ja o W. Ge i ke, Be o d Di i e Co a d Theo : Mo al ‘ealis i the He e Bi le, Theological Studies 65, no. 1 (2009): 1-5.

You will be blameless in your judging.”62 David feels consumed by guilt and yearns for God to make him clean again. One might read this verse as a simple acknowledgement that God’s moral standards are more demanding than those of humans, but a proponent of DCT could read it as suggesting that God is the sole source of moral law, and for that reason it is against God alone (rather than against some independent moral principle) that David sinned. B. Johnson explains further:

Whenever [the] covenantal relationship between God and human beings is violated, God cannot be the guilty party because right is inseparable from God God is both the origin and guarantor of all righteousness; there is no righteousness apart from him. Hence if God is [righteous], human beings are [wicked] as long as they are separated from God.63

It is by definition, not due to God’s moral excellence, that He is perfectly just.

Second, Psalm 143:2 reads, “Do not come judgmentally to your servant: because no living creature shall be righteous before you.” Here David introduces his prayer for God to ease his affliction by acknowledging his own moral inadequacy in relation to God’s greatness. At the same time, he also lets himself off the hook: he is no worse than any other of God’s creations! But as with Ps 51:6, 143:2 can also be read to support DCT: if God defines the justice so perfect that no creature can attain it, it is only natural that no creature should be justified before God.

Third, in Job 28:12, in the poetic interlude inserted into Job’s final speech to his friends, Job asks “And wisdom—where shall it be found? And where is the place of understanding?” In 28:28, at the close of the interlude, he answers, “God said to humanity: Now, they shall fear God; that is wisdom. And fleeing from evil is

62 The translation is my own. I use here the traditional Christian numbering system. Hebrew texts number this verse as 51:6.

63 G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren, and Heinz-Josef Fabry, eds., Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishi g Co pa , , s. . Tzadak, .

understanding.” Job may mean that wisdom and understanding (both of which are partner-concepts to righteousness in wisdom literature)64 coincide with obedience to God because God only demands that we do what is wise, and what is wise is to act in accordance with intrinsically valuable moral principles. However, the verses can also be read to support the position of a proponent of DCT: if revering God is precisely equivalent to wisdom, then righteousness does indeed mean doing whatever God may command.

Finally, in Job 40:8-9, in God’s response to Job’s complaints, God says, “Would you impugn My justice? Would you condemn Me that you may be right? Have you an arm like God’s? Can you thunder with a voice like His?”65 God’s response is cryptic: it may mean that Job is a fool to test his own righteousness against that of the most righteous Being in existence, but it may also mean something like the premise of DCT.

As J.D. Pleins writes, the problem with challenging God’s justice may have nothing to do with God’s justice. “In using his innocence to make a case against God, Job ran the risk of closing himself off from the only one who could bring him consolation.”66 Job’s problem is not that God is right and Job is wrong; it is that God is God and Job is Job. Job is mad to challenge the very source of cosmic power and consolation, no matter how God may ignore the just principles Job wishes He would use to govern the world.

64 As Birch writes in Let Justice Roll Down, Jo : is a e a ple of isdo lite atu e s ie that the fea of God is the fou datio of isdo a d k o ledge. He o ti ues, … isdo g o s out of a d attests to a ealit fou ded i God….All the good thi gs i life flow out of an order which God i te ded a d esta lished. Bruce C. Birch, Let Justice Roll Down: The Old Testament, Ethics, and Christian Life (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), 324-25. On this view, wisdom coincides with justice: both poi t to ai tai i g a d p o oti g God s o de .

65 J. David Pleins, The Social Visions of the Hebrew Bible: A Theological Introduction. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 498.

66 Ibid.

These verses from Job can be interpreted as simply emphasizing the perfection of God’s justice compared to the fallible morality of humans. But as Katharine Dell explains in her article on the book of Job, “Does God Behave Unethically?” “Job’s capitulation [to God, at the end of the book]…may well be because he recognizes the awesome power of the Almighty,” and not because he believes that he has disobeyed any moral imperative.67 God’s power is primary and His morality secondary. Might determines Right. We can understand Psalms 51:6 and 143:2 through the same lens: because God’s incontrovertible will alone determines the nature of justice, no one is just without being united with God.

God’s Imperfect Justice in Exodus 32

Yet in multiple biblical passages, God seems to be on the verge of unleashing harsh punishment, only to be stopped by a person who convinces Him to take a wiser or more just course of action. Many of these passages refer to what God had planned to do as hara’ah (the evil) and say nicham (He repented) when God has a change of heart, as we will see.

The clearest example of this type of interaction appears in Exodus 32:9-14.

Furious at the people of Israel for building and worshiping a golden calf after He led them miraculously out of slavery in Egypt, God is ready to kill them all except Moses and his family (32:9-10). But Moses pleads with God, speaks of His relationship with the people of Israel and the promises He made to their ancestors, and persuades Him to preserve them for the sake of His public image (32:11-13). In 32:12 Moses asks God to “repent of this evil against Your people” and in 32:14 we read that God “repented of the evil which He said He would do against His people.” The language in the two verses is

67 Katharine Dell, Does God Beha e U ethi all ?, i Ethical and Unethical in the Old Testament: God and Humans in Dialogue (New York: T & T Clark International, 2010), 173.

almost perfectly parallel: Moses calls God’s plans for His people evil and asks God to repent of them, and two verses later the narrator confirms Moses’ assessment: what God thought to do to the people was indeed evil, and thanks to Moses, God chose not to do it.

The story appears to be an attempt to make its intended audience more obedient. Moses and God respond to the people’s idolatry by “playing Good Cop/Bad Cop,” and their interaction magnifies both God’s fearsome power and Israel’s need to follow Moses closely: only God’s prophet can keep God’s terrifying, barely-controlled wrath in check.

The story of Moses’ intercession with God could have helped inspire allegiance to Israel’s religious leaders, through both love for the leaders and fear of God. But as effective as the story may have been in that regard, it is also likely to be deeply troubling to a certain kind of believer. It presents a case in which God, whose rule we expect to be so just that justice itself is defined thereby, declared an intention to do something “evil” to His people. As far as we know, God would have gone through with it had it not been for the quick work of His faithful and persuasive servant. God’s readiness to wrong His people supplies a counterexample to the theological claim that God is perfectly just, besides shattering the premise that justice is always defined according to God’s will.

Because the text calls God’s initial plan evil, not just, justice must be here defined according to some principle other than God’s own will. Whatever that principle was, when God departed from it (however briefly), Moses held onto it. This fact only exacerbates the problem: it is bad enough for God to be capable of brief injustice, but for God’s prophet to momentarily best God in righteousness is frankly embarrassing! What are we to make of Ps 143:2, which said no living creature can be righteous before God?

Did David not know about Moses? The character of God in Exodus 32 is not consistent with the claims of DCT.

God’s Decision to Spare the People of Israel in Numbers 14

Exodus 32:9-14 is only one occurrence of a larger trend. Its closest parallel passage is Numbers 14:11-24, when God is again furious at His people and prepared to kill them and start over with Moses and his family (14:11-12). This time, His fury comes in response to the scouts’ report of the Promised Land’s fearsome inhabitants and Israel’s terrified reaction. While Moses does not call God’s planned punishment “evil” here, he again persuades God to stay His hand by asking what the other nations will say. Israel currently enjoys a formidable reputation among the Canaanites its reputed relationship with the Almighty inspires fear in the hearts of its opponents–but if God makes good on His threat, the Egyptians will hear of it and tell the Canaanites that Israel’s God lacks the power to bring His people into the Promised Land successfully, and the Canaanites will think less of God (14:13-16). Moses tells God that to be truly powerful, He must have patience with His iniquitous people, and he begs God to pardon them (14:17-19). God does pardon them and agrees not to destroy them immediately, but announces a more moderate punishment: the faithless will never enter the Promised Land; instead, Caleb will lead the rising generation in after the older one dies off (14:20-24).

While the gap between God’s initial plan and His final decision is much narrower here than in Ex 32, in both passages God announces a harsh plan and decides to pursue a more merciful one after hearing from Moses. If the initial plan God voiced in 14:11-12 was perfectly just (as one would expect of a god who embodies justice itself), then how can His ultimate decision also be right? Can two plans so different from each other both

be fair? And conversely, if God’s ultimate decision to let the faithless people die of old age in the desert was a fair one, then how can we defend His earlier plan to immediately kill them? If justice means anything apart from whatever God says, it must care whether the adults of Israel die immediately or grow old wandering in the desert.

God’s Choice to Spare Nineveh in Jonah 3-4: A Parody of Exodus 32 & Numbers 14

By the time the book of Jonah was written, the passage from Numbers 14 must have been well-known, because the author of Jonah packs meaning into the brief text in part by alluding to the pattern established by Numbers 14:9-24 and in part by making a few notable changes from that pattern. Jonah, a sort of anti-Moses, is self-interested. He has no more patience for God or other people, so when God tells him to warn Nineveh that it will be destroyed for its wickedness, He makes no effort to plead with God to save the city. Instead, he flees in the opposite direction to save himself the fruitless effort (and the potential capital punishment see Dt 18:20-22) of proclaiming a prophecy that will never come to pass. But in spite of Jonah’s unwillingness, the people of Nineveh (who complement Jonah’s anti-Moses character by representing anti-Israel, being quick to repent instead of being inexcusably faithless) optimistically throw themselves into wholehearted atonement as soon as they hear Jonah’s message. In 3:9 they say, “Who knows? God may turn and repent,” and in 3:10, we read that God, seeing their atonement, “repented of the evil which he said he would do to them.”

The book’s final chapter tells us that when God first commanded Jonah to go to Nineveh to tell the city’s inhabitants that they would soon be destroyed, it was so obvious (and so maddening) to Jonah that God would eventually change His mind and forgive them, he could not stand to discharge his assignment (4:1-2). His speech in 4:2 includes a

parodic echo of Moses’ intercessory prayer in Numbers 14:18, but where Moses says that God “will by no means clear the guilty,” Jonah says the opposite: he says God “repents of evil,” referring to God’s decision to clear the guilty Ninevites. The language of Jonah 4:2 mirrors that of 3:9-10 and Ex 32:12-14.

Even in Jonah, it remains theologically questionable for an all-knowing god to announce a definite course of action and then change His mind. Had the destruction been conditional, we would have expected God to command Jonah to add “unless everyone here repents” to his categorical warning in Jonah 3:4, “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” But in light of their sincere repentance, the people of Nineveh deserve their divine pardon. Perhaps God’s supposedly perfect justice can be reconciled with His describing His own plan for Nineveh as “evil” by pointing to the Ninevites’ total change: God’s initial plan for them might have been appropriate had they held to their sinful ways, but it would have been evil to inflict it upon them once they atoned. But the contrast between Israel’s stubbornness in Exodus 32 and the Ninevites’ wholehearted repentance throws the problem of the former passage into even sharper relief: in Exodus 32, Israel never atones. In light of Jonah 3-4, the people’s failure to repent makes God’s abandoning His original plan for them even harder to justify.

God’s Abandoned Plans to Punish Israel in Amos 7

In Amos 7:1-6, Amos tells of how God showed him His plans to punish the people of Israel for their iniquity, and how he interceded and begged God to have mercy on them. Amos humbly warned God that His plans might wipe Israel out entirely, small as it is. As in Exodus 32 and Numbers 14, God repents of His plans (which are not described as evil here) not because Israel has shown a change of heart but simply because

Amos pled effectively. If God is all-knowing, it cannot be that Amos provided God with any information not already accessible to Him, and yet twice in this passage God announces a plan to punish Israel, Amos pleads for God not to do it, and God repents of His plan. Just as Exodus 32 and Numbers 14 magnify Moses’ status, Amos 7 draws attention to Amos’ importance to Israel’s well-being. If not for Amos’ intercession, God might have gotten carried away in his zeal to punish. But if these passages’ purpose is to glorify prophets, they only succeed at the expense of God’s image: they imply that God’s rage can overpower His wisdom and justice. The theological result of this reading is that rather than being an arbitrary determiner of the nature of justice, God is beholden to rules which His prophets understand and can cite to reign in God’s volatile wrath.

God’s Decision to Spare Jerusalem in I Chronicles 21

In I Chronicles 21:1-18, thanks to Satan’s inspiration, King David commands each local leader to number the people in his area. Each one does so, albeit some under protest (21:1-6). God, displeased, smites Israel, and David admits his mistake and begs God’s forgiveness (21:7-8). But instead of forgiving him outright, God tells David to choose one of three terrible punishments (21:9-12). David opts for natural disaster, preferring to be at the mercy of God than human enemies, and a pestilence kills 70,000 of his men (21:13-14). Then God sends an angel to finish off Jerusalem. But before the angel can strike, God looks down and sees the destruction the city has already withstood, and He “repents” of the further “evil” he had planned, telling the angel to stay his hand. (21:15). Before the angel sheathes his sword, David and his elders see the angel and prostrate themselves. David begs God to punish him for his sin, but to spare his innocent subjects (21:16-17), and God instructs David in how he is to repent (21:18).

There is great emotional power in the picture of God being moved from wrath to pity by the sight of a mostly-destroyed Jerusalem while David, still terrified by the angel, begs God to take him but spare his innocent subjects. Both God and David display an overwhelming desire to protect the vulnerable: God is willing to forego inflicting punishment for the sake of preserving Israel, and David offers to sacrifice himself (as is his duty as king) for the same purpose. The passage portrays both God and King David as powerful and loving rulers, but in doing so, it calls God’s justice into question. If God knew of Jerusalem’s weakened state when He sent the angel to destroy the city in 21:15, either it was wrong for Him to send the destroying angel initially or it was wrong for Him to call off the plan in the end. That the text calls the plan “evil” suggests the former, but it also suggests that something outside of God can evaluate the justice or injustice of His plans. This passage, like the others we have investigated already, suggests both that God’s will does not determine the nature of justice and that God is not perfectly just. This passage is unique because God has two reasons to repent for His planned evil. First, He repents from divine protectiveness: in spite of the people’s lack of merit, God remembers His love for them and His hope that they will survive, as in Exodus 32 and Numbers 14 (where God remembers his love for the people) and in Amos 7 (where God changes His plans to avoid killing them entirely). Immediately after God repents (and, it is implied, before anyone on earth learns of God’s change of heart), King David and the elders sincerely atone, indicating that it is now retroactively fair for God to have shown them mercy, even if God was too lenient before68 like the Ninevites in Jonah 3,

68 It may sound odd to modern ears to call mercy an outgrowth of justice because we commonly call justice and mercy opposites. But M. Weinfeld e plai s that i e tai i li al te ts, justi e a d ighteous ess efe , i fa t, to a ts of ki d ess a d e , espe iall he des i i g a ule s

they have turned from their wickedness and deserve to be saved. The double motivation here for God’s change of heart—He was moved by pity and the people repented makes God look more just than He does in other passages of this type.

God’s Extension of King Hezekiah’s Life in II Kings 20

In II Kings 20:1-6, as King Hezekiah lies in bed “sick unto death,” Isaiah comes to him and prophecies that he will not recover, but will die soon (20:1). But as Isaiah leaves, Hezekiah prays for God to heal him, reminding Him of how virtuously he has lived (20:2-3). God, swayed by Hezekiah’s prayer, immediately tells Isaiah (who has barely left the inner court) to return to the king and tell him he will recover and live fifteen years more (20:4-6). This passage does not describe God as repenting of any evil He had planned; instead, in 20:5, God merely instructs Isaiah to tell the king that He has heard his prayer and seen his tears, and He will heal him.

One purpose of this passage may be to portray King Hezekiah in a flattering light it makes him look humble and shows that God favors him but what it says about God’s character is puzzling. The Bible’s presentation of King Hezekiah is so full of praise that there is no clear reason why God would initially plan to send Hezekiah an early death,69 nor why Hezekiah would have to remind God of his obvious virtue in order to convince God to change His mind. God’s decision to afflict Hezekiah is mysterious at best, capricious at worst; the idea that Hezekiah does not deserve his hardship is strongly treatment of the weak. See Moshe Weinfeld, Social Justice in Ancient Israel, 2nd ed. (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2000), 59.

69 The Talmudic speculation on this question further attests to how puzzling it is. The Babylonian Talmud postulates that God struck Hezekiah with a malady to resolve a rift between him and the prophet Isaiah, and that Isaiah, while visiting the sick king, warned him that not only would he die but his soul would perish as well, because he had failed to marry and have children. In a classically neat Talmudic resolution, when Hezekiah recovers, he marries Isaiah s daughte . “ee Marcus Jastrow and Isidore Singer, eds., Je ish E lopedia Ne Yo k: Fu k a d Wag alls, , s. . Hezekiah, a essed De e e , 2014, http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/7668-hezekiah

supported by how quickly God heals him in response to his sincere prayer. Hezekiah prays humbly, as though he had little merit, but the passage suggests it was God who was in the wrong for inappropriately making Hezekiah face death. Like the preceding ones, this passage suggests that God can be wrong. By conceding claims to God’s goodness, we introduce the possibility of moral principles existing independently of God’s will.

God’s Protection of Cain in Genesis 4

Finally, in Gen. 4:13-15, God, having discovered Cain’s murder of Abel, curses Cain with banishment. This leaves Cain vulnerable to others’ murderous vengeance. When Cain protests that the curse is more than he can bear that whoever finds him will slay him God responds by giving him protection from murder (4:15). It seems God meant for Cain to be homeless, but not dead. Yet how can we say that God lacked the foresight to see what Cain saw at once? Even if we do not call God all-knowing, could God have been unaware of what was so evident to Cain? One primary purpose of the passage may be to make God look extraordinarily reasonable He even cares for murderers and outcasts! but if so, it is unclear why God did not give Cain the protection along with the curse. If God can respond to Cain’s protest by lightening His decree, and if we assume that a perfectly just decree would be made imperfect if it were either harsher or lighter, then either its initial or its final form must have been imperfectly just. Nevertheless the text offers a sort of reassurance: God’s decrees are not necessarily set in stone. God is willing to change His mind if presented with a fair complaint.

God Changes His Mind: The Peril and the Promise

Certain passages from the books of Job and Psalms can be read as supporting Divine Command Theory, but even if that were their authors’ intent, it is not all the

Hebrew Bible has to say on the subject. Stories of God’s interactions with Moses (Exodus 32 and Numbers 14), the Ninevites (Jonah 3-4), the prophet Amos (Amos 7), King David (I Chronicles 21), King Hezekiah (II Kings 20), and Cain (Genesis 4) show that God will sometimes change His plans apparently to make them better conform to a vision of justice which exists independently of His evolving will. In Exodus 32, Jonah 34, Amos 7, and I Chronicles 21, the text says explicitly that God repented of his plans, and it calls those plans evil in Exodus 32, Jonah 3-4, and I Chronicles 21. While in Jonah 3, God seems to see his plan to destroy Nineveh as only undesirable once the Ninevites atoned, in the other six passages, God changes His plans at least partly because His attention is newly drawn to information that was available to Him all along, but which now has a new emotional impact upon God, inspiring Him to be more merciful to those He would have punished. In these six texts, God treats his former plans as if they were a bad idea all along.

Like any loaded weapon, the belief that God can change His plans can be used equally easily to defend or to hurt the disempowered. If someone claims that the poor must have earned their lowly condition because of their own failure to live wisely (saying, for example, that they are at fault for being lazy, as Proverbs 10:4 suggests), and if that person treats them as if they deserve their hard life, an opponent could retort that even if they do merit their situation, God may yet show them mercy. That opponent’s response could be strengthened by bringing up the related possibility that God never approved of their lowly situation at all that He has simply been delaying justice, and once it is unleashed, we will see the poor showered with blessings while their former oppressors wail in the agony of deserved punishment. If God can back out of a promise,

perhaps He can also delay the fulfillment of His promises, so how things appear now is not necessarily a reflection of how God will ultimately want them to be.

But the doctrine that God can change His mind cuts both ways. Suppose we follow Psalms 12:5-8 and 140:12, James 5:2, and similar passages teaching that God shows special favor to the needy, and we expect that favor to manifest itself with God rising up and giving the wealthy their long-overdue punishment for greedily oppressing the poor. We derive from these teachings both hope for the future and a benefit in the present: if God favors the needy, then the needy have a claim to high status in the eyes of God, which lends some balance to the low status they hold in human society. Their voices might carry more weight when they speak to the rich and powerful. But if God is known to go back on His word, this promise He makes to the needy cannot be trusted. We will wonder whether, when the time comes for God to unleash punishment upon powerful oppressors, God will decide to show them mercy instead. As a result of this uncertainty, the special status of the lowly in daily society would be rendered less reliable, so the voices of the poor would carry less weight when they speak to the rich and powerful. If we think there is still hope for the poor even when God seems to be allowing them to suffer, we must also think there might be no hope at all for the poor, even though God has promised to redeem them. If God’s word is not His bond, we cannot know where we stand with God.

Some thinkers consider the belief that God changes His mind to be so dangerous that they seek to disarm it, arguing that in spite of what the Bible appears to say, God never changes His mind at all. For example, Robert Chisholm, a professor at the Dallas Theological Seminary, reasons that God might announce an idea He is considering, and

He might later discard it, but once God is sure, He never goes back on His word.70 Chisholm finds support for this view from clues in the text, but his grounding for it comes not from the text but from the traditional view that it would be unbecoming for God to change His mind, and therefore God does not do it. Similarly, Matthew Halsted, a Christian apologist, argues that since Christian hope of salvation hangs upon the reliability of God’s promise, the passages in the Bible where God seems to go back on His word are only figures of speech that anthropomorphize God to convey an important message. 71 And Lindsay Van Allen writes that the problem with God repenting in response to human protest is that “if God is still repenting or learning, then…it wouldn't make sense to implicitly follow Him.”72 God’s claim on our obedience is compromised if we cannot rely on His justice. These reactions to God’s changing His mind are motivated by a deep understanding of just how theologically perilous it is to view God as capable of acting imperfectly.

The social and psychological implications are also dangerous. If people cannot trust God’s word, they cannot trust their leaders who speak God’s word to them. If we all begin to make our own decisions about whether to follow our leaders, a formerly unified society will grow chaotic, it may break into warring factions, and it may never achieve the sort of greatness that can come from unity and shared vision. Something is lost when we relinquish mass trust in, and obedience to, a single will. And to turn from the many to the one: the individual also loses a sense of basic safety (a possible prerequisite for

70 ‘o e t B. Chishol J ., Does God 'Cha ge His Mi d'?, Bibliotheca Sacra 152 (OctoberDecember 1995): 387-99.

71 Matthe Halsted, Does God ‘epe t?, Ch istia Apologeti s a d ‘esea h Mi ist , a essed December 17, 2014, http://carm.org/does-god-repent-an-examination-of-exodus-32-14-and-genesis-6-6

72 Lindsay Van Allen, emailed to author, January 28, 2015.

moving through life with confidence) if she cannot trust the one in control to lead wisely.

Just as a young child will not have the capacity to ensure that her parents’ decisions are fair and prudent, an adult may feel daunted by the idea that she must review the justice of God’s decisions and must speak up against God about any problems she finds. It can be a relief to know that someone else competent is in charge; for some people, to be denied that reassurance means never feeling entirely safe again.

But while the unity of society and the individual’s feelings of safety absolutely matter, it is not clear that their importance trumps the importance of preserving protest as a viable option for people who are suffering severely. If Mses. Green and Brown are suffering so severely that they will not feel a basic sense of safety regardless of what anyone tells them about the character of God, Ms. Gray would demonstrate a certain lack of sympathy if, in the face of their suffering, she nevertheless continued to operate as if God’s justice is perfect. Has she the right to continue making that claim purely from her need to feel safe, if she shows no interest in what Mses. Green and Brown are feeling?

Even if she defends her choice by pointing to the importance of preserving social unity, her defense is suspect: how valuable, and how worth preserving in its current form, can even the most unified society be if it does not respond with compassionate indignation to the severe suffering of Ms. Green and Ms. Brown?

Perilous though it may be, the idea that God changes His mind is too precious to disarm. If God can listen to human protest and reconsider His stated judgments in response, then perhaps when Mses. Green and Brown suffer undeserved pain, we need not feel a religious obligation to justify their present suffering or its continuation. We can simply say that they are in terrible pain, and that we want it to stop. This model also gives

Mses. Green and Brown a way to respond to their suffering without effacing themselves. They can cry out in protest without being labeled impious for refusing to embrace God’s will. In this view, their protest does not itself qualify as a transgression that justifies their suffering, as it might have in the theologies we investigated in the previous chapter. Instead, when they cry out, they are following the examples of great biblical heroes. As adherents to their religion, they inherit the right to negotiate with God according to a shared vision of justice. Other members of their community may even join with them in solidarity, conveying exactly the compassionate support that would help Ms. Green manage her pain and encourage Ms. Brown to seek release from its shackles.

There is a less obvious, but more widely applicable, benefit from making protest against God an acceptable response to suffering. If God already changes His decrees sometimes when people protest, then for human leaders acting as God’s agents to do likewise is no new threat. If God were infallible, and if one aspect of God’s infallibility were the way He guides His servants to carry out His will on earth, then for Ms. Brown to accuse His servants of error could be seen as effectively accusing God of imperfection.

But if God’s occasional errors are already well known, then we can reasonably expect His servants to be capable of transmitting them (and even of generating errors of their own). Under these circumstances, if Ms. Brown is suffering under the unjust rule of people in power who are thought to speak for God, she can protest the injustice without necessarily inviting a piety-driven backlash that interprets her protest as blasphemy or seeks to silence it. She can seek redress without impacting the overall stability of her society’s power structure. In this way, we can remove an obstacle to greater justice on earth when we admit the possibility of imperfect justice in heaven.

Lamentations Rabbah: Protesting God’s Injustice Summons His Mercy

The twenty-fourth section of the introduction to Lamentations Rabbah (commonly called the twenty-fourth proem) contains a rabbinic story in which five prophets protest on behalf of the people of Israel against God’s harsh decree, and God responds more mercifully. The proem is of particular interest to our inquiry not only because the story is so rich but also because the protest that ultimately succeeds comes on the heels of several failed protests, drawing attention to the question of what kinds of protests, and what kinds of protestors, can bring forth God’s mercy.

The proem should not be understood as a statement of what its authors or its readers believed. It is not Jewish theology, but rather something like a meditation or a fantasy that expresses certain fears and desires. We cannot draw conclusions from it about ancient rabbinic doctrinal beliefs. We can, however, glean from it something of the mood at the time among these thinkers how they felt about God, their suffering, and the power of people to effect change in Heaven and we can use it as a foundation on which to construct Jewish theology today.

I draw from this proem three visions of the relationship between God and Israel’s suffering. These visions differ from each other in significant ways, but the text does not separate them neatly; instead, it moves fluidly from one to the next. After showing how each of these three visions characterizes God, I will analyze the proem’s literary structure to demonstrate how it can be understood as representing two literary genres: a rabbinic complaint-mashal with a tragic outlook, and a psalm of lament whose ultimate message is more uplifting. Finally, I will discuss what lessons the proem has for readers in search of healing for themselves and for others.

The proem’s first vision primarily appears at the beginning of the text. It suggests that human suffering is the natural result of God’s distance, and that God is forced to be distant because the people of Israel have sinned. God is horrified and distraught by their suffering and wants to end it, but He must let it continue.73 The second vision, primarily appearing in the middle of the text, agrees with the first vision that suffering is punishment for sin, but it says something different about God’s power: in this vision, God can end Israel’s suffering whenever He chooses, but God chooses not to end it. Instead, God actively prolongs its suffering, deaf to the three patriarchs’ pleas for mercy and Moses’ request for lighter punishment. The third vision, appearing at the end of the proem, agrees with the second vision that God is directly responsible for Israel’s suffering and can end it at any moment, but He is less cold and more accessible. Here, as in the biblical stories of the previous section, human protest influences God’s rule. God responds to protest with mercy, reassuring the people of Israel that all will be well.

The proem’s first section (verses 1-17 in Buber’s text)74 opens on the aftermath of the first temple’s destruction. God weeps over Israel laid waste, refusing the angels’ comfort. Physical signs of connection between God and Israel are destroyed. The onceglorious temple, where God’s presence dwells on earth, is now ruins where foxes run wild. The name of God is no longer incised on the people’s weapons. They mourn the loss of God’s presence and favor.

For the community of Israel said before the Holy One, blessed be He, “Lord of the world, I remember full well the security and peace and prosperity in which I dwelt, but which now are far from me, so I weep and sigh, saying, ‘Would that it

73 This vision anti ipates the the e of the e t hapte athe tha e e plif i g this hapte s theme, but I analyze it here for the sake of textual continuity.

74 Salomon Buber, Midrasch Echa Rabbati (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1967), 23-25

were like those old times, when the temple was standing, and in it you would descend from the heavens on high and bring to dwell your presence upon me.’

And the nations of the world would praise me. And when I asked mercy for my sins, you would respond to me. But now I am shamed and humiliated.…for my sins have made this happen to me, and deceitful prophets who were in my midst misled me from the way of life to the way of death.”75

Israel’s sins and its naïve trust in false prophets caused God to withdraw. From that distance, God cannot ensure His people’s wellbeing as they fight their enemies. Whereas God’s justice and mercy ruled before, now all hell has broken loose.

God then withdraws His presence from the temple, and it is destroyed.

When the Holy One…considered destroying the house of the sanctuary, he said, “So long as I am within it, the nations of the world cannot lay a hand on it. I shall close my eyes to it and take an oath that I shall not become engaged with it until the time of the end.” Then the enemies came and destroyed it. Forthwith the Holy One, blessed be He, took an oath by his right hand and put it behind him: “He has drawn back his right hand from before the enemy” (Lam 2:3). 76

God allows Israel’s enemies to destroy the temple by withdrawing from protecting His people. That God swore to refrain from getting involved again indicates that He needed an oath to bar Him from yielding to his true desire. He wants to protect the people of Israel, but must not do so:

[He] wept, saying, “Woe is me! What have I done! I have brought my Presence to dwell below on account of the Israelites, and now that they have sinned, I have gone back to my earlier dwelling. Heaven forfend that I now become a joke to the nations and a source of ridicule among people.”77

God is distraught at His people’s defeat and fears a loss of status in other nations’ eyes. Inconsolable and refusing even Metatron’s comfort, God surveys the damage on earth with Jeremiah and the ministering angels. God laments again at what He sees:

75 Jacob Neusner, Lamentations Rabbah: An Analytical Translation (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1989), 72.

76 Neusner, 72-73.

77 Neusner, 73.

At that moment the Holy One, blessed be He, wept, saying “Woe is me for my house! O children of mine – where are you? O priests of mine – where are you? O you who love me – where are you? What shall I do for you? I warned you, but you did not repent.”78

God is bound to punish the people of Israel for their sins, so He cannot remedy the situation. Had the people repented sooner, God could have prevented the destruction, but as they did not, now God mourns with them. The proem’s first section concludes with God commanding Jeremiah, whose sympathetic gestures He finds inadequate, to resurrect Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses because they “know how to weep.” Jeremiah obeys, and the four dead men rise from their graves. Upon hearing the news, they proceed to lament with God.

79

This section of the proem emphasizes God’s profound grief and inability to fix things. God’s justice and love for His people is complete, but His power to determine the course of history according to His own wishes is deeply compromised. Israel’s sins force a loving but rule-bound god to allow a terrible fate that only the people could have prevented.

Throughout the proem’s first section, we have been hearing several rabbinic voices. But now, at the beginning of the second section, R. Samuel bar Nahman takes over. He narrates through the end of the proem. Not surprisingly, the tone of the proem changes here, and so does the vision of God’s relationship to Israel’s suffering. Instead of offering God the pure sympathy He desired, Abraham protests, holding God accountable for the horrid situation and complaining that He is unfairly hard on His people. Abraham cries, “How come I am treated differently from every other nation and language, that I

78 Neusner, 73.

79 Ibid.

should be brought to such humiliation and shame!”80 God offers no response, so the ministering angels take up Abraham’s cry, using the five parts of Isaiah 33:8 as their template. They imply that it is God’s fault that “the highways lie waste” and that “the wayfaring man ceases” to make his triannual pilgrimages. They say God has “broken the covenant” made with His people we are no longer talking about a god whose word is His bond—and similarly, He has “despised the cities,” Jerusalem and Zion, which God had previously chosen as His favorites. The angels conclude that God “regards not Enosh” in that “Even as much as the generation of Enosh, chief of all idol worshippers, [God has] not valued Israel!”81 Echoing Abraham, the ministering angels protest that God is too hard on Israel, showing the people even less love than He showed the most idolatrous generation that ever was.

This is a different view of God than what we saw in the proem’s first section. God cannot be at fault for the state of the highway and for the wayfaring man’s having ceased, if Israel brought on its own destruction. Understanding the angels’ laments requires a different set of premises about the relationship between God and Israel’s suffering. In this second vision, God has control over all that occurs, so whatever happens is God’s will. But if God is in control and yet Israel suffers beyond what it deserves, then God’s love and justice are called into question.

As the drama continues, this new vision sharpens. Abraham continues his complaint:

Said Abraham before the Holy one, blessed be He, “Lord of the world! How come you have sent my children into exile and handed them over to the nations? And they have killed them with all manner of disgusting forms of death! And you have

80 Neusner, 74.

81 Neusner, 75.

destroyed the house of the sanctuary, the place on which I offered up my son Isaac as a burnt-offering before you!?”82

To Abraham, God is more to blame than sinful Israel for its exile and destruction. God had no right to destroy the sanctuary, given Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice Isaac there. God ought to have protected Israel from its enemies. God defends Himself: Said to Abraham the Holy One, blessed be He, “Your children sinned and violated the whole Torah, transgressing the twenty-two letters that are used to write it: ‘Yes, all Israel have transgressed your Torah’ (Dan. 9:11).”83

God’s defense is a reiteration of His frustration from the first section. Here, as there, He depicts Himself as obligated, against His own will, to let Israel suffer for its sins. It is as if God is crying, “I had no choice!” In response, Abraham shows God that there were other options.

Abraham rejects the idea that God must act in accordance with some vision of retributive justice. He challenges God to bring witnesses to testify against Israel. But when God calls the Torah as a witness, Abraham silences her before she can begin testifying by reminding her that when other nations despised her, Israel honored her by adopting her commandments.

[God] said to [Abraham], “Let the Torah come and give testimony against the Israelites.” Said Abraham to her, “My daughter, have you come to give testimony against the Israelites that they have violated your religious duties? And are you not ashamed on my account? Remember the day on which the Holy One, blessed be He, peddled you to all the nations and languages of the world, and no one wanted to accept you, until my children … accepted you and honored you! And now are you coming to give testimony against them on their day of disaster?” When the Torah heard this, she went off to one side and did not testify against them.84

82 Neusner, 75.

83 Ibid.

84 Neusner, 75-76.

Abraham deals similarly with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which God calls to witness against Israel’s transgressions. Abraham uses each letter’s desire to be honored as leverage, making it feel so indebted to the people of Israel (who kept commandments beginning with its sound) that it refuses to testify against them. Thus Abraham relies on the demands of loyalty to dismantle the mechanisms of divine justice. God can no longer establish that Israel is guilty and deserves to be punished. Yet, God does not relent.

With God’s witnesses silenced, now Israel’s advocates speak. First Abraham, then Isaac, and then Jacob remind God of how they suffered without reward to help achieve God’s goals. Abraham cites his willingness to sacrifice his own son; Isaac cites his willingness to be sacrificed, and Jacob cites the twenty years he worked for Laban, his readiness to be killed by Esau so that his children could live, and the anguish he bore in raising his children. Each patriarch ends his plea by asking, “Are you not going to remember this and have mercy on my children?”85 The patriarchs’ efforts to appeal to God signal their belief that God has the power and authority to reverse Israel’s fate, and that He would do so if only He had sufficient mercy on His people. They try to awaken God’s mercy, but God remains stubbornly silent.

Moses speaks next. He takes a different approach, demonstrating faith in God’s goodness despite stark evidence to the contrary. Like the patriarchs, Moses cites his lifelong devotion to God’s purposes and lack of reward: he led the people of Israel through the desert for forty years, but God decreed that he should die in the wilderness instead of entering the promised land but he does not plea for God to remember and have mercy, as the patriarchs did. Instead, Moses bids Jeremiah to show him what is happening to Israel, and Jeremiah takes him to the scene. When the survivors see Moses,

85 Neusner, 76-77.

they are filled with hope, but their hope is crushed when a voice from heaven echoes around them saying, “It is a decree from before me!”86 God’s message is clear: there is to be no redemption. But Moses gently subverts the decree:

Then said Moses to them, “My children, to bring you back is not possible, for the decree has already been issued. But the Omnipresent will bring you back quickly.” Then he left them.87 Moses thus limits the scope of God’s decree: he cannot save Israel now, but God will do so, and soon. Like Abraham, who dismantles the mechanisms of justice to make way for God’s mercy, Moses responds to God’s decree by assuring Israel (and reminding God) that it can be reversed. Even with God Himself ruling out a reversal, Moses faithfully insists that redemption will come. Moses’ insistence reveals an advantage of believing that God exercises total control: although it makes God responsible for terrible things, rendering His goodness incomplete, it also means that at any moment, God can change the course of history by doing something miraculous.

When Moses returns to the three patriarchs, he gives a detailed report and they all weep and sing dirges together. Moses curses the sun for not going dark when the enemies entered the temple to destroy it, but the sun defends itself: it would have darkened, except “[the angels] would not let me nor did they leave me alone, but beat me with sixty whips of fire, saying, ‘Go, pour out your light.’”88 Moses tries to generously spread the blame around to those complicit in the destruction instead of making God responsible for all of it, but the facts are against him; God is responsible even for the sun’s role in the tragedy.

Soon after, Moses warns the enemies to kill Israel more mercifully:

86 Neusner, 77.

87 Ibid.

88 Neusner, 78.

Moses then said, “O you who have taken the captives! I impose an oath on you by your lives! If you kill, do not kill with a cruel form of death, do not exterminate them utterly, do not kill a son before his father, a daughter before her mother, for the time will come for the Lord of heaven to exact a full reckoning from you!”89 Moses insists that ultimately, all will go according to his optimistic vision of God’s will, in which God sides with Israel. The enemies flout Moses’ words, doing exactly as he warned them not to do. As far as they can see, Moses’ threat of a divine reckoning is empty: if Israel’s God were so great, wouldn’t he have saved His people by now?

But Moses’ faith is unassailable. He turns back to God in the expectation that God will, if nothing else, at least obey God’s own laws as written in the Torah.

Moses said further before him, “Sovereign of the world, you wrote in your Torah, ‘Whether it is a herd-animal or a flock-animal, you shall not kill it and its offspring in the same day’ [Leviticus 22:28], so how is it that already countless children and their mothers are killed, and you are silent?”90

Like the patriarchs before him, Moses attributes to God the power to enact or prevent the deaths of the people of Israel, but Moses adds to that attribution an expectation that God cares about upholding the laws He issued to them. Moses seems to be asking for the bare minimum, that the suffering not be so dehumanizing that the people as a whole can never recover from it physically or emotionally. But God is still silent, and now Moses falls silent too. This event, halfway through verse 23 in Buber’s text, concludes the second section of the proem.

Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses express powerfully their belief that God has absolute power, total responsibility for Israel’s destruction, and the freedom to change the course of history if He wishes. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob plead for mercy for the people’s sake, while Moses tries to impose his faithful vision of God’s goodness upon

89 Neusner, 78.

90 Buber, 28. The translation is my own.

God. God refuses each one, either by saying there will be no relief from Israel’s suffering or by keeping stony silence.

The third and final vision of the relationship between God and the suffering of the people of Israel appears halfway through verse 23 in Buber’s text and concerns an exchange between God and Rachel. When Moses falls silent, Rachel rushes in from out of nowhere one wonders if she resurrected herself and recounts her suffering on the day when she was to marry Jacob.

In that hour, Rachel, our mother, rushed in before God and she said, “Sovereign of the universe! It is revealed before you that Jacob your servant loved me with an exceeding love, and he worked for Father on my behalf for seven years, and when he had fulfilled the seven years, and the time for my wedding to my husband had arrived, my father decided to bring my sister instead of me to my husband. And the thing was made extremely hard upon me, because the decision was known to me, so I made it known to my husband and I transmitted to him a sign so that he could distinguish between me and my sister in order that my father would not be able to exchange me, and thus I was internally comforted .

“But I swallowed my jealousy and I had compassion upon my sister so that she would not be exposed to disgrace. So in the evening, they brought my sister to my husband instead of me, and I transmitted to my sister all the signs that I had transmitted to my husband in order that he would think that she was Rachel. And that’s not all! Then I was concealed underneath the bed where he would be lying with my sister, and he was speaking with her, but she was silent while I responded to his every single word, in order that he would not recognize my sister’s voice. I showered kindness upon her and I was not jealous of her and I did not expose her to disgrace. And what am I? I am flesh and blood, dust and ash, and I was not jealous of my rival-wife, and I did not expose her to shame and to disgrace.

“But you are the living and eternal sovereign of mercy. How can you be jealous of idol worshippers, when there’s nothing of significance in [the act of idolatry]? But you exiled my children and they were killed in the desolation, and their enemies did with them as they wished.”

Immediately, the mercies of the holy one, blessed is God, were unfolded, and God said, “For you, Rachel, I am bringing Israel back to their place.”

Thus it is written here that God said thus: “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation of bitter crying. Rachel weeps over her children. She refuses to be comforted on account of her children, because they are no more. [Jeremiah 31:14]

And it is written that God said thus, “Prevent your voice from crying and your eyes from shedding tears, because there is reward for your deeds,” etc. [Jeremiah 31:15] And it is written, “And there is hope for your future. God spoke and the children returned from their exile.” [Jeremiah 31:16] 91

Rachel’s understanding of God agrees with those of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses: they all attribute to God absolute power over the world and total responsibility for all that occurs. What first distinguishes Rachel’s vision of God is that she considers Israel to deserve no suffering at all. She portrays its suffering as a result of God’s passion: God is jealous and irrational in response to Israel’s idolatry. She insists that idolatry is insignificant (ein bah mamash), because after all, idols do not represent real gods. The idolatrous people of Israel have no real relationship with rival-gods, but even if they did, surely an omnipotent god has the capacity to show mercy to them if Rachel, a mere human, could show mercy to Leah when Leah became her rival-wife and a real threat to her happiness. Because idolatry is meaningless and because God can do anything, Rachel argues, God’s failure to show mercy to His people is doubly inexcusable.

Further distinguishing her protest from those of the other prophets, Rachel shows understanding of God’s pain. Where Moses insists on God’s goodness in spite of evidence to the contrary and Abraham tries to coerce God to be merciful by rendering inactive God’s powerful tools of justice, Rachel recognizes why God is doing what He is doing. In a way that the other prophets cannot do because of their different experiences, Rachel shows sympathy for God by drawing parallels between her story and God’s situation. She has God’s ear when she rebukes Him for His jealousy-driven decree, and thus she unlocks God’s mercy and can bring reassurance and hope back to her people. In this third vision, the people of Israel suffer neither because they deserve it nor because

91 Buber, 28. The translation is my own.

God cannot do otherwise, but because the omnipotent God, feeling jealous and unloved, is using power unjustly to express His feelings.

This singular proem juxtaposes three markedly different visions of the relationship between God and the suffering of Israel. In the first vision, seen mostly in the first section and partly in the second, God loves Israel, but lacks the power to protect it from the punishment it deserves Its fate is determined by its own behavior and the demands of justice. God can only respond to its suffering with horror and lamentation. In the second vision, seen in the second section of the text, God has absolute power, but He can be cruel. Nothing happens unless God actively wills it, so Israel suffers at the hands of its enemies because God chose to punish it for its sins. God cares about justice, but He gets carried away with zeal to punish, and pleas for mercy and moderation do not move Him. In the third vision, it is God’s flaws, not those of Israel, which cause it to suffer.

God is as susceptible as humans are (if not more so) to passionate, irrational behavior. A worthy person who has endured unrewarded suffering can convert God’s wrath to mercy by showing sympathetic understanding while mounting a justified protest.

I have taken pains to tease apart these three distinct visions of the relationship between God and the suffering of the people of Israel. The text itself, however, shows no awareness of the inconsistencies between each one and the other two, mixing them together with no explicit efforts to resolve the contradictions implied. While it is by no means unusual for rabbinic commentaries to offer contradictory explanations for confusing scriptural passages,92 the struggle to explain a single confusing biblical passage

92 The internal oppositions contained within some rabbinic commentaries do not only stem from rabbis contradicting each other. For the sake of explaining difficult texts, one rabbi may even contradict himself. A single rabbinic commentator may expound upon one phrase in a verse or two phrases from the same verse with two mutually exclusive explanations. One example of this widespread phenomenon

does not seem to be the motivating factor for the contradictions in this proem. Quite the contrary: the authors of this proem seem to have been so committed to explaining their catastrophic situation through these particular visions of God that they grasped for scriptural support from any source they could find. The scripture serves the proem instead of the proem serving the scripture. While the proem is inspired (if not unified) by the first fourteen verses of the twenty-second chapter of Isaiah, its presentations of God as variously grief-stricken, distant, and responsive to protest are supported by a motley assortment of verses from the following chapters: Gen 1, 6, and 22, Ex 14, 20, and 33, Lev 22, Deut 22 and 32, Isa 30, 32, and 33, Jer 11, 13, 14, and 31, Hos 5, Mic 3, Ps 42, 80, and 137, Job 39, Lam 2 and 5, Dan 9, 1 Chr 16, and 2 Chr 32. The breadth of sources attests to some motivation for these contradictory visions of God other than the need to explain a single scriptural passage.

David Stern suggests a reason why the proem might present multiple visions of God. He identifies two visions rather than three, but his analysis is no less applicable.

But might [the competing pictures of God] be the products of a more specific, local need, an exegetical impulse, for example? In our text this is, unfortunately, not the case. For while the two narratives both use Scriptural verses to prove their anthropomorphic claims at different points, the narratives themselves do not seem to be exegetical artifacts. On the other hand, it is certainly fair to suggest that the extreme nature of the two characterizations of God the very feature that all but makes them into caricatures may very well have derived from the equally extreme, radically catastrophic nature of the historical event that serves as their backdrop and overall context, namely, the destruction of the Temple. Each portrait of God reflects in some way what must have been the deepest feelings appea s i ‘ashi s o e ta o the sto of the i di g of Isaa i Ge esis ‘a ah: ‘ashi e plai s the ope i g o ds of Ge . : , afte these o ds, as efe i g to a o e satio et ee God a d the satan. Immediately afterward, he explains it as referring to a conversation between Isaac and Ishmael. In his remarks on Gen. 22:2, Rashi first says that God pleaded with Abraham to obey the terrible commandment to sacrifice his son, but he then says (relying upon the literal meaning of the word for sa ifi e that God e e ea t fo A aha to sa ifi e Isaa at all, ut o l to bring him up the mountain, and then once he was up, to take him back down. In this way, Rashi labors to justify this troubling story with whatever justifications are available, even if they cannot all be true at the same time.

Jews experienced in the aftermath of the destruction: extreme guilt on the one hand, as though the catastrophe had been entirely deserved on account of their great sins, and extreme self-pity on the other, as though the catastrophe had been wholly undeserved since it far exceeded any transgression they could have committed to warrant such punishment. The pressures exerted by these feelings may help us to understand the tone of near-desperation [and the] mythic quality both narratives share despite the different ways they represent God.”93

In Stern’s view, the proem’s writers are processing contradictory feelings of guilt and self-pity in response to the destruction. He imagines that survivors of the catastrophe were left feeling as if they both had and had not deserved it. While he may be correct about the emotional states of those who composed the proem and those who found its message relevant to their lives, there may be more to the picture than that.

David Kraemer also comments on the disunity of the text. He writes: there is some confusion as to the integrity of the text here….The entire narrative is included only in Sephardic manuscripts of the midrash, and [S. Buber, who published a Hebrew version of the text] judges important sections, and perhaps even the entire present text, as a later borrowing to Lamentations Rabbah. Indeed, the very strangeness of the text, in context, is part of what motivates Buber to make this judgment.94

Kraemer explains that in at least one non-Sephardic version of the midrash, the narrative ends with the sun describing God as Israel’s enemy (at least effectively so) and with evidence that Moses, Israel’s only real hopeful protector here, doesn’t have the power to realize his hopes. The last words…have us crying and hanging our heads with Jewish parents who have witnessed the murder of their own child. The bitter indictment…is unparalleled. God the villain, unrepentant to the end, is present only in the echo of God’s earlier, heartless decree.95

93 David Stern, Midrash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 87-88.

94 David Kraemer, Responses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 143-44.

95 Kraemer, 145-146.

If God does not ultimately grant relief to Israel, Moses is a fool for promising that “the Omnipresent will bring you back quickly”96 and the reader is left outraged at God’s mulish silence in the face of the male prophets’ heroic efforts.

That some versions of the text do not contain Rachel’s protest suggests two possibilities: R. Samuel bar Nahman may have originally written it and some later editor removed it, or perhaps R. Samuel bar Nahman did not originally write it, and someone else added it later. There exists such meager knowledge of the original texts that we will probably never know what really happened,97 but which is more likely? The question is not a simple one arguments can be made for both sides but the proposition that R. Samuel conceived of the final passage loses credibility for several reasons.

First, when Jeremiah resurrects the dead prophets, Rachel is not mentioned. We do not hear of her until she leaps in unannounced. This sudden appearance seems to indicate that her entrance was not part of the original composition. Second, God treats Rachel differently from the other four prophets so differently, in fact, that (as I have argued above, and in opposition to Stern) it is as if she is not even speaking to the same god. This change of divine character suggests a change of author. Third, a tale that ends with Rachel’s appearance and God’s response may feel more complete than one ending with Moses’ indictment of God’s injustice. The rabbinic tradition, like any oral transmission process, tends to wear away sharp edges rather than creating them. It is less likely that the narrative would have originally included, and later lost, Rachel’s complaint

96 Neusner, 77.

97 My search for definite answers about the history of the text has been fruitless. An email conversation with Daniel Boyarin on 12/8/13 confirmed my suspicions that the information may simply ot e ist: as he ites, probably it cannot be known.

and God’s response to it, and more likely that the popular preference for a happy ending, if such an ending is available, would lead to a tradition of including it.

Fourth, as David Stern points out, there exists a particular subgenre of rabbinic parables in which the wronged and indignant supplicant traditionally has the last word, as Moses would if Rachel’s speech were absent. These parables most frequently dealt with the second temple’s destruction, and so they would have been most popular during the years following that event, a period that includes the lifetime of R. Samuel bar Nahman.

Stern calls this subgenre the “complaint-mashal” and identifies several of its relevant features: first, it expresses a wealth of suffering and pain that resisted the rhetoric of apologetic assuagement. The unprecedented severity of the punishment; the enemy’s gratuitous cruelty to the victims; above all, the seemingly endless persistence of their horrible situation all these agonies and humiliations, all of them condoned by a silent God if not directly instigated by Him seemed to the Jews to exceed by far anything they had done to deserve them. The result is a sense of excessive, irreparable hurt….

98

99

The 24th proem amply expresses that “excessive, irreparable hurt,” perhaps most sharply in Moses’ final complaint: God stubbornly refuses to respond to Moses, even while He breaks His own commandments in His passion to punish His people. Stern goes on to identify a rhetorical strategy characteristic of the complaint-mashal: it “intentionally shifts the audience’s sympathy toward the [people of Israel]” by giving them “among other things, the final statement in the dialogue,” which “consolidates the legitimacy of [their] complaint.”

100 As Kraemer pointed out in his passage cited above, Moses’ inability

98 “a uel Be Nah a Nah a i , Je ishE lopedia. o , a essed De e e , , http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13133-samuel-ben-nahman-nahmani

99 David Stern, Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 133.

100 Stern, Parables in Midrash, 136.

to fulfill his optimistic promise to help Israel, thanks to God’s stony silence, serves as a magnet for our sympathies.

We can better understand the complaint-mashal by comparing it to classical tragedy, and Moses’ role in it to that of a tragic hero. His faithful efforts to save the people and his “bitter indictment” of an unrepentant god who condones slaughtering children in front of their parents parallel Prometheus’ protest in the conclusion to Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound: both heroes decry unjust suffering at the hands of their respective almighty gods. As Wendy Farley explains in her theology of suffering shaped by the pattern of tragic narrative, the all-powerful Zeus is motivated “only by lascivious self-interest” and his “power is consummated in egotistical cravings and violence,” while Prometheus, the “embodiment of compassion,” nobly accuses Zeus by means of the former’s undeserved suffering.101 The legitimacy of the tragic hero’s urgent, unsatisfied protest is unimpeachable; it is that combination of urgency, legitimacy, and denial of satisfaction that gives both Greek tragedy and Stern’s complaint-mashal their force.

Without Rachel’s speech, the 24th proem fits the complaint-mashal form perfectly, and conveys well the sharp force of classic tragedy. With her speech and the consequent satisfaction of the prophets’ urgent requests, the story gains a comparatively neat resolution, but loses the tragic force of the complaint-mashal. Thus I suspect R. Samuel ben Nahman originally wrote his story to end tragically, without Rachel’s speech.

For these four reasons, it seems more likely that Rachel’s speech and God’s response was a later addition to the proem. If so, then the next question to consider is why someone felt the need to add a comparatively happy ending to the text. Given what we observed in the previous chapter about how strong the religious impulse is to say that

101 Farley, 27-29.

all will be well, I suspect such a clear accusation from one so righteous as Moses that the world is tragic and God is unjust would have, over time, come to be seen as too threatening to the faith in God’s goodness, justice, and power that rabbinic Judaism traditionally encouraged. True, such a claim about God’s injustice may well have seemed satisfyingly realistic in light of the Jews’ situation when the proem was composed, but these proems, like any biblical and rabbinic writings, are meant to be spiritually useful to future generations, not merely reflective of the mindset shared by the passage’s author and its original audience. The text had a greater chance of being embraced by later readers if it felt familiar to them, like something they would encounter when reading other scriptural texts. To one well versed in biblical and rabbinic writings, any text that contains expressions of grief, loss, and unanswered complaints would evoke a different genre of biblical literature, one that is theologically safer than the complaint-mashal: it would be reminiscent of the lament psalm.

In Why Do We Suffer? Daniel Harrington describes the lament psalm: the literary conventions of the biblical laments [consist] of an address to God and a complaint[,] a confession of confidence in God[,] a petition[,] and a concluding thanksgiving. The nature of the suffering is vague, thus facilitating the psalm’s reuse by many people….The speaker addresses God in a free, even bold manner, appealing to God to vindicate him and the divine honor.102 Harrington notes that not every psalm contains every element Psalm 88, for example, lacks the element of thanksgiving but in general, that final element is understood as being part of what defines the lament psalm as a genre.103 If Rachel’s speech is taken as part of the 24th proem, then each of those five elements address, complaint, confession

102 Daniel Harrington, S.J., Why Do We Suffer? A Scriptural Approach to the Human Condition (Franklin, WI: Sheed & Ward, 2000), 5.

103 Harrington, 9-10.

of confidence, petition, and thanksgiving appear in the proem. We can read it as a longform lament psalm, as I will show.

The proem begins by describing the destroyed city. R. Simeon b. Laqish writes,

On three occasions the ministering angels wanted to recite a song before the Holy One, blessed be He, but he did not allow them to do so…[the third occasion was] at the destruction of the house of the sanctuary: “That is why I say, ‘Let me be, I will weep bitterly. Press not to comfort me [for the ruin of my poor people].’ ”104

Instead of addressing God, the text has angels offering to recite psalms and God, griefstricken, rejecting them. The frustrated address sets the tone for the rest of the text.

The proem is long on complaints, though other elements occasionally interrupt them. First, the narrator complains bitterly about the loss of the divine presence, which represents the end of God’s favor upon Israel. Then we see God leaving the Temple and weeping alone, sorrowing over His own lot. Metatron interrupts this second complaint to address God, offering comfort, but is rebuffed; God resumes complaining. When Abraham is joined by the ministering angels, they begin a third complaint, crying out to God about an obvious double standard: Israel is punished for its sins, while its enemies sin without correction.

The next part mixes complaint with petition. In the trial scene, Abraham’s speeches to the Torah and the alphabet can be understood as twenty-three complaints, each followed by a successful petition. After the trial, the three patriarchs speak to God, following the pattern of address, complaint, and petition. That their petitions are formulated identically lends force to their pleas: each one asks God to “remember” his suffering and to “have mercy” on his children.

104 Neusner, 70.

With Moses’ entrance come confessions of confidence, but not in the form we would expect. When Moses stands up to address God, he makes his complaint, but before he speaks further, he follows Jeremiah down to earth and observes the damage. There, the people see him and express their confidence in his ability to rescue them. How striking that the first confession of confidence in this proem is directed not toward God but toward his faithful servant! In spite of the divine decree that no help is forthcoming, Moses nevertheless expresses confidence that “the Omnipresent will bring you back quickly,” before he leaves. Following these confessions of confidence comes more complaint: Moses tells the patriarchs what he has seen, they lament, and Moses complains to the sun and to the temple. When Moses threatens Israel’s enemies, his words again show implicit confidence in God. But as noted earlier, the irony of that confidence at that moment is thick. If Moses really feels such confidence, he looks like a fool. Moses concludes his speech with a final, tragic complaint that God does not even obey His own Torah.

When Rachel speaks to God, she too begins with an address and a powerful complaint. When she confesses her confidence in God’s ability to do the right thing, the confession reads like a backhanded compliment: “But you are the living and eternal sovereign of mercy” might have been a simple confession of confidence, had it not come on the heels of her reminder that she is dust and ashes and yet she overcame her jealousy, and just preceding the charge that if she can do it, then God has no excuse for failing to do likewise. God’s promise to bring the people of Israel back from exile lets the author confess fundamental confidence in God, and it prompts the reader to feel the sort of gratitude toward God with which the psalm genre is associated.

Given how frequently psalms are cited in rabbinic texts, we can safely say that the proem’s audience would have been familiar with the psalms both individually and as a whole. In spite of the proem’s different literary form and its extended length compared to that of the psalms, its readers would have recognized the elements of address, complaint, petition, and confession of confidence throughout the proem as the elements of a lament psalm. For such a lead-up to conclude with no statement saying that God hears the supplicant and responds with mercy might have seemed to them too unfinished, if they were not familiar with or favorably disposed toward the complaint-mashal’s tragic form. They might be left feeling a troubling lack of closure, as modern residents of the United States might respond when a popular song fails to end on the chorus or a romance ends before the two lead characters confess their love for each other. Like modern audiences, once ancient readers knew what genre they were in, they would have anticipated a particular ending. If it was not provided, they might opt to “fix” the material by composing the expected ending themselves and transmitting that version thereafter.

If my suspicions about the history of this proem’s development are correct, then its juxtaposition of three competing visions of the relationship between God and the suffering of the people of Israel testifies to more than just how badly the sages wanted to find ways of understanding that relationship. This juxtaposition brings out some insights into the nature of suffering itself: first, it shows a layered grasp of the warring inclinations to embrace, and to not embrace, the belief that suffering is divine punishment for sin; and second, it imparts wisdom about how to bring healing to people damaged by prolonged, crippling pain.

While the tradition of complaining to God, as psalmists do in lament psalms, expresses a common human impulse, the classic lament psalm’s uplifting conclusion seems to be at times indispensible and at other times unacceptable. In the pattern of the complaint-mashal, the justifiably aggrieved hero suffers a tragic end but gets the last word by decrying God’s injustice with his final breath. A narrative with this pattern may have helped its author and readers to maintain a sense of identity while enduring what would otherwise be an example of Farley’s radical suffering.105 The power of the complaint-mashal lies in its indignant assertion that this suffering is not deserved, no matter how sinful the sufferers may have been, and that whoever would impose such suffering is unequivocally wrong to do so. Embracing that powerful assertion with the support of a compassionate community can mitigate the dehumanizing effects of radical suffering. Under such severe conditions, a story whose vision is tragic may be indispensable.106

But in more fortunate times when a people’s sense of humanity is not at stake, a different urgent theological need arises: the people’s ongoing relationship with God must be tolerable. They need to be sure that God is good and can provide them with meaningful lives in an ordered world. At such times, the majority of people may, like Ms. Gray, prefer to address the problem of evil by concluding that God is ultimately good and sovereign, as nearly all the lament psalms assert in their final thanksgiving gesture: in the end, God will respond (or God already has responded) to the supplicant with love, or by reestablishing justice, or both. In rabbinic theologies, the sages most often explain suffering as punishment for sin or advance payment for future reward: those who suffer

105 Farley, 21.

106 Farley, 69-94.

are reaping what they sowed, or they will later reap rewards for the righteous suffering they are sowing now. But according to Farley, a sufferer like Ms. Green can only tolerate the spiritual damage such a conclusion can inflict when she is not already on the brink of despair. Otherwise, embracing that conclusion may break her spirit beyond repair.107 Perhaps even more valuable to modern readers, the conversation between Rachel and God offers complex commentary on how those who suffer can help heal each other. First, it encourages proactive persistence: Rachel jumps in after Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses have failed. Second, it asserts that suffering ought to be relieved. That assertion may seem a minor matter, but for sufferers like Ms. Brown who have endured ongoing abuse, the sense that they ought not to seek relief from their pain is disturbingly pervasive.108 Third, to a great extent, Rachel is empowered to seek an end to Israel’s suffering on her own. As Galit Hasan-Rokem writes in Web of Life, even though Rachel depends upon God for relief, she is the one who decides to initiate the conversation God does not invite her and Jeremiah does not resurrect her and she presents her arguments explicitly and forcefully, rather than relying upon someone else to speak on her behalf.109 Fourth, Rachel’s conversation with God shares with the complaint-mashal the boldness to call God unrighteous. Fifth, her speech emphatically refrains from blaming victims for their own pain. Even though Rachel’s choice to efface herself and deceive Jacob for the sake of preserving her sister’s dignity is a morally ambiguous one, she presents her behavior in a way that demands its praiseworthy aspects be recognized;

107 Farley, 21 and 118-119.

108 Dorothee Soelle, Suffering, trans. Everett Kalin (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 9-28.

109 Galit Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature, trans. Batya Stein (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 126-29.

she will accept no blame, nor even any suggestion that the problematic aspect of her behavior makes her deserve her surpassing grief. Similarly, while she does not deny that Israel’s behavior is flawed, she insists that they do not deserve their current situation. Instead of defending God, she denounces God’s behavior as petty jealousy. Sixth, the passage directs attention to the importance of sympathetic knowledge. Even though Rachel does not defend God’s behavior, she shows deep understanding of it. In that regard, the story she tells about what would have been her wedding day serves two purposes: it establishes a contrast between her great merit and her severe suffering, and it demonstrates that she can sympathize with God. At the very root, it is her ability to offer the understanding God seems to have been craving all along that allows her to reach beyond God’s stubbornness and reawaken His love. Seventh, the passage teaches the importance of empowering others with love. Rachel does not stop at sympathetic understanding; she also shares with Moses a commitment to asserting that while God is not perfectly just, He is capable of perfect justice. When she calls God the living and eternal sovereign of mercy, she reminds God of His divine potential and shows faithful certainty that He can regain that former excellence if He chooses. Not only does Rachel’s approach have its desired effect upon God; it is also an excellent model for how to reach out in sympathy to someone damaged by suffering, to show the person a way back toward wholeness.

We have seen that without its third vision of the relationship between God and human suffering, this proem would see the world as tragic, as in a complaint-mashal, but when the third vision is included, the proem follows the more reassuring pattern of a lament psalm in which God finally responds to human protest and relieves suffering. The

tension between the tragic vision of the proem in its complaint-mashal form and the more optimistic vision of the lament psalm form shows an understanding of the tension between the desire to be true to one’s experience of suffering and the impulse to assert that the world is ultimately just. The third vision on its own can serve as a guide for how we can support others who are in pain using sympathetic understanding, compassion, and faith in their enduring worth. But with or without Rachel’s protest, the text models the kind of response to suffering that helps to mitigate it: it implicitly praises doing all we can to end suffering, wearying God with protests, speaking boldly against excessive punishment, and never giving up. Including Rachel’s successful protest may give hope to Mses. Green and Brown while appeasing Ms. Gray’s need for resolution, but even the complaint-mashal form without Rachel’s protest can help Mses. Green and Brown. It mirrors their experience of the world, lends validity to their feelings, and encourages them to protest, even if only to help them maintain their own humanity. An imperfectly just God is terrifying, but stories about how to deal with Him can empower us to combat injustice in all its forms.

Lack of Protest Against God in Christianity

The idea that we might need to protest against God’s unjust rule remains popular in many forms of Jewish practice. I still remember, as a child in my Conservative synagogue’s religious school (in San Leandro, CA in the late 1980s), being presented with a worksheet in which we were given a column of prophets’ names and another column with each prophet’s most memorable deed and being asked to match the deed to the prophet. Abraham, according to this worksheet, was the one who “argued with God.” That he tried to protect the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah from possibly undeserved

destruction was, according to this mainstream, middle-of-the-road Jewish education worksheet, the thing that Abraham could be proudest of having done, and the thing we could admire most about him. It came as a surprise to me when I found that my Christian friends considered Abraham great precisely because of his unquestioning obedience to God’s commandment to sacrifice Isaac. In my childhood synagogue and in the dozen or so other Jewish communities I have been involved with since then, I have never seen the binding of Isaac taken as a story about God rewarding Abraham for his faithful obedience. Every rabbi’s sermon and every community discussion on that story that I have encountered shows discomfort with the idea that God would command such a thing and that Abraham did not protest the commandment. While Christianity is not lacking in a tradition of holy people internally struggling with God’s rule, it has a more complicated relationship with outright protest against His decrees.

In “Judging God: Why Protest Prayer Persists in Judaism and Disappears in Christianity” Daniel London argues that Christianity lacks a robust tradition of protesting against God about human suffering that Christians prefer to think of suffering as beneficial than as the work of a god of questionable justice. Meanwhile, Judaism maintains the tradition of protesting against God. By casting the Torah as the “divine mediator” between the people and God’s wrath,

Jews empowered themselves with an effective tool to judge God in the tradition of protest theology and protest prayer. On the other hand, by seeing Jesus as the divine mediator, Christians emptied themselves of any need to arbitrate between humanity and divinity, a duty that Christ has already fulfilled. 110

110 Da iel Lo do , Judgi g God: Wh P otest P a e Pe sists i Judais a d Disappea s i Ch istia it pape itte fo a ou se at GTU, submitted December 21, 2012, and emailed to the author February 5, 2015), 2.

Christianity provides full service, while Judaism is DIY. London is sensitive to what is lost theologically when a religion treats protest against God as acceptable: the resulting picture of God is one who “is in control of all things and is, in fact, doing an awful job or at least needs a little help from His human friends in order to do his job better.”111 Godconscious humans cannot take comfort in the knowledge that God has everything in hand. They must keep careful watch of current events and be ready to intercede at a moment’s notice. It might feel realistic, and it can give them a sense of control over their lives, but it leaves them vulnerable to chronic anxiety.

By the end of Second Temple Judaism, the idea of an “immanent-andtranscendent God” had gained more popularity, eclipsing the god of imperfect justice whom one could reasonably protest. London cites a possible reason that this more Deuteronomic theology, in which all events manifest God’s perfect justice, would have gained such prominence: it may have been that “the revolutionary sentiments associated with protest prayer gave Jewish authorities ample reason to keep the tradition suppressed.”112 Those who spoke for God, if they wanted to stabilize their positions of power, might have leaned toward whatever theologies gave their subjects the least possible encouragement to challenge their right to rule.

London writes that this newly popular idea of God “gave birth to the theology of the Logos, [which] served as a divine mediator between heaven and earth.”113 If God is immanent and transcendent, there must be some facet of God that can live in the hearts of people while another facet remains inaccessibly remote. As descriptions of God placed

111 London, 3.

112 London, 10.

113 London, 11.

Him farther out of reach, the importance of the Logos as mediator between people and God expanded to fill the gap. Rabbis identified the Logos with the Torah; Christians identified it with Christ. London explains:

When the author of the fourth Gospel wrote his prologue, he synthesized the Wisdom of God in Proverbs with the Logos of God in Philo to describe the Word of God in the Gospel, who became flesh and dwelt among us. [Thus] the theology of the Logos is transferred onto Jesus of Nazareth, thus making Jesus the divine mediator who is also one with the Godhead. 114

Jesus takes the roles of Wisdom and God’s Word, mediating between people and God.

Jesus Christ stands in as humanity’s perpetual intercessor and protestor against God’s wrath. Not only would it be impossible for humans to play such a role, but humans no longer need to play such a role since that role has already been filled, for eternity, by the best possible candidate. Therefore…the tradition of prophetic protest prayer becomes obsolete in Christianity.115

Now that Jesus serves forever as an intercessor between God and the people while at the same time being eternally united with God, the need for a protesting prophet is permanently fulfilled.

Turning from the prophet who protests on behalf of the people to the individual who protests on his own behalf, London traces the evolution of Jesus’ attitude.

Jesus’ personal protest prayer becomes less of a protest and more of a sad submission as it changes from Mark to Matthew to Luke. Matthew turns Jesus’ imperative “remove this cup” into a jussive “let this cup pass from me.” Mark’s Jesus boldly reminds God of his power to save (“for you all things are possible”) in order to make God act while Matthew’s Jesus submissively begs, “If it is possible.” Luke keeps the imperative, but adds “If you are willing” and subtracts the other two repetitions of the prayer.116

114 London, 11.

115 London, 12.

116 London, 13.

In the earliest synoptic gospel, Jesus almost tells God to do as he wishes, but in the latest one, the boldness is gone and he speaks meekly. And in the Gospel of John, written several decades later,

Jesus does not pray for his suffering to be removed at all but almost seems to look forward to his suffering, which he describes as his glorification: “Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you” (John 17:1). So the submission to the suffering eventually eclipses the protest to the suffering entirely.117

The more Christians see suffering as valuable to them, the less popular protest becomes. There is no moral force in protesting what a loving god gives us for our own good.

By the time Paul writes about his own suffering in 2 Corinthians, the shift in preference from protest to submission is firmly in place. Following Jesus’ lead, Paul prays three times for God to relieve his suffering, and God does not relieve it. Like Jesus’ suffering, Paul’s suffering later becomes understood as not only necessary, but profoundly beneficial and redemptive, thus fueling the theology of redemptive suffering which reaches new heights of popularity in Christianity. Furthermore, if God refused to grant the bold and persistent petitions of his beloved Son Jesus Christ and St. Paul, then why in the world would he grant the bold and persistent petitions of their followers?118

The popularity of responding to suffering with gratitude was on the rise, but even had it not been, it would have been enough to say that if Jesus Christ and the apostle Paul, two such holy people, protested their own suffering unsuccessfully, surely God will not respond with mercy to the protests of anyone else! There is no use asking God for what He will not give. It is a small step from there to the conclusion that we might as well make the best of what we cannot change.

117 London, 14.

118 Ibid.

In this way, Jesus’ and Paul’s acceptance of unrelieved suffering serves as a lesson for all Christians about the importance of submitting to their own suffering. Because the choice to protest against or submit to suffering was, as London argues, one of the points on which Judaism and Christianity leaned in opposite directions when the two religions were first establishing their separate identities,119 those who wanted to solidify their status as adherents of Christianity and not of Judaism would have been motivated to emphasize how accepting of their suffering they were, lest someone mistake them for a member of their rival religion.

A Grief Observed: C.S. Lewis Wrestles with His Faith in God’s Goodness Popular Christian culture today reveals that the taboo against protest has solidified. In the previous chapter we investigated C.S. Lewis’ presentation of Christianity’s response to the problem of human suffering, a book he published in 1940. Twenty years later, he faced his own personal crucible when his beloved wife became seriously ill again with the cancer that had gone into remission shortly after their wedding in 1957. They enjoyed just over two years of marital happiness together before she died. A year later, in 1961, he published under a pseudonym his book A Grief Observed, the journals he kept in the wake of her death. His health began deteriorating that year, and he

119 While Christianity was singing the praises of submission to the suffering God sends us, London ites that i ea l a i i Judais , the sages [ele ated] the Torah to the status of Logos and divine mediator [and thus] equipped themselves with a tool, nay a weapon, to argue more assertively and aggressively with their God….In some ways, it appears that the Torah might have greater authority than God himself [and] God appears open to having his interpretation of Torah overruled by human interpretation. London, 14-15. While in early Christianity, the Logos became a person who would know exactly what to do to mediate between God and people, and who needed no human help, in rabbinic Judaism, the Logos was a tool whose potential power would only be unlocked if it was handled by experts trained in its use.

died in 1963.120 I will investigate three aspects of his arrestingly honest and utterly heartrending journals: first, his questioning God’s goodness; second, his surprise at finding that he could not rely on his faith when he needed it most; and third, the isolation he felt as a result of how others responded to his grief.

Lewis approaches the question of God’s goodness as a binary one. He writes in

The Problem of Pain of God’s perfect goodness, and in A Grief Observed of the opposite idea, but he does not consider an intermediate position. His god is not the sort of being who is loving today and cruel tomorrow or half-loving and half-cruel at once; God is all one or all the other.

Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be or so it feels welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become….

Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.’

Our elders submitted and said, ‘Thy will be done.’ How often had bitter resentment been stifled through sheer terror and an act of love yes, in every sense, an act put on to hide the operation?121

No sooner is Lewis bereft of every comfort save God’s love that God, who always seemed so accessible, now offers only deliberate silence. Lewis’ greatest fear is that he will discover God to have been cruel all along, and Christianity to have grown from a seed of abject terror of, rather than boundless love for, God. He does not fear that God

120 Brian Sibley, C. S. Lewis: Through the Shadowlands (Great Britain: Fleming H. Revell, 1985), 129-154.

121 Lewis, 658-59.

was once loving and is now cold, but that this coldness is what God has always been like, and that any notion of God being good was based upon a lie which humans (who secretly knew better) would tell to win His favor.

Later, Lewis faces a different but equally terrible possibility: rather than Christianity being based on human efforts to say flattering things in order to appease a fearsome God, perhaps all talk of God’s goodness stems from God’s successful attempt to convince humans that He is wise and loving and all shall be well for the faithful, a promise He never intended to keep.

Sooner or later I must face the question in plain language. What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, ‘good’? Doesn’t all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite? What have we to set against it?

We set Christ against it. But how if He were mistaken? Almost His last words may have a perfectly clear meaning. He had found that the Being He called Father was horribly and infinitely different from what He had supposed. The trap, so long and carefully prepared and so subtly baited, was at last sprung, on the cross. The vile practical joke had succeeded.122

Lewis considers the shattering idea that Jesus was tricked into trusting God, agreeing to imperil himself simply because God asked and all the while, God meant to abandon him just when he would have no escape. Lewis feels similarly tricked. Ruing the false hope he and his wife cherished when her cancer went into remission, he writes, “Time after time, when He seemed most gracious He was really preparing the next torture.”123

Later, he reflects on why he wrote as he did:

I was getting from it the only pleasure a man in anguish can get; the pleasure of hitting back. It was really just…mere abuse; ‘telling God what I thought of Him.’ And of course, as in all abusive language, ‘what I thought’ didn’t mean what I thought true. Only what I thought would offend Him (and His worshippers) most.

122 Lewis, 668.

123 Lewis, 669.

That sort of thing is never said without some pleasure. Gets it ‘off your chest.’ You feel better for a moment.124

It can be a relief to say that God is not good, but upon reflection, Lewis finds it distasteful to have so indulged himself. He knows he would offend other Christians (a point we will revisit later). He only resorted to it because he had no other recourse and was desperate. This leads to my second point: that he had no other recourse is one of the things that seems to catch him by surprise. He had thought himself prepared for suffering, and he had thought his faith in God’s goodness (along with his understanding of how love can hurt but still be love) would carry him through his own suffering, but he finds that his faith is failing him.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it?125

Lewis realizes that the certainty he thought his faith gave him, to face the world’s monstrous sufferings while still asserting God’s goodness, was not borne of a real consideration of the problem. Only now is he vulnerable to the full force of suffering’s emotional impact.

What grounds has [her death] given me for doubting all that I believe? I knew already that these things, and worse, happened daily. I would have said that I had taken them into account. ... We were even promised sufferings. … Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not in imagination. Yes; but should it, for a sane man, make quite such a difference as this? No. And it wouldn’t for a man whose faith had been real faith and whose concern for other people’s sorrows had been real concern. The case is too plain. If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which ‘took these things into account’ was not faith but imagination. The taking them into account was not real sympathy. ... It has been an imaginary faith

124 Lewis, 673.

125 Lewis, 665.

playing with innocuous counters labeled ‘Illness,’ ‘Pain,’ ‘Death,’ and ‘Loneliness.’ I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me. Now it matters, and I find I didn’t.126

If the theology that Lewis relied upon turns out to have been one that he only thought he trusted, perhaps his lack of genuine trust stems from the theology’s inability to adequately account for the depth of anguish people actually suffer. It may be that a theology of suffering that speaks frankly about the tragedy of life cannot at the same time draw firm conclusions about the Almighty’s perfection. If Lewis was not prepared for the impact of his grief on his faith, then perhaps it was not God that played a trick on him, but rather the theology he had been taught.

As we turn now to the third point, let us remember that the propositions about God we have been considering in this chapter that God is sometimes unjust in the way He treats us, that protesting against God’s injustice is a noble response, and that it sometimes even brings about the desired result of changing God’s mind—are propositions that the author of The Problem of Pain would have rejected out of hand. But two decades later, his grief forced him to face them almost against his will. Lewis was not prepared for, and was not sure how to deal with, this new and dreadful suspicion that God is not good, nor did he know what to do about his corresponding impulse to proclaim God’s wickedness. He resorted to writing his thoughts privately, but while the writings may have benefitted his health, he seems to have wanted community that would witness his grief supportively. Instead he was met with embarrassment and platitudes. He cannot talk to the children about her. The moment I try, there appears on their faces neither grief, nor love, nor fear, nor pity, but the most fatal of all nonconductors, embarrassment. They look as if I were committing an indecency. They are longing for me to stop. I felt just the same thing after my own mother’s death when my father mentioned her. I can’t blame them. It’s the way boys are.

126 Lewis, 671-72.

It isn’t only the boys either. An odd byproduct of my loss is that I’m aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet. At work, at the club, in the street, I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it’ or not. I hate if they do, and if they don’t. Some funk it altogether. R. has been avoiding me for a week. I like best the well brought-up young men, almost boys, who walk up to me as if I were a dentist, turn very red, get it over, and then edge away to the bar as quickly as they decently can. Perhaps the bereaved ought to be isolated in special settlements like lepers.

To some I’m worse than an embarrassment. I am a death’s head. Whenever I meet a happily married pair I can feel them both thinking, ‘One or other of us must some day be as he is now.’127

He sees himself as a burden to his children, his students, and his friends. He can neither speak to them about his grief nor look to them for sympathy.

Those who do try to say comforting things are of little use to him.

It is hard to have patience with people who say, ‘There is no death’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death. And whatever is matters. … You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter. I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?128

What pitiable cant to say, ‘She will live forever in my memory!’ Live? That is exactly what she won’t do. You might as well [think] you can keep the dead by embalming them. Will nothing persuade us that they are gone?129

All the comfort people offer him implies that all is well, his wife is not really dead, and that he ought to be happier. No one will validate the anguish he feels by saying, with him, that death is final and grief is hideous.

He wonders whether others know, or are in denial of, what he cannot ignore.

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.130

127 Lewis, 659-60.

128 Lewis, 662.

129 Lewis, 664.

They tell me H. is happy now, they tell me she is at peace. What makes them so sure of this? ... How do they know she is ‘at rest?’ Why should the separation (if nothing else) which so agonizes the lover who is left behind be painless to the lover who departs?

‘Because she is in God’s hands.’ But if so, she was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here.131

Little wonder that he used a pseudonym when he published the book. If his fellow Christians could not agree with him that there is reason to doubt God’s goodness, they would surely be offended by the passages where he says what he thinks of God, to (as he says) get it off his chest and give himself a bit of the only sort of relief available to him. He could not expect them to understand and show solidarity with him how could they, when God’s good name is at stake?

What Lewis seems to want most from others is their agreement that if his beloved wife can be dead when he wants so desperately for her to be alive, something is deeply wrong, and not with him. Instead they tell him that she is not really dead, or that he ought to be less sad, or that he would feel better if he were properly faithful. They deny him the support he wants in his grief. He feels alienated from those who expect him to feel consoled by the promise of eternal life or the idea of God caring for everyone in the best way possible. No one seems willing or able to offer the solidarity he would prefer, rooted as they are in a shared theology that insists that all is well if God is in control. Lewis still believes in God’s total sovereignty; what he wants is for his friends to entertain, with him, the possibility that God can be unloving. The unsettling ideas that God is not perfectly good and that protest against God’s unjust treatment of us is perfectly appropriate, had it been generally embraced by the members of Lewis’ religious

130 Lewis, 666.

131 Lewis, 667.

community, might have given him (and others in situations like his) some relief from anguish, if only by refraining from adding more pain to what he was already suffering.

If Protest Against God did not Exist, We Would Have to Invent It

The tradition of protesting against God’s rule may discomfit those who want God to be above reproach. There is a comforting sense of order and safety that comes of being certain that God’s justice serves as a fixed point, an ideal against which everything else can be measured. We all need a foundation on which to build our understanding of the world. Yet as we have seen, sometimes the circumstances of a person’s life force him to forego that certainty even though he may have desperately wanted to maintain it. When one suffers as Lewis did, one cannot help questioning the claim that God’s rule is always just. His religious tradition celebrates and encourages submission to God’s will, so it offers no obvious way for him to protest and remain a model Christian. He believed (probably correctly) that if he spoke openly about it, he would garner the disapproval and discomfort of his fellow church members, so he kept his feelings quiet. He did not seek their emotional support, even though it might have spared him some pain. Rather than disturb his community members’ relative comfort, he took on more pain for himself. But the religious communities that are most successful at ministering to their members do not keep the comfortable at ease by further afflicting the sufferers. Instead, the ones who can afford to risk their own stability do so for the sake of easing the suffering of the ones in greatest need. A vital part of showing sympathy for another’s grief is the willingness to say, with them, that something must be wrong with the foundation of the world if what we can see has gone so awry.

Some say a religious community is a hospital for sick souls. If so, then the members who are suffering are the ones with spiritual emergencies. Principles of triage require that the ones who can survive without immediate help must go without some of what would make them more comfortable for the sake of tending to the ones who are barely hanging on. If a religious community must choose either to teach that we can always trust God to steer the world as it ought to go or to teach that the world is imperfect and we sometimes have reason to protest against God’s rule, then the choice is clear: for the sake of supporting the ones who need it most, we must teach that protesting against God is acceptable. Scripture provides adequate basis for it; our only obstacle will be ourselves.

Chapter III: God Needs Us to Perfect the World

As soon as we admit that the world is not as it ought to be, we must choose between the certainty of God’s absolute rule and the elation of God’s complete love; we cannot logically claim to have both. If we cannot relinquish the former, we get theologies of suffering like those we investigated in the previous chapter. But if we are more committed to the latter, then we may instead explain the world’s injustice by saying that God does all He can, but cannot do it all on His own We share power with God. To make the events of the world go as they should, God needs our help This approach’s primary advantage is that we can be sure God cares about us and wants our suffering to end. Such certainty makes for a loving relationship with God, unmarred by God’s abuse of power. There is great comfort in saying that God is always on our side. Besides, our spirituality may grow much healthier if we need not fear that God is a loose cannon who might unleash His wrath upon us at any moment. But this approach has disadvantages of its own, mainly that we cannot trust God to be capable of doing all that we might have hoped God could do. If God is not at fault for our suffering and cannot make it stop, we cannot rely on God to respond to our protest and make things all right. Protesting against an omnipotent god’s unjust rule may require great courage, but coping with the disappointment that God cannot do everything necessary to set the world right requires a different kind of courage the courage of maturity that we demonstrate when we square our shoulders and prepare ourselves to take on the problems of the world without knowing whether they can ever be solved. When God is not fully in control, the resulting theological power vacuum tends to draw to the fore ideas about the devil or harmful aspects of nature. In some worldviews

that confess a limited god who needs human help to perfect the world, God and the devil compete to persuade each human soul to follow their opposing leads. Humans can help to advance God’s will on earth by making good choices, but if they choose badly, the world grows worse and God cannot intervene. For God to rely upon us to help realize His will on earth is hugely empowering we are given a glorious calling but it can also be daunting: we have ultimate responsibility for completing a project well beyond our capacity.

Surprisingly, that weightiness and its attendant feeling of near-hopelessness can help Mses. Green and Brown by giving them a point of entry which matches how they already feel. If they find life too heavy to bear and hope scarce, a religion that tells them all is well will be more alienating than comforting. Further alienation is the last thing they need when their suffering is already blocking them from genuine interpersonal connection. But if their religion teaches a theology which mirrors their experience of life, declaring what they themselves would articulate if they only could, then it might truly have something consoling or comforting to offer. Even if it cannot solve their problems, it can validate their experiences.

One factor that seems to have prevented this approach to the problem of evil from becoming more widely adopted is how non-traditional it is. Jews and Christians who care about avoiding heresy might want to steer clear of beliefs that they suspect to be dangerously out of the mainstream. While some of the theologies of suffering we will explore in this chapter are indeed less popular, there is one response to the problem of evil that is predicated upon the premise of a finite god and has still gained wide popularity. That response is known as the free will defense.

God’s Lack of Omnipotence as a Premise of the Free Will Defense

One popular response to the problem of evil, usually thought consistent with claims that God is fully in control, is the claim that even though God does not want His children to suffer, He lets us hurt each other because He cannot achieve His goals without affording us the freedom to do good or evil. According to this line of reasoning, we should be grateful that we can harm each other because the only alternative is a world of automatons. We are supposed to recoil at the idea of not controlling our own will, and to quickly realize that human evil, no matter how appalling, beats the alternative. Besides, the reasoning goes, it would be absurd for God to populate the earth with mere extensions of Himself when what God desires are creatures who are not Him who can grow to seek, obey, and love Him even though they could have done otherwise. God must create free beings even though they may bring on undeserved suffering.

132

The Free Will Defense According to Lewis

But there is good reason to say the free will defense (FWD) contradicts the claim of an all-powerful and perfectly just god. To see why, let us recall Lewis’ rendering of the FWD in The Problem of Pain, a passage we investigated in Chapter I.

We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of his abuse of free will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound-waves that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void; nay, if the principle were carried out to its logical conclusion, evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to frame them. All matter in the neighbourhood of a wicked man would be liable to undergo unpredictable alterations. That God can and does, on occasions, modify

132 Joh Hi k gi es the philosophi al theologia s t eat e t to this ie a out the elatio ship et ee f ee ill a d the p o le of e il i his A I e aea Theodi . “tephe T. Davis, ed. Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 38-52. Alvin Plantinga presents a similar argument in God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977).

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the behavior of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part of Christian faith; but the very conception of a common, and therefore stable, world, demands that these occasions should be extremely rare.

I refer again to this passage because it captures a popular formulation of the FWD. But the argument has several weaknesses. First, it dismisses too lightly past instances where God is said to have intervened to prevent extreme evil. Second, it fails to distinguish between the freedom to intend to act and the action’s successful completion. Third, it does not address the problem of natural evils. Fourth, it insists unevenly upon free will’s importance by failing to address how preserving a wicked person’s freedom so often results in removing that of an innocent victim.

Divine Intervention to Stop Extreme Evil?

The FWD claims that God does not intervene to prevent interpersonal harm. As Lewis says, God may work miracles, but to do so whenever the need arises would destroy the integrity of His system. We require a predictable world if we are to be able to make meaningful choices. God cannot make wooden beams like blades of grass, alter sound waves, or change our thoughts because it would mean retracting the free will he gave to each one of us, good and evil alike.

But in the Bible, God does intervene. Israel’s journey out of slavery in the first half of the book of Exodus includes many overt miracles done in response to great need. That some of them are wrought against the backdrop of Pharaoh’s divinely-hardened heart, which directly flouts the supposedly supreme importance of free will, is not presented as problematic. When Balaam tries to curse Israel in Numbers 22-24, God intervenes repeatedly to make him bless them instead. Balaam helplessly explains in 24:13: “If Balak should give me his house full of silver and gold, I would not be able to

133 Lewis, 565.

go beyond the word of God, to do either good or bad of my own will.” And in Esther, the Jews are spared mass execution when Haman’s plot is exposed to the king, an outcome which God is said to have achieved by subtly frustrating Haman’s will.134 This god is not above curtailing our freedom when our intentions threaten His desires. Freedom to Intend vs. Freedom to Succeed

Even if God never prevented villains from freely pursuing their wicked ends, we could still reject the FWD in a different way. Turning a wooden beam to a blade of grass does not interfere with the will of the person who tried to attack her opponent. Freedom of will means nothing more than the liberty to formulate our own intentions, and intending is not succeeding. Plenty of factors can frustrate our goals without ever limiting our free will. If God tests our moral fiber by watching what we will ourselves to do, but God still wants to prevent undeserved suffering, then God is in luck because humans formulate intentions to act before performing the actions. God could gather all the data He needs simply by looking into our hearts to see what intentions we decide to adopt. He could then frustrate the bad intentions before anyone suffers undue harm. A woman who intends to beat a child with a wooden beam could drop dead mid-swing, the beam falling harmlessly from her suddenly impotent fingers, and God can still know how vicious she is. But even if the Almighty wants to deal with her more subtly, He could find other ways to frustrate her plan: a splinter could make her drop the beam in pain, or she could notice a social worker walking by, or the child could squirm away just in time. An omnipotent god can surely preserve her free will and still protect the child.

134 One popular tradition has God ausi g the ki g s sleepless ight i Esthe : . Herbert Lockyer, All the Miracles of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1961), 130.

Natural Evil

Even if God cannot stop human-caused evils such as women beating children with wooden beams, the FWD does not account for “natural” evils such as catastrophic famine, flood, or epidemic, hereditary birth defects and degenerative diseases, attacks by wild animals, tree limbs suddenly dropping on the unsuspecting people who seek their shade. We might try to use something like the FWD to say that just as God must not suspend anyone’s free will, neither can He interrupt the natural order of the world. But the Bible suggests that God has no objection to protecting His creations from natural evils. When the people of Israel are wandering in the desert and they need food and water, God sends manna for them to eat (Ex. 16) and makes water spring from a rock for them to drink (Ex. 17:6). In Dan 6, God sends an angel to close the lions’ mouths and keep Daniel safe in their den. But specific examples might even be unnecessary; according to Calvin, for example, God directly causes every natural event.135 If God has such complete control over and responsibility for all that occurs (except, of course, what falls within the sphere of human free will), then all natural events are equally miraculous, and it is meaningless to justify natural evil by saying God must let nature take its course. If God cannot interfere with nature, God does not have total control after all.

Free Will for Whom?

A third weakness of the FWD, especially as John Hick presents it,136 is the unevenness of its insistence that God’s plan requires us all to have the opportunity to exercise our free will. When an adult misuses her free will to kill an innocent child, she ends the child’s ability to exercise free will any further. The child can never fulfill her

135 Calvin, Ch. 16 Sec. 6 (cited on p. 25, fn. 24 above).

136 Davis, 48.

true purpose by performing that “one right act,”137 the act of self-surrender out of love for God, which Lewis considers our purpose in life and the capstone of human moral achievement. If God needs everyone, even the attacker, to act freely so He can see what kinds of moral choices she makes, does God not also need to protect the child so she can live long enough to come to know and choose God’s will over her own? If our purpose as humans is to choose God over ourselves, those who die before they have the opportunity to do so are permanently leaving their life’s purpose unfulfilled—yet God does nothing to remedy that situation. The FWD insists that the attacker’s free will is too precious to curtail, but the victim’s free will may be snuffed out entirely. If the attacker’s unrestricted free will is so essential to God’s plan that we compromise the justice of the world for its sake, surely the innocent person’s free will should get equal consideration! Yet the FWD leaves the innocent victim high and dry, revealing itself to have little actual concern for preserving free will and more interest in reconciling God’s goodness with human evil.

The Free Will Defense and God’s Limited Power

What the FWD really tells us, when pressed, is not that our unjust suffering is inevitable given God’s divine plan, but that God does not wield absolute power. It excuses God for letting the woman with the wooden beam kill the child by claiming that God cannot hem in her free will, but beneath that defense is a frustrated cry: this is all God can do! To do more is impossible for God not logically impossible, but simply beyond God’s abilities. We hear the same cry in the FWD’s failure to address the problem of natural evils: one might have called them the fault of Nature, not God; but if God cannot intervene in natural processes, then God lacks the control over nature that we hoped He had. And if God’s plan lets the wicked person kill others but cannot ensure that

137 Lewis, 609.

the innocent person can choose God before her life ends, then God again appears too weak to be called almighty. Compromising our claims about God’s absolute power resolves these weaknesses. It seems when the FWD speaks of “logical impossibility,” what it really means is “theological limitation.” Because of its broad popularity coupled with its implication that God’s power is limited, the FWD opens the door to calling “traditional” any other responses to the problem of evil that make similar concessions about God’s power. We can explore ideas about God’s limited power without leaving orthodoxy behind.

The Kabbalistic Myth of the Shattered Vessels: To Heal the World, God Needs Us

In his book, Tree of Souls, Howard Schwartz discusses the popular Kabbalistic creation story which Rabbi Isaac Luria composed in the 16th century. Schwartz summarizes the myth:

At the beginning of time, God’s presence filled the universe. Then God decided to bring the world into being. To make room for creation, God first drew in His breath, contracting Himself. From that contraction a dark mass was produced. And when God said, Let there be light (Gen. 1:3) the light that came into being entered the dark mass, and ten holy vessels came forth, each filled with primordial light.

In this way God sent forth those ten vessels…. Had they arrived intact, the world would have been perfect. But somehow the frail vessels broke open, split asunder, and all the holy sparks were scattered, like sand, like seeds, like stars. Those sparks fell everywhere, but more fell on the Holy Land than anywhere else.

That is why we were created to gather the sparks, no matter where they are hidden. Some even say that God created the world so that Israel could raise up the holy sparks. And that is why there have been so many exiles to release the holy sparks from the servitude of captivity. For in this way the people of Israel will sift all the holy sparks from the four corners of the earth.

And when enough holy sparks have been gathered, the vessels will be restored, and the repair of the world, awaited so long, will finally take place. Therefore it should be the aim of everyone to raise these sparks from where they are imprisoned and to elevate them to holiness by the power of their soul. And when the task of gathering the sparks nears completion, God will hasten the

arrival of the final redemption by Himself collecting what remains of the holy sparks that went astray.138

Although Luria did not invent it out of whole cloth he was inspired by a selection of verses in Tanakh he is responsible for the story as we have it today, as well as for the notion that humans and God can work in partnership to perfect the world.139 This story reconciles the brokenness of the world with God’s perfection by saying that the vessels God sent into the non-God space could not contain His holy light. God is too much for the world. To achieve perfection, God created humans to recover the sparks and return each one to its place.

A kabbalist is not likely to call God’s power limited—indeed, this creation myth depicts God’s power as so overwhelmingly unlimited that it cannot be contained and yet that uncontainability itself is a fatal limitation: God’s power, concentrated, cannot exist in the world without generating chaos. Evil originates not from human sin nor from the devil but from a sort of cosmic birth defect. God relies on humans to help Him put the world into its intended state after His power introduced a flaw. The work of redeeming the world may one day be completed, but it is never permanently out of reach no matter how dark the situation may look.

This myth’s popularity among both Jews and non-Jews speaks to its powerful appeal and the absence of anything like it in non-kabbalistic religious traditions. It offers Mses. Green and Brown not only validation, from saying that indeed all is not well, but also solidarity, from saying that God always wants to make it better. These two claims

138 Howard Schwartz, Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 122.

139 U io fo ‘efo Judais , “o ial A tio : The Ba ksto : Tikku Ola , ‘efo Judaism Magazine, Winter 2009, accessed February 16, 2015, http://rjmag.org/PrintItem/index.cfm?id=1540&type=Articles

are missing from the theologies of suffering we saw in Chapters I and II, respectively. The teaching that God needs humans to partner with Him to fix it can also help both women in several ways. First, it assigns high status to humanity’s purpose, which could appeal to anyone wanting reassurance of her personal worth. Second, someone feeling aimless can find direction in the command to heal the world’s ills along with God. Third, the message can encourage the dispirited by saying that God is with us in our efforts: with God on our side, though we may not succeed right away, we can never permanently fail Fourth, the message is welcoming: it invites us to roll up our sleeves and start working. The world is not an intricately-assembled machine whose workings we must not touch for fear of making it go haywire; indeed, it has already gone haywire, and it will not run properly again without our help.140 That fourth point is especially helpful to Ms. Brown, who needs plenty of support before she can summon the will to try to improve her situation. That the myth holds humans blameless for the world’s original defect may especially console Ms. Green it can help her work against the sense of shame she might otherwise feel.

Jewish mysticism dwells in dualities and contradictions. For every claim it makes, it frequently makes the opposite claim as well. A master of the field might find textual support to negate every aspect of my interpretation of the myth of the shattered vessels,

140 The full impact of this view may be easier to understand in light of its polar opposite, the teaching that God and His chosen leaders are perfectly able to handle everything, and our attempts to fix the flaws we see reveal our own lack of faith and excess of pride. For example, Krista Cook writes about the evils of ark-stead i g a d h Uzzah dese ed death i Ch o : It see s like a ha sh pu ish e t to modern readers, but the point is clear. It was Heavenly Father's ark. If He needs to save or steady it, He will. The Church today is the ark. If someone needs correcting or if something needs changing, Heavenly Father can and will do it. Those of us who attempt to correct His leaders, or anything in His Church they do not have any authority over, are overstepping their responsibility and authority. Ark steadiers de o st ate a la k of faith, as ell as ispla ed o fide e i thei o isdo . Krista Cook, A oid Attempted Ark-“tead i g, A out. o , a essed Ma h , , http://lds.about.com/od/TheBible/fl/Avoid-Attempted-Ark-Steadying.htm

141

and might even be able to negate Schwartz’s rendering of the myth itself. No doubt this complexity gives the field much of its allure. Nevertheless, the story as presented here is useful to Mses. Green and Brown. The popularity of this interpretation of the myth lends it legitimacy, an important factor for those who only want to be comforted by “authentic” religious teachings. I suspect this interpretation has become as popular as it has in the USA and parts of Europe because of the lack of other teachings like it within those countries’ dominant religious traditions, and because of a common desire for such a message. We especially see this popularity within Reform Judaism, where conversations on Judaism’s purpose are full of references to tikkun olam, the work of perfecting the world work that, it is believed, God wants and expects humans to take on.

Wendy Farley’s Theology of Suffering

Process theology is not Christianity’s answer to Kabbalistic thought (if only because probably nothing can answer Kabbalistic thought), but the two systems do offer similar teachings about the nature and meaning of suffering and God’s relationship to it. For some believers, that similarity can boost the theology’s air of legitimacy. But process theologians have shown less interest in grounding their claims in scripture than in saying things consistent with scientific knowledge and human experience.142 Wendy Farley’s theology of suffering in Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion is neither the first nor the

141 In literature on Reform Judaism, tikkun olam is depicted as central to Jewish life and as something that Jews have the power to do of their own accord. For example, in defining tikkun olam, ‘efo Judais s e site offe s these o ds: Often translated to mean 'repair of the world', and even as social justice, tikkun olam underpins our religious way of life and perspective that works towards a time of peace – not just ending war, but a time of prosperity, health and justice for all. For Reform Jews the importance of working individually and collectively towards a better and redeemed world is vital to our understanding of what being active Jews means. A to Z of ‘efo Judais : Tikku Ola , The Movement for Reform Judaism, accessed March 4, 2015, http://www.reformjudaism.org.uk/a-to-z-ofreform-judaism/?id=152

142 Gregory Love, emailed to author, February 19, 2015.

most paradigmatic presentation of process theology, but I present it here because her writing has been so influential upon my own thinking.

What matters most to Farley is that radical suffering devastates the goodness of creation and mandates compassion. Any worldview that does not see and respond to the contradiction between creation’s goodness and radical suffering with bewildered lamentation and compassionate resistance is of no use to her. Although she shows obvious interest in the teachings of the Bible, scripture is not the primary source of her assertions. Instead, like other process theologians before her, she anchors her “reflections as firmly as possible in concrete experience.”143 She cares more about the experiences of people in pain than what the Bible says. Farley explains human suffering, both of societies and of individuals, as an effect of finite existence’s tragic nature. Creation is such that God cannot intervene to prevent unjust suffering, but receiving God’s redemptive, compassionate love can empower us to maintain our sense of humanity in the face of potentially spirit-crushing pain.

Farley argues that we must understand radical suffering through tragic vision. She defines radical suffering as whatever afflicts an undeserving victim such that the victim is dehumanized, unable to defy the source of the suffering, and unable to anticipate any relief. Radical suffering leads to degradation and despair because the victim, broken by pain and humiliation, loses the will (and perhaps the ability) to resist it, and thereby becomes, to a degree, complicit in the continuation of this miserable condition.144 By tragic vision, Farley means an unflinching acknowledgement of the tragedy and injustice

143 Farley, 13.

144 Farley, 53-59.

of a person’s suffering.145 She contrasts this response to those suggested by four traditional theodicies: the first views suffering as punishment for sin, the second as necessary for aesthetic harmony, the third as needed for pedagogy or purgation, and the fourth as presaging divine correction in the end-times.146 She then explains why none of those theodicies is theologically satisfying when an undeserving person endures radical suffering: our response to radical suffering should be compassion for the victim and an affirmation of the suffering’s unjustifiability.147 To explain and justify the suffering is to present it as acceptable, and if it were acceptable, then sympathetic outrage would be inappropriate. But that outrage, Farley holds, is the most appropriate response.

Her ideal response to suffering has three components: it recognizes the sufferer’s humanity and anguish, it shows compassion for the person’s plight, and it expresses a life-affirming defiance of what causes the suffering. The third element may at first seem futile what good comes of defying a power greater than us? but Farley explains that “it is in the resistance itself, in this refusal to give up the passion for justice, that tragedy is transcended.”

148 When a tragic hero denounces the afflicter, even if he utters his denunciation in a final gasp, the righteous indignation fueling it reasserts the inherent authority of justice in the face of moral outrage. The moral ideal that ought to reign reclaims its rightful place, not in the physical world, but in the minds of all who witness the tragedy and are reminded that things ought to be otherwise.

145 Farley, 19-39.

146 Farley, 21.

147 Farley, 21-23.

148 Farley, 27.

Farley emphasizes that radical suffering sickens all peoples in every age Although she holds that God and God’s creation are unquestionably good, she acknowledges that the conditions of human experience are tragic.149 Farley identifies “certain features of existence as simultaneously conditioning the possibility of human life and occasioning its destruction.”150 She cites examples of those features, including cultural diversity (which gives our lives depth but also sparks suspicion and violence), the array of possible life pursuits (which offers choice but also means inevitable neglect of needed work), physical embodiment (which makes life possible and often pleasurable, but also subjects us to sickness, pain, and death), the possibility of risk (which promises more intense enjoyment of life, but also implies inevitable loss), and the historical continuity of human institutions (which carry art and wisdom down through the generations, but also carry racism, misogyny, and oppression of the poor). How tragic that life on Earth would not be possible or wondrous if it did not contain the seeds of its own destruction!

Farley then looks more deeply into the specific tragedy of human freedom. We can understand, sympathize with, and love others, so treating one another compassionately should be innate for us. Yet, we commit and tolerate shocking evil with little effort. Exploring dimensions of sin, Farley observes that to fulfill our desires or assuage our anxieties, we overcome our natural resistance to evil by telling ourselves that our deeds are not as evil as they are, or by making ourselves callous to our victims’

149 Farley, 32-34.

150 Farley, 32.

sufferings.151 Thus we let our sinfulness grow, further muting our compassion and stunting our moral growth through false teachings and desensitizing habits. Sin restricts our moral growth and our sympathetic instinct. This bondage occurs individually and communally: we are bound not only by our own sins but also by those of our society’s laws and cultural attitudes. Yet, that bondage does not absolve us: for every choice we make, we could have (with some effort) chosen otherwise. If we continue our immoral practices, we bear some guilt. The tragedy of human freedom is that a capacity for moral greatness contains the risk of moral corruption, and as a society, we are invariably corrupted.

According to Farley, the proper response to radical human suffering is total compassion, which rehumanizes the sufferer by reassuring her of her own worth and empowering her to resist despair. Farley explores five dimensions of compassion.152 First, compassion requires sympathetic knowledge, which she defines as an understanding of what the sufferer is experiencing and a self-transcendent sharing in the sufferer’s emotional response. Second, compassion must be an enduring disposition, meaning all perceptions and experiences of the world must be informed by a commitment to thinking of others as vulnerable humans whose welfare matters. Third, it can be seen as a form of love: although compassion implies a duty to care for others, that duty is not imposed by any external authority, but rather generously offered to all, fueled by an unselfconscious delight in others’ well-being. Fourth, compassion is the proper grounding for justice: through compassionate understanding of another’s experiences, society can construct a system to expunge unfairness, resolve conflicts, foster fellowship, and redeem (rather

151 Farley, 44-50.

152 Farley, 70-89.

than merely punishing) violators. The vital insight here is that law should serve justice, and justice should serve compassion. When the law trumps the demands of justice, or when justice has no grounding in compassion, then the system becomes destructive.

Fifth, compassion is a form of power, but opposite to the power to dominate. Dominance takes power from others, decreasing their autonomy, but compassion increases autonomy by giving power to others. Farley distinguishes compassion from charity charity is generous, but it maintains the existing power dynamic between the empowered giver and the disempowered receiver but compassion invites its recipient to take up a status equal to that of the giver. The folly of compassion it dares to resist evil in spite of its relative weakness is precisely what allows it to succeed.153 Evil urges tempt us to seek dominance, but to seek dominance is to be corrupted. Compassion is incomprehensible to evil because it does not seek power for itself, only giving it to others. Evil cannot vanquish compassion because it cannot understand it.

From investigating compassion, Farley moves to addressing the problem of evil by suggesting that God’s power is not power of dominance but rather power of compassion, the power to empower others. God’s power and God’s love are both correctly understood as divine compassion, which contains both love and power. On this view, evil exists because God cannot alter the tragic structure of our finite world without destroying it utterly, nor can God overcome the tragic structure of human freedom by compelling us to act morally. God dearly desires for all to be well with creation, but the most God can do is offer infinite, empowering compassion, which humans can use to

153 Farley, 89-92.

help themselves and others.154 Alas, some are so broken that they cannot even receive God’s compassion;155 the tragic conditions of existence make God unable to help them.

While reminding us that God does not love as humans do, and that God’s love is not God’s self, Farley holds that love is still a helpful metaphor in describing how God affects us. First, it helps explain the apparent contradiction of tragic existence: it seems as if “two opposing world orders struggle against one another…one testifying to the injustice of the cosmos, the other to an ultimate good”156, but those two world orders are properly understood as stemming from the same divine love. Cosmic injustice results from the world’s being not-God: God desired the existence of what is not-God, and wrought the work of creation. To satisfy God’s desire, creation must differ from its creator.157 God is infinite, so creation must be finite, but what is finite will inevitably acquire the injustices that plague our world. The same love that moved God to create the world also fuels His hope for its redemption. In view of that hope, God offers the world (via receptive human agents) fragments of redemption: He cares for our well-being, reintegrates social outcasts, liberates the oppressed, and seeks communion with others.158

Through the concepts of tragic vision and redemption, we understand God’s behavior as akin to love, but Farley warns us not to anthropomorphize God. Her definition of God’s love is carefully refined. First, God exists independent of all else; creator and creation remain in permanent disunity. Second, God’s will to create our finite

154 Farley, 98-114.

155 Farley, 118.

156 Farley, 98.

157 Ibid.

158 Farley, 99-101.

world implies God had a desire (Eros) to bring about our existence. God’s love for creation parallels the human ideal of loving one’s fellow, so when we work to love others, we aspire to be like God. Third, because of the finite world’s tragic structure, God’s love is also tragic: God wants what is best for all creatures, but knows that they will suffer and that their suffering is a result of the very conditions into which God placed them. Fourth, the effect of God’s love upon finite creatures is redemptive compassion: God’s love empowers us to resist evil and heal its damage.159

In her final chapter, Farley explains that God mediates empowering compassion to us through three imperfect media: historical memory, scripture, and church activity. History “preserves the ‘dangerous memories’ of real occasions of liberation,” such as the emancipation of American slaves, and these moments “become signs of the compassionate power of God in history” which “bear sacramental power,” enabling sufferers to “resist suffering and evil in the present.”160 Scripture gives us stories of God realizing His purposes (such as the exodus from Egypt) and parables of the kingdom of God. These offer, respectively, “a resource that reminds human beings of the possibility and reality of divine compassion active in history” and a “vision that stands in condemnation” of earthly injustice. Without erasing suffering, they give “signs or memories of God’s liberating, redemptive work.”161 Church activity likewise serves God’s purposes: “Through the sacraments and participation in a local community,” church members are inspired by “a redeemed vision of humanity,” an inspiration which

159 Farley, 101-14.

160 Farley, 128.

161 Farley, 129-30.

empowers them to “resist the evils and suffering within and without the church.”162 By participating in the sacrament of the Eucharist, which enacts and reminds participants of redemption by symbolizing fellowship of all peoples, church members can “enjoy God and celebrate creation” even “in the midst of the struggle against evil.”163 By preserving historical memories, looking to scripture, and participating in church, we are reminded of God’s love and creation’s goodness, which encourages and empowers us to compassionately resist evil. We will never achieve perfection Farley explicitly rejects the doctrine of a final end to sin and suffering but although evil is stronger than good (an aspect of creation’s tragic structure), humans whom God inspires with a persistent vision of the ideal can occasionally, temporarily improve the world.164 Divinely inspired people will struggle eternally against evil, and will occasionally, briefly overcome it. Farley’s concept of radical suffering and her argument for tragic vision are valuable contributions to theological discourse, but they can also be of practical use to real people in pain and can offer guidance to those who would help them. Given Mses. Green and Brown were conceived in response to Farley’s book, it is no surprise that her words offer them an accurate reflection of their experiences, an assurance of the humanizing love they need, and a resounding absence of empty promises. Farley represents faithfully the horror and prevalence of suffering so that sufferers know they are understood and so that their luckier community members have a better idea of what they are enduring. She works valiantly to make her reasoning consistent about God’s relationship to the human experience of radical suffering, so that if Ms. Green or Ms.

162 Farley, 130.

163 Ibid.

164 Farley, 131.

Brown subscribe to it, they will be spared the consternation of investing in a system that produces cognitive dissonance and disappointment Perhaps most importantly, she explicitly rejects the religious tradition of victim-blaming, saying that to explain suffering as divine retribution denies victims “the right to resist suffering” as well as “the right to transform a situation of oppression.” It tends to “lock God away from the sufferer,” making God “the ostensibly righteous torturer.” Thus, “the pious sufferer is betrayed into the hands of despair.”165 Earlier, quoting Kant, she writes that anyone who calls suffering desirable offers “an apology in which the defense is worse than the charge”166 it may be problematic to say the world is unjust, but it is far worse to deny it: the denial multiplies the victim’s pain. By exposing the justification of suffering as abusive, Farley helps separate this religious tradition from its power to do harm.

Farley does not sugar-coat our dark situation: she says the only ethical response to radical suffering is compassionate resistance, and that resistance tends to buckle under the powers of evil. Unwarranted optimism would only bring the sufferer disappointment later As she shows, it is the nature of our world that many stories turn tragic; the things to do in response are resist if possible, to mourn if not, and to show compassion regardless.

What troubles me most about Farley’s argument is the contradiction it implies about the inescapability of evil. Farley rejects aesthetic theodicy’s claim that evil is necessary for good to exist—because it works “by rendering particular sufferings invisible,” and “justice cannot tolerate a cosmic harmony” that rests on unaddressed

165 Farley, 118-19.

166 Farley, 21.

wrongs. 167 She refuses to call injustice necessary for goodness. She even asserts that “[t]ragic vision … shares with classical Christian theology a belief that creation is good,”168 where “good” means “not dependent on evil to function.” This observation has two advantages first, it matches our experience, and second, it describes what is difficult about the human condition without assuming that God willed that difficulty. But it also has a drawback: it asserts what she had declared unacceptable in rejecting aesthetic theodicy. Either good’s existence does not require evil (as she claims on p.22) in which case God could have spared us those features of human existence that both condition its possibility and occasion its destruction, or these features are necessary, and good cannot exist without evil after all. After Farley so powerfully denounces unsatisfying theodicies, it would be a pity if she unwittingly relies upon one herself. But if she does not contradict herself in the two passages I discussed above, the statements must harmonize, and that harmony seems out of reach. If evil is not necessary for good to exist, as she claims, then surely the features of existence that condition the possibility of human life (the creation of which Farley insists is good) need not also make its (physical or spiritual) destruction more likely. But if the essential features of existence do tend to lead to its destruction, as she also claims, then surely the good of human life will never exist without those evils that lead to radical human suffering, and we return to the aesthetic theodicy that evil is an ingredient of good, which Farley wanted to reject.

Considering what this dilemma teaches us about God makes the problem worse. If we say humans cannot exist in this finite world without the world becoming corrupted, then we imply that God created a fundamentally broken world, or at least a world

167 Farley, 21-22.

168 Farley, 32.

designed in such a way that it broke when humans arrived. This vision is not so different from that of the kabbalistic myth of the shattered vessels, but as Farley is committed to saying only what is grounded in concrete human experience, she cannot point to a future when all will be well. She envisions the world in a state of permanent brokenness. What does it mean that God has created us and put us here to make the best of a corrupt and corrupting situation? God either lacks the ability to have done better in the first place (meaning we cannot trust that God can take care of us) or He lacks the desire to have done better (meaning that as much as God loves us, He still does not provide us with all we need). As Farley herself emphasizes in her final chapters, even the promise of infinite divine compassion does not heal the wounds that suffering and sin inflict on the world. Farley’s god, enthusiastic but insufficiently competent, negligently created a flawed world, dropped well-loved but likewise flawed humans into it, and now apologizes and offers insufficient aid to those still whole enough to make use of it. That this god should be worthy of our worship will not be obvious to everyone.169 Not even God’s love for what is not-God can justify the decision to create a world so eternally doomed.

Modern LDS Theologies of Suffering and Joseph Smith’s Limited God

Today, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints aligns its teachings about God closely with the teachings of traditional Christianity that we investigated in Chapter I: it says that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent.170 LDS doctrine thus finds

169 Da id ‘a G iffi , defe di g his o p o ess theolog agai st Joh ‘oth s iti is , suggests that a God who cannot prevent the evils of the world is surely more worthy of worship than one who could prevent them but chooses not to. The choice may come down to a matter of taste. Davis, 140.

170 Fo e a ple, the hu h s o li e i le di tio a sa s, God created all things and is the ruler of the universe, being omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent (through His Spirit)… Bi le Di tio a : God, The Chu h of Jesus Ch ist of Latte -day Saints, accessed May 18, 2014, https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bd/god. That teaching seems to be based on the words of one of the hu h s fo e leade s, ho taught, This great God, the Lord Almighty is omnipotent, omniscient, and

itself saddled with the dilemma that has long plagued Christian theology: it becomes difficult to confront and explain the existence of undeserved suffering without suggesting that God has a disturbing system of values. But LDS scripture permits a different approach. In parts of Joseph Smith’s translation of the Bible (commonly called the Joseph Smith Translation, or JST) and his later writings and speeches, he taught that God has limitations, and that God’s power, while still phenomenally great, is likewise limited.

One result of this distinction in doctrine is that in LDS theology, a promising explanation for the existence of undeserved suffering becomes tenable. If there are things God simply cannot do to relieve undeserved suffering because He must obey certain laws of the universe, then God’s relationship to these evils may be one of impotent (or at least insufficiently potent) opposition, very much as it appears in process theology. If God does not have total power to control everything, perhaps people suffer not because God permits it but rather because God cannot stop it. The status quo, in this view, is not necessarily a reflection of what God wants (or what God will permit for now). We may do all we can to relieve our own undeserved suffering and that of others without concluding that in doing so we are rebelling against God’s will Below, I investigate several texts that point toward this promising view.

The Limits of God’s Creative Power

In the King Follett Discourse, Joseph Smith’s last public speech before his death three months later, he interprets bereishit bara elohim (“In the beginning God created,” Gen 1:1) to show that matter is co-eternal with God. omnipresent. He has all power, knows all things, and, by the power of his Spirit, is in and through all things. B u e ‘. M Co kie, The Lo d God of the ‘esto atio , The Chu h of Jesus Ch ist of Latte -day Saints, October, 1980, accessed May 18, 2014, https://www.lds.org/general-conference/1980/10/thelord-god-of-the-restoration

You ask them why [they say the world was made out of nothing], and they say, “Doesn’t the Bible say He created the world?” And they infer that it must be out of nothing. The word create came from the word BARA, but it doesn’t mean so. What does BARA mean? It means to organize; the same as a man would organize and use things to build a ship. Hence, we infer that God Himself had materials to organize the world out of chaos chaotic matter which is element and in which dwells all the glory. Element had an existence from the time He had. The pure principles of element are principles that never can be destroyed. They may be organized and reorganized, but not destroyed. Nothing can be destroyed. They never can have a beginning or an ending; they exist eternally. 171

Both “chaotic matter” and human spirits are co-eternal with God. In D&C 93, we read:

29 Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.

30 All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence.

…

33 For man is spirit. The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fullness of joy….172

The language does not lend itself to easy interpretation, but the usual reading is that our spirits are made of intelligence just as atoms make up physical objects. Intelligence, like matter, is eternal; both can be reorganized, but not created or destroyed. Intelligence also has a will of its own. By nature (not by divine design), Human spirits have free will they would not be separate from God without that freedom. The resulting picture is one of God trying His best to work within a system of disparate powers, not all of which are subject to His control.

In his translation of the Bible, Joseph Smith revises certain verses in such a way that other powers coexist with God’s. Consider his revisions of the following Gospel verses:

171 The King Follett Discourse was delivered by Joseph Smith in April 1844 to church members during the biannual General Conference. His words were recorded by four scribes and then amalgamated to create the existing text. Stan Larson, The Ki g Follett Dis ou se: A Ne l A alga ated Te t BYU Studies Volume 18:2 (1978), 10-11.

172 Doctrine & Covenants 93:29-33.

King James Version Joseph Smith Translation

Matt 19:26 But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.

Mark 10:27 And Jesus looking upon them saith, With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible.

Luke 18:27

And he said, The things which are impossible with men are possible with God.

But Jesus beheld their thoughts, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but if they will forsake all things for my sake, with God whatsoever things I speak are possible.173

And Jesus looking upon them saith, With men that trust in riches, it is impossible; but not impossible with men who trust in God and leave all for my sake, for with such all these things are possible.174

And he said unto them, It is impossible for them who trust in riches, to enter into the kingdom of God; but he who forsaketh the things which are of this world, it is possible with God, that he should enter in. 175

In each of these three verses, Joseph Smith changes the text from saying God can do anything to saying God can do certain things in this case, God may save the rich man, provided he trusts in God and forsakes all for His sake. In narrowing the text’s claims about God’s power, Smith does not directly contradict the claim of God’s omnipotence, but he does remove important textual support for it. His removal can be interpreted to mean that the KJV was incorrect in supporting the doctrine of divine omnipotence.

Other passages in the Book of Mormon and Doctrine & Covenants support this view of a god with limited creative power. In the second chapter of the second book of Nephi, we read that opposition is fundamental to the nature of the world:

11 For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so…righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as

173 Matthew 19:26, King James Version and Joseph Smith Translation.

174 Mark 10:27, King James Version and Joseph Smith Translation

175 Luke 18:27, King James Version and Joseph Smith Translation

dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility.

15 And to bring about his eternal purposes in the end of man… it must needs be that there was an opposition; even the forbidden fruit in opposition to the tree of life; the one being sweet and the other bitter.176

The balance of opposites is a condition of existence. One possible (and popular) interpretation of this statement takes it as a fact about human nature: a concept only becomes meaningful to people when they understand it in relation to its opposite. We may find life pleasant, but we do not know how precious it is until we confront death. We might enjoy companionship, but we cannot really appreciate it until we have felt isolation. Until Adam and Eve tasted the forbidden fruit, the tree of life was empty of meaning and effectively invisible to them. If humans, by nature, cannot be fully aware of something without knowing its opposite, and if God cannot change that rule, but must work within it, then God’s creative power is limited, not absolute.

The Limits of God’s Free Agency

God’s freedom is limited not only by natural laws but also by moral laws. In Smith’s translation of Ex 9-11, all references to God’s directly hardening Pharaoh’s heart are gone; instead, Pharaoh alone is responsible for the hardening of his own heart.177 Smith’s revised text suggests two possible interpretations. It may be that, as we saw in D&C 93:29-33 above, human spirits are permanently endowed with free agency not because God willed it so but because it is the unchangeable nature of human spirits. Or it may be that Smith’s revision was driven by his commitment to God’s perfect justice.

176 2 Nephi 2:11-15.

177 Robert J. Matthews, A Plai er Tra slatio Joseph “ ith’s Tra slatio of the Bible: A History and Commentary (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1975), 313.

Pharaoh himself, and not God, must be responsible for his being so hard-hearted, or else it would be unfair for God to punish him. It is unclear whether the limiting factor is the law of the universe or God’s chosen commitment to ruling justly.

But the distinction between those two possible limiting factors seems to collapse when we consider how God’s justice is described in the following passages from the Book of Mormon. In the 3rd chapter of the Book of Ether, the brother of Jared informs us that God cannot lie:

11 And the Lord said unto him: Believest thou the words which I shall speak?

12 And he answered: Yea, Lord, I know that thou speakest the truth, for thou art a God of truth, and canst not lie.178

God Himself declares the same restriction in Doctrine & Covenants 62:6, saying, “Behold, I, the Lord…promise the faithful and cannot lie.”179 It is not that God refuses to lie, but rather that He cannot do so. And in the 42nd chapter of Alma, amid teachings about sin, atonement, and redemption, we read that God must act justly or else cease to be God:

11 And now remember, my son, if it were not for the plan of redemption, (laying it aside) as soon as they were dead their souls were miserable, being cut off from the presence of the Lord.

12 And now, there was no means to reclaim men from this fallen state, which man had brought upon himself because of his own disobedience;

13 Therefore, according to justice, the plan of redemption could not be brought about, only on conditions of repentance of men in this probationary state, yea, this preparatory state; for except it were for these conditions, mercy could not take effect except it should destroy the work of justice. Now the work of justice could not be destroyed; if so, God would cease to be God.

14 And thus we see that all mankind were fallen, and they were in the grasp of justice; yea, the justice of God, which consigned them forever to be cut off from his presence.

15 And now, the plan of mercy could not be brought about except an atonement should be made; therefore God himself atoneth for the sins of the world, to bring

178 Ether 3:11-12.

179 Doctrine & Covenants 62:6.

about the plan of mercy, to appease the demands of justice, that God might be a perfect, just God, and a merciful God also.

22 But there is a law given, and a punishment affixed, and a repentance granted; which repentance, mercy claimeth; otherwise, justice claimeth the creature and executeth the law, and the law inflicteth the punishment; if not so, the works of justice would be destroyed, and God would cease to be God.

25 What, do ye suppose that mercy can rob justice? I say unto you, Nay; not one whit. If so, God would cease to be God.

Sinning incurs debt, and if the sinners cannot pay it, God must pay their debts Himself, by means of some great sacrifice, to create a path back to His presence for faithful penitents. The claim here is remarkable: if the spirit serving as God were to waive the debt, or otherwise govern unjustly, even for mercy’s sake, He would lose His godliness. God’s justice is so reliable that the laws of justice may as well have been imposed upon God by some external force more powerful than He. God must satisfy them even when He wants to do otherwise. By describing God as being obligated, rather than eager, to govern justly, the text emphasizes God’s loving aspect—here, loving to the point of selfsacrifice instead of His wrathful one, but that emphasis also supports the view that God has limited power and some evils are beyond His control.

The Limits of God’s Control over Satan

For a fuller picture of LDS scriptural understanding of evil, let us read a key passage about Satan. The opening of Moses 4 says that in the beginning, God, Satan, and Jesus had a conversation similar to the “grand council” described in the King Follett Discourse: in the Discourse, the head god calls forth the other gods in a “grand council” where they “contemplated the creation of the worlds”; 180 in the book of Moses, God,

180 I the Ki g Follett Dis ou se, Joseph “ ith is epo ted to ha e said, I ill go to the e fi st Hebrew word BERESHITH in the Bible and make a comment on the first sentence of the history of eatio : I the egi i g. . . I a t to a al ze the o d BE‘E“HITH. BE—in, by, through, and everything

Jesus, and Satan come together to talk about the plan of salvation (how humankind was to be redeemed). Jesus and Heavenly Father say that humans must have free will, and Satan takes an opposing position.

1 And I, the Lord God, spake unto Moses, saying: That Satan, whom thou hast commanded in the name of mine Only Begotten, is the same which was from the beginning, and he came before me, saying Behold, here am I, send me, I will be thy son, and I will redeem all mankind, that one soul shall not be lost, and surely I will do it; wherefore give me thine honor.

2 But, behold, my Beloved Son, which was my Beloved and Chosen from the beginning, said unto me Father, thy will be done, and the glory be thine forever.

3 Wherefore, because that Satan rebelled against me, and sought to destroy the agency of man, which I, the Lord God, had given him, and also, that I should give unto him mine own power; by the power of mine Only Begotten, I caused that he should be cast down;

4 And he became Satan, yea, even the devil, the father of all lies, to deceive and to blind men, and to lead them captive at his will, even as many as would not hearken unto my voice.181

Where Satan proposes that humans be compelled to act righteously on earth so that all of them might return to God after death,182 Jesus suggests that humans should be free to choose whether to obey God or not. Partly on the basis of the wickedness of Satan’s suggestion, he is banished from Heaven forever. He establishes his reign outside of Heaven, and all humans who do not follow God’s direction become susceptible to Satan’s else; next, ROSH the head, ITH. Where did it come from? When the inspired man wrote it, he did not put the first part the BE there; but a man an old Jew without any authority put it there. He thought it too ad to egi to talk a out the head of a a . It ead i the fi st: The Head O e of the Gods ought fo th the Gods. This is the t ue ea i g of the words. ROSHITH [BARA ELOHIM] signifies [the Head] to i g fo th the Elohi . … Thus, the Head God ought fo th the Head Gods i the g a d, head ou il. … The Head O e of the Gods alled togethe the Gods a d the g a d councilors sat in grand council at the head in yonder heavens to bring forth the world and contemplated the eatio of the o lds that e e eated at that ti e. La so , .

181 Moses 4:1-4.

182 Aa o Holt poi ts out that a i o it of LD“ elie e s i te p et “ata s pla to e o e i which humans would have no free agency, but their actions would not necessarily be uniformly righteous. Aaron Holt, emailed to author, April 16, 2014.

snares. God will reverse this situation in the end of time, according to D&C 19,183 but for now, God and Jesus engage in protracted struggle with Satan, neither one vanquishing the other. While this narrative’s primary purpose seems to be that it gives legitimacy to the human experience of feeling torn between good and bad impulses, we can infer from the relationship it describes between Satan and God another limitation upon God’s power: until the world ends, Satan acts in opposition to God’s will. Because God does not exercise total control over Satan, we can attribute undeserved suffering to Satan’s rebellious efforts; we need not see it as consistent with God’s will.

The Limits of God’s Ability to Help Humans in Moses 7

In the seventh chapter of the Book of Moses, we find a moving treatment of God’s relationship to undeserved human suffering. It begins with Enoch watching God as He weeps over wayward people who would not repent and must now endure the disastrous consequences.

28 And it came to pass that the God of heaven looked upon the residue of the people, and he wept; and Enoch bore record of it, saying: How is it that the heavens weep, and shed forth their tears as the rain upon the mountains?

29 And Enoch said unto the Lord: How is it that thou canst weep, seeing thou art holy, and from all eternity to all eternity?

30 And were it possible that man could number the particles of the earth, yea, millions of earths like this, it would not be a beginning to the number of thy creations; and thy curtains are stretched out still; and yet thou art there, and thy bosom is there; and also thou art just; thou art merciful and kind forever;

31 And thou hast taken Zion to thine own bosom, from all thy creations, from all eternity to all eternity; and naught but peace, justice, and truth is the habitation of thy throne; and mercy shall go before thy face and have no end; how is it thou canst weep?

183 D&C 19:1-3 reads: 1 I am Alpha a d O ega, Ch ist the Lo d…I am he, the beginning and the end, the Redeemer of the world. 2 I, having accomplished and finished the will of him whose I am, even the Father, concerning me having done this that I might subdue all things unto myself 3 Retaining all power, even to the destroying of Satan and his works at the end of the world, and the last great day of judgment, which I shall pass upon the inhabitants thereof, judging every man according to his works and the deeds which he hath done. [My emphasis.]

32 The Lord said unto Enoch: Behold these thy brethren; they are the workmanship of mine own hands, and I gave unto them their knowledge, in the day I created them; and in the Garden of Eden, gave I unto man his agency; 33 And unto thy brethren have I said, and also given commandment, that they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father; but behold, they are without affection, and they hate their own blood;

…

37 But behold, their sins shall be upon the heads of their fathers; Satan shall be their father, and misery shall be their doom; and the whole heavens shall weep over them, even all the workmanship of mine hands; wherefore should not the heavens weep, seeing these shall suffer?184

Enoch watches in surprise as God sheds bitter tears because some of His beloved children will not do what is required of them to return to Him. Instead, they will suffer at the hands of Satan. While the point of this passage was probably to highlight not God’s limited power but rather His love for humans He loves them so deeply that even if they deserve punishment, God cannot bear to lose them a by-product of that message is the implication that God is beholden to rules He did not make. He cannot break them, even when He dearly wishes to do so.

Perhaps Smith had in mind the image of that same loving god when he revised Isaiah 63:17. In the KJV, Isaiah asks God why He has made humans weak and liable to sin by saying, “O Lord, why hast thou made us to err from thy ways, and hardened our heart from thy fear?” The JST reads, “O Lord, why hast thou suffered us to err from thy ways, and to harden our heart from thy fear?”185 Along the same line, in Matthew 6:13, where the KJV has, “lead us not into temptation,” the JST says, “suffer us not to be led into temptation.”186 In both texts, the KJV seems to be speaking about the experience of being human it feels as if we are simply incapable of mustering the strength to resist

184 Moses 7:28-37.

185 Matthews, A Plainer Translation, 313.

186 Matthew 6:13, Joseph Smith Translation.

temptation, or as if we have an inescapable, natural tendency to sin and that aspect of human nature is attributed to God’s will, because according to this belief system, all that exists is a manifestation of God’s will. But Smith seems to read the KJV as making statements not about human nature but about God’s nature. When read that way, it seems to emphasize not the tragedy of human weakness but rather an injustice on God’s part: God, the texts seem to say, makes us sin! To expunge that unacceptable implication, Smith makes us responsible for our own sins. God may, his revision implies, intervene to shield us from blundering into temptation, instead of passively allowing us to stray wherever we will, but even when God does not intervene, God is a passive bystander and not to blame for our sins.

Passage after passage allows us to see God’s power as curtailed. God can organize the universe and make people from available materials, but He cannot create the materials He would have preferred. He can bring a rich man into the kingdom of Heaven, but only if he is faithful and forsakes earthly things. God can make a tree of life, but it would be meaningless without a forbidden fruit as well. He can show infinite mercy, but only in a way that satisfies the demands of justice, which God cannot suspend. God can design and implement a plan of salvation, but He cannot stop Satan from trying to thwart His will. He can establish a path for penitent sinners to return to Him, but cannot make them repent. He can neither make us behave righteously nor compel us to do evil nor lead us into temptation; He does not make us prone to sin. While Joseph Smith does not address the matter explicitly, his writings leave ample room for theologians to respond to the question of why good people suffer by giving the relatively desirable answer that while God wants all to be well, some things God simply cannot control.

Modern Mormon Depictions of God’s Power

From around 1835 through the middle of the twentieth century, this understanding of God limited in power, albeit eternally progressing was dominant among Mormons.187 But today, this theological position is widely buried or deemphasized by church leaders.188 Instead of teaching of a limited God who wants to prevent suffering but cannot, they stress God’s wisdom in creating the world as it is, while playing down the seriousness of human suffering. Below, I present some relatively recent representative pieces which address the question of why we suffer and give authoritative answers.189 Each one depicts unjust suffering as a net positive.

187 See O. Kendall White, Jr. Mormon Neo-Orthodoxy (Salt Lake: Signature Books, 1987), Ch. 3 T aditio al Mo o Theolog a d Ch. Mo o Neo-O thodo .

188 Euge e E gla d ites, The influence of those two highly-respected and prolific Gospel scholars and General Authorities [Joseph Fielding Smith and Bruce R. McConkie] and the more intangible influences of our crisis-ridden and anxiety-producing past century have encouraged, in the latter half of the twentieth century, an increasing emphasis in Mormon thought on the absolute and infinite qualities of God in contrast to sinful humans in need of salvation by grace. [Other authors have documented] the reconstruction of Mormon doctrine away from its original radical adventuresomeness, as part of the twentieth century accommodation to American culture. Euge e E gla d, The Weepi g God of Mo o is i Ele e t Vol. : “p i g , se tio . I u likel suppo t of E gla d s positio , “a d a Ta e ites, Fo a u e of ea s the LD“ Chu h has ee editi g its ooks a d hu h a uals to de-emphasize the more radical parts of its theology. Some observers had hoped that this signaled a move toward standard Christian theology. However, even after editing, the aberrant doctrines are still sprinkled th oughout thei i st u tio a uals. “a d a Ta e , Does the LD“ Chu h “till Tea h That Hea e l Fathe Was O e a Ma ? Utah Lighthouse Mi ist http://www.utlm.org/onlineresources/doesldschurchteachheavenlyfatherwasaman.htm Accessed May

. The Utah Lighthouse Mi ist ites a ti les iti al of the Mo o hu h s do t i e and of its leade s eha io ; that see s to e its sole pu pose. As su h, Ta e s e phasis o the fe a e a t do t i es that e ai sp i kled th oughout LD“ hu h edu atio al ate ials is ost likel i te ded to depict the church in as alien a light as possible. In fact, the years of editing LDS materials to de-emphasize those doctrines not in harmony with mainstream Christianity may well have been undertaken in response to the work of Sandra Tanner and others engaged in similar pursuits.

189 Because these talks were written by people who are said to be divinely appointed to deliver their message to their audience, and because the audience is further taught that God has a special reason for wanting them to hear that particular message, the talks are not interpreted as mere speculation or expression of personal views. Rather, they are viewed as a message from God to the listener by means of the speake . Ea h of these talks is a aila le o lds.o g, the hu h s offi ial e site, hi h i di ates that the o te t of the talks as dee ed to e o siste t ith oth the hu h s a efull a i u ed i age and the message which the church wants to present to the general public a public consisting of both

With God, All Things Are Possible

First, let us consider a talk written and delivered by Russell M. Nelson at General Conference in April 1988, four years after he was called to serve in the second-highest office in the church (an office in which he still serves as of February 2015):

Many shoulder heavy burdens of righteous responsibility which, on occasion, seem so difficult to bear. I have heard those challenges termed impossible....But, in fact, our Lord had spoken: “With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.” (Matt. 19:26; see also Mark 10:27; Luke 18:27) … You who may be momentarily disheartened, remember, life is not meant to be easy. Trials must be borne and grief endured along the way. … Your prayerful access to help is just as real as when David battled his Goliath (see 1 Sam. 17). … “Be strong and courageous” (2 Chr. 32:7), and you will be given power and protection from on high. “For I will go before your face,” the Lord declared. “I will be on your right hand and on your left, and my Spirit shall be in your hearts, and mine angels round about you, to bear you up.” (D&C 84:88). The great latter-day work of which we are a part shall be accomplished. Prophecies of the ages shall be fulfilled. “For with God all things are possible.”190

In his message of encouragement to people who are struggling, Nelson portrays God as capable of ultimately bringing the righteous sufferer through any trial, no matter how tough. This is a distinctly different depiction of God from what we have seen previously, and it is particularly striking that Nelson used the King James translation of Matt. 19:26 rather than Joseph Smith’s, to make his point. Whereas in the texts we have already investigated, God seemed limited, His action circumscribed by laws he could not suspend, here Nelson strives to buoy up his audience by describing a triumphant god with power to spare. If we find our troubles overwhelming, we are reminded that “life is not meant to be easy” (suggesting that God designed life to be overwhelming on purpose, for those who are Mormon already and those who are not Mormon yet. Church members are expected to take these texts seriously, and so we ought to read them in that light.

190 ‘ussell M. Nelso , With God Nothi g “hall Be I possi le, The Chu h of Jesus Ch ist of Latter-day Saints, accessed May 10, 2014, https://www.lds.org/general-conference/1988/04/with-godnothing-shall-be-impossible?lang=eng

a good end) and we are encouraged to see ourselves as David battling Goliath as long as we have faith in God and refuse to give up, we can win with God’s help. There is not even the whisper of a suggestion that some obstacles are insurmountable, or that God wishes things were otherwise. While this advice may be reassuring to people like Ms. Gray who wonder whether they are alone in finding life difficult and who would benefit from some encouragement, it may also be terribly frustrating to the faithful Ms. Greens who might justifiably think that while life might not have been meant to be easy, it was surely not meant to break down their will to resist. And it may impart a damaging sense of purpose upon the Ms. Browns who are mired in destructive situations, susceptible to messages that God wants them to stay where they are and keep working to solve a problem that is beyond their control. No Pain is Wasted

In October of 2007, Larry Richman gave a devotional address, “Learning through Life’s Trials,” to the students of BYU-Idaho. Like many BYU devotionals, it was printed in the Ensign, the church’s monthly magazine, for the spiritual benefit of all church members. Reminding us of C.S. Lewis’ words in The Problem of Pain, Richman writes:

Apostle Orson F. Whitney (1855–1931) of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, explained: “No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. It ministers to our education, to the development of such qualities as patience, faith, fortitude and humility. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable, more worthy to be called the children of God … and it is through sorrow and suffering, toil and tribulation, that we gain the education that we come here to acquire.”

Trials give us opportunities to show the Lord and ourselves that we will be faithful. We can choose to feel sorry for ourselves and ask, “Why me?” or we can grow from our trials, increase our faith in the Lord, and ask, “How can I be faithful in the midst of this trial?” We can let adversity break us down and make us bitter, or we can let it refine us and make us stronger. We can allow adversity

to lead us to drift away from the things that matter most, or we can use it as a stepping-stone to grow closer to things of eternal worth.

Spiritual growth can often be achieved more readily by trials and adversity than by comfort and tranquility. Trials can teach us that faith in God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ is the source of inner strength. President David O. McKay (1873-1970) recounted the testimony of one of the survivors of the ill-fated Martin handcart company [a large group of Mormon pioneers who attempted to migrate westward on foot during a ferocious winter], who said: “We suffered beyond anything you can imagine and many died of exposure and starvation, but … [we] came through with the absolute knowledge that God lives for we became acquainted with Him in our extremities.”191

In Richman’s view, pain and suffering make us better people, provided we take advantage of the gifts they have to offer. Suffering can help us to acquire virtues, qualify us to associate with God, provide an opportunity to prove our worth, stimulate the growth of our faith in God, and allow us to fulfill our purpose in life. What’s more, there is no other way for us to gain these precious benefits so effectively. We are encouraged to be grateful for the most difficult aspects of life on earth because without them, we would be in spiritual poverty, more distant from God, and in increased danger of losing our faith.

While Richman’s approach can be hugely empowering to Ms. Gray as she struggles to find meaning in her suffering and regain a sense of autonomy after circumstances have made her feel powerless, his words can also do unintended harm to Ms. Green, whose suffering is ongoing and crippling. His reasoning implies that if we “let adversity break us down and make us bitter,” instead of taking charge of and being improved by our suffering, then we only have ourselves to blame. If Ms. Green feels broken and bitter, according to Richman, she only has herself to blame for letting it happen. God’s wisdom is defended at the cost of acknowledging that some people’s

191 La ‘i h a , Lea i g Th ough Life s T ials The Chu h of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed May 10, 2014. https://www.lds.org/ensign/2010/03/learning-through-lifes-trials?lang=eng

experiences are so overpoweringly painful that they have no choice but to be broken down.

Suffering Helps Us Get Into Heaven

A third talk, this one written and delivered by James E. Faust at General Conference in October 2004, suggests that unjust suffering is necessary because it allows all those who love God with a pure heart to distinguish themselves, by means of faithfulness in the face of undeserved suffering, from those who only pursue their own interests.

Dr. Arthur Wentworth Hewitt suggested some reasons why the good suffer as well as the wicked: “… I believe it is because He loves us so much more than He loves our happiness. How so? Well, if on a basis of strict personal return here and now, all the good were always happy and all the bad suffered disaster (instead of often quite the reverse), this would be the most subtle damnation of character imaginable.”

President Kimball gave this insightful explanation: “If pain and sorrow and total punishment immediately followed the doing of evil, no soul would repeat a misdeed. If joy and peace and rewards were instantaneously given the doer of good, there could be no evil all would do good and not because of the rightness of doing good. There would be no test of strength, no development of character, no growth of powers, no free agency. … There would also be an absence of joy, success, resurrection, eternal life, and godhood.” 192

If good people never suffered unfairly, Kimball reasons, life would be too easy. God, in His wisdom, has designed life to include unjust suffering so that we can become worthy, through enduring our trials, of eternal life and exaltation. Faust continues:

Our love of God must be pure, without selfish intent. The pure love of Christ must be the motive in our devotion. … Now all this suffering might indeed be unfair if everything ended at death, but it doesn’t. Life is not like a one-act play. It has three acts. … We were sent into mortality to be tested and tried. … Our past and present sufferings cannot, as Paul said, “be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us” in the eternities. “For after much tribulation come the blessings.

192 Ja es E. Faust, Whe e Do I Make M “ta d? The Chu h of Jesus Ch ist of Latte -day Saints, October 2004. Accessed May 10, 2014, https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2004/10/where-do-imake-my-stand?lang=eng

Wherefore the day cometh that ye shall be crowned with much glory.” So tribulation is useful in the sense that it is helpful to get into the celestial kingdom.193

Heaven will be so wonderful that once we arrive there, we will realize that all the pain we may have suffered on earth was worth the reward.

While this talk’s noble aim—to give the faithful a sense of purpose for their struggles by recasting those struggles as part of God’s plan—is not neatly comparable to the aim of visionary scripture like Moses 7:28-37 (discussed above), the contrasting emphases are nevertheless worth noting. While Moses 7 taught of God’s love being so present that the heavens themselves weep for lost souls, this talk postulates a more emotionally reserved God who has a counter-intuitive way of expressing His love: “He loves us so much more than He loves our happiness” that He afflicts good people now in order to reward them later (and presumably does the reverse to bad people). Faust asks us to play down what causes us pain on earth, while Moses 7 asks us to focus on, and feel compassion for, those who endure such pain.

Enoch’s Compassion

To sharpen the contrast between Faust and Moses 7, let us consider Enoch’s developing reaction to God’s grief. While in vv. 29-31 Enoch reminded God of His greatness and asked in astonishment how the Eternal can weep, a few verses later he comes to see things differently.

41 And it came to pass that the Lord spake unto Enoch, and told Enoch all the doings of the children of men; wherefore Enoch knew, and looked upon their wickedness, and their misery, and wept and stretched forth his arms, and his heart swelled wide as eternity; and his bowels yearned; and all eternity shook.

193 Faust, 2004.

49 And when Enoch heard the earth mourn, he wept, and cried unto the Lord, saying: O Lord, wilt thou not have compassion upon the earth? Wilt thou not bless the children of Noah?

50 And it came to pass that Enoch continued his cry unto the Lord, saying: I ask thee, O Lord, in the name of thine Only Begotten, even Jesus Christ, that thou wilt have mercy upon Noah and his seed, that the earth might never more be covered by the floods.

51 And the Lord could not withhold; and he covenanted with Enoch, and sware unto him with an oath, that he would stay the floods; that he would call upon the children of Noah;

52 And he sent forth an unalterable decree, that a remnant of his seed should always be found among all nations, while the earth should stand;194

Once Enoch sees the humans, wicked though they are, through God’s eyes, he feels such heights of compassion that all eternity shakes in sympathy with him. Nor is his compassion fruitless: he stubbornly importunes God to have mercy upon them until God, unable to resist, blesses humanity with an unalterable decree. We might have said that Enoch here plays the part of the prophet who protests against an unjust God until he convinces Him to have mercy, but it seems as if in this story, God is already inclined to be merciful; He only needed a bit of convincing.

Eugene England writes movingly of the practical potential of Enoch’s growth as a model for religious life, in opposition to the growing trend among Mormons to see God as omnipotent:

These, then, are some reasons the weeping God of Mormonism must survive as part of the rich texture of Mormon thought: To keep alive a concept of the Atonement that emphasizes Christ’s mercy and our own response to it in becoming new creatures; to keep before us the concept that moved Enoch to compassion "as wide as eternity" and might also move us; and to stem our inclinations to various forms of violence with each other. There seems to be at present a bad case of loss of nerve, of preferring negative, safe religion to the positive, adventuresome kind championed by the founders of Mormonism.195

194 Moses 7:41-52.

195 England, Section 33.

England acknowledges that it “makes life very difficult” to believe in “a weeping God, who can’t solve our pain and problems or promise to make everything right in the end, who calls us to live with him in a tragic universe,” but he nevertheless holds that “it would be a tragedy to lose such an understanding” of God. Without it, committed believers are at risk of seeing only the problems God has already solved, and only the events that demonstrate God’s power to perfect the world, while silencing, blocking out of their view, or reinterpreting as good those tragic stories that seem to implicate God for failing to make the world whole.196

Recommendation for the Leaders of the Mormon Church

It is no light thing to recommend, as I am doing, that leaders of the LDS church incorporate complex ideas about the nature of God into a worldview that already gives meaning to pain and makes members feel safe, happy, and hopeful. If Russell Nelson’s teaching that with God, nothing is impossible can lend Ms. Gray the courage to face her personal goliaths, what good comes from her embracing the view that there are some things upon which hope and happiness depend, yet God cannot do them, as Joseph Smith’s translation of those three Gospel verses suggests? If Larry Richman’s teaching that no pain is wasted gives her the change of perspective and the hopeful resolve she needs to endure her own pain, why should she adopt the conflicting belief that (as sad experience can testify) some painful experiences provide such little value that we should avoid them if we possibly can, and if we cannot, we can only mourn? And if James Faust can lighten her heavy heart by pointing toward the rewards she will enjoy in heaven, why should she turn her gaze, as Enoch did, back to the woes of life on earth?

196 England, Section 34.

But no theology of suffering, no matter how comforting, is sufficient for a people if, to sustain itself, it must transmute or render invisible whatever questions the perfection of God’s plan. A compassionate approach would acknowledge the experiences of Mses. Green and Brown when they are too beaten down to decide for themselves how to respond to their own pain. It would admit that their days are not brightened by optimistic encouragement and that their pain should not be prolonged (not even for the sake of rewards) when it does them unredemptive harm Ms. Green needs her community to grieve with her over the tragedy of what is destroyed, and Ms. Brown needs her community to work with her to eradicate the cause of her suffering, even if that means wearying God with their pleas. The scriptures we have investigated here would support the church’s leaders, should they decide to teach what would help these sufferers most instead of attempting to put a positive spin on their situations. No doubt the temptation is great to make Mormon theology look like the theology of more established and more populous denominations of Christianity. But the LDS church would have much of value to offer the world if it preached the message of compassion that precious few other churches are preaching, instead of conforming to the standards that other churches have already established. To help others bear the burdens that they cannot bear alone, a community must adopt perspectives that prepare it to see the tragic fractures in our beautiful world.

God Helps Those Who Help Each Other

The factor that unites all the responses to suffering in this chapter is the combination of a sad admission that all is not well and an assertion that God is behind us but “behind” in two senses of the word. God is behind us in that He is rooting for

us He loves us and wants the best for us but God is also behind us in that He does not lead us in our halting progress toward a better world. We must walk alone onto the field first; only then can God follow.

We find the acknowledgement of a sick world and God’s presence behind us in all four of the viewpoints we investigated in this chapter. The free will defense responds to the problem of suffering by admitting that it is indeed a problem, and instead of calling the suffering valuable, it describes it as an unfortunate result of the indispensible gift of free will. It relies upon the premise that God loves us and wants us to make the best choices we can with the free will He has graciously given us, but it also teaches that God has created the world to be as good as possible; establishing social justice is up to us. The kabbalistic myth of the shattered vessels teaches that in our perfect world gone awry, God’s love for us takes the dual forms of hope and need: God hopes that we will do the work for which He created us that we will put the world in its right order but He also cannot step in and complete that work until we have done the lion’s share of it first.

Wendy Farley writes of a god who watches over a ruptured world. God is always ready to love, empower, and re-humanize the victims of radical suffering, but there are limiting factors on God’s influence: it is only through the free actions of caring people that God’s love is felt, and for that love to be of any benefit to sufferers, they must be able to receive it. And in Moses 7, God shows Enoch that the suffering of sinners is cause to weep, but God must wait for Enoch to cry aloud repeatedly before offering His help.

This approach to the problem of human suffering is light on traditional scriptural support, but for many people, it is recognizably accurate in a way that the other two approaches we investigated were not. People who mourn for the sin and suffering that

persist, who are aware that nothing will get better until people start acting differently to make it better, and who nevertheless feel God’s empowering love in their lives will find this approach consistent with their experience of the world. It tells the truth about Ms. Green’s and Ms. Brown’s experiences while offering them realistic hope about what God can do for them: when we decide to focus on helping each other, it teaches, God can help us keep at it even when we feel defeated.

Conclusion: The Well-Stocked Theological Toolbox

The breadth of responses to the problem of evil amply shows that no single approach is sufficient to minister to a community of people that includes Ms. Gray, Ms. Brown, and Ms. Green. Ms. Gray may find it most helpful to hear that her suffering has meaning and all will be well in the end. Ms. Brown may feel most empowered to resist her suffering if she has the support of her community in protesting its injustice. And Ms. Green may feel less broken if she is part of a community of people who respond to her tragedy with horror and treat her with humanizing compassion. Even if a community were only ministering to one individual, it may be that she will move through different stages as she copes with her suffering, so that at one time her needs will be like Ms. Green’s, at other times like Ms. Brown’s, and if she is lucky, at still other times like Ms. Gray’s. The leaders and members of a healthy religious community must stock their theological toolbox with, and become proficient at using, as many responses to human suffering as they can find, in hopes that they will be able to offer help to whoever might need it in whatever way is most effective for them. In the spirit of that goal, I briefly describe below two more types of responses to suffering that may bring peace to people enduring ongoing pain.

God Suffers With Us and Will Someday Redeem Us

The theology of the suffering god who redeems us is probably the most complex, but it may also be the most helpful for a faithful person dealing with ongoing pain. This theology can be thought of as a hybrid of Chapter I’s approach, which finds value in suffering, and Chapter III’s approach, which compromises God’s power but not His love. It treats God’s suffering as valuable—God suffers with afflicted people, and is thereby

able to redeem them but it also depicts God as wanting to relieve suffering but lacking the power to do it except by first sharing sufferers’ agonies. It is central to Christian theology, springing as it does from the suffering and redemptive power of Christ, and it also appears in Judaism in the form of the weeping Shekhina (God’s presence on earth) who accompanies the Jews into exile and, someday, back out.

According to this narrative, a sufferer can take comfort in knowing and relating to God, who loves her completely, suffers alongside her, and perfectly understands her experiences. It combats the threat of isolation by affirming that God has never left her to suffer alone, but has been with her the whole time experiencing her pain with her. Although God suffers, God is not broken or dehumanized by the experience in the way a person might be. God withstands it and comes through intact. Having come through it, God can extend a hand backward to help the sufferer come through it also. God brings her out of her suffering and makes her whole again. In this way, God offers both ideal companionship and the hope of ultimate redemption.

The concept of God suffering on our behalf tends to generate, in believers’ hearts, feelings of guilt and a sense of permanent debt Religious leaders can exploit those feelings to control their flock. Thus the question of who is responsible for God’s suffering becomes relevant to our inquiry. The answer is complex. In one sense, people are responsible for God’s suffering because God made all of creation perfect (as in Chapter I, but in contrast to Chapter III), so when people sin and cause suffering, they create grief for God to resolve. But in another sense, no one forced God to suffer with us; God could have addressed the problem of human redemption in some other way, or could have chosen not to create potentially-sinful humans at all. But God did choose to create

us, to give us freedom to choose our own actions, and to care for us as we live out our own personal falls from Eden and journeys back to God. In a sense, we and God share responsibility for God’s suffering, but the burden of guilt may appear to rest more upon our shoulders or more upon God’s, depending on the viewer’s perspective. This theology can be exploited to make believers feel indebted to God (and, by association, to their religious leaders) but that potential exploitation is not a problem endemic to the approach itself.

Another potential problem arises when we ask to what extent people ought to aim to do as God would. Striving to imitate the ideal is a fine general principle, but if God suffers with us, must we suffer with one another in order to be like God? The answer reveals another praiseworthy aspect of this approach: it distinguishes between what we endure for the sake of bringing relief to others and what we endure for the sake of being like God. In this approach, suffering is not good in itself. God only suffers in order to meet people in their suffering, with the ultimate goal of bringing them out of it. We may do as God does, meeting people in their suffering, but only to help them through. No extra credit is awarded to people who suffer without that other-directed goal. God comes to earth not to be in pain, but to be with us.

197

We Cannot Know Why We Suffer

While some people will not feel at ease unless they can assign a specific meaning to their misfortune, others are happier not dealing with details. For them, it is better to acknowledge the unjust suffering that plagues the world, and to nevertheless say that God

197 This se tio d a s hea il upo G ego Lo e s e ails to the autho , Ja ua -22, 2015. For more on this approach, see Jurgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993) and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1987).

is loving and fully in control. It may be that the contradiction implied does not trouble them until they start to think about it, so they prefer not to think about it. Or it may be that the contradiction does trouble them, but they require themselves to affirm God’s goodness and sovereignty in the face of unjust human suffering and without any explanation, as a form of spiritual discipline. They may find it rewarding to exercise the mental effort required. Alternatively, they may cherish the faith in God they have to develop when they intentionally bar themselves from trying to see an explanation, and instead practice trusting that God has everything under control even though they cannot see how. We saw an example of this from Calvin, who said, “sometimes the causes…are hidden.”

198

For those who can live in peace trusting that an explanation exists without having access to it, this approach is a practical one. Those who are enthusiastic about delving into theological reasoning might do well to remember that others in their religious community may crave their friendship, but do not share their enthusiasm and might be happier not being exposed to their theological views. We all must choose for ourselves how, and whether, we will come to terms with suffering. As long as they respond compassionately to the needs of others and labor to resist injustice and ameliorate the effects of suffering where possible, those who seek no explanation are still making an ethically valid choice.

Human Suffering is Meaningless

This final approach is the mirror image of the previous one it is both the same and opposite. It agrees with the assertion that it is beyond our capacity to see any explanation for our suffering, but it disagrees with the reason why an explanation is out

198 See p. 27, fn. 24 above.

of reach to us. It is not that we cannot see it, but rather that no explanation exists. The adherent of this view gives up on finding a relationship between our agony and God’s nature, and may even give up on God entirely, as I have done. The advantage of this approach is that it treats a person’s suffering as nothing more than what it actually is unwanted, ongoing, sometimes destructive pain and it introduces no other complicating questions like whether God loves us, whether we deserve God’s love, whether God is ruling justly, and whether we are responding to our suffering in the right way. Each of these questions may themselves add to a person’s pain. If our pain has no deeper meaning, we have no need to discover that meaning; we can focus on surviving the pain in whatever way is best for everyone.

But the extent to which this approach requires us to let go of our hopes can mean a prohibitive emotional cost to those committed to having a relationship with God. I do not feel as if I chose this view instead, my own experiences and my desire to be honest with myself required me to adopt it and I doubt I could have chosen it under other circumstances. To say that suffering is meaningless (and especially to go one step further and say our lives have no fixed or enduring meaning beyond what we assign to them) is incompatible with a view of the world that promises purpose, assurance of safety, complete love, and ultimate resolution. My unbelief in a world that makes those promises leaves me secure that I am not relying on false hopes, but I feel the absence of what I used to hope for, and I continue to feel the attraction of a meaning-laden world.

Still, I remain wary about the search for meaning. The quest for God in our lives sometimes motivates us to respond to people undergoing severe suffering by distancing ourselves from them or silencing their voices. We deny them precisely the willingness to

listen, the sympathetic outrage, or the compassionate solidarity that might reduce or help them cope with their pain. Surely God would not ask us to sacrifice others’ well-being in order to have a relationship with Him! Indeed, the practice of responding to the pain of our fellows by mourning or resisting with them can be fully consistent with the search for God and a meaningful life.

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