Suffering and Resurrection
A Sacred Chain Story
My previous post ended with a cliffhanger: did God create pain and suffering? That doesn’t seem like the sort of thing a good, loving, and all-powerful God would do. Yet from our natural history, it’s beyond all reasonable doubt that living things were living and dying (sometimes painfully) for many, many generations before humans appeared on the scene to really mess things up.
I suggested in the post (and develop a bit further in the book) that there may have been good reasons for this. We know from our individual lives that going through challenges can make us stronger. And the responses of our ancestors (even the non-human ones) to challenges they encountered in the natural world helped to develop in them, and eventually in us, the capacities for greater cooperation, altruism, and even love. It’s almost like you can see the image of God developing over millions of years.
OK, there is a fair bit of speculating we have do to tell this story. But it is certainly consistent with what we know from science, and I think it makes more sense of the theological issue of why there is pain in the world than the other options. And yet we still can’t help but wonder: how do we reconcile that pain and suffering with a good creation?
To start answering that question, I like to ask why God didn’t just create everything in a perfect heaven to begin with? I think you have to say either God couldn’t do that directly, or there was some overwhelming reason why it was better for us to go through this order of things first. I’m not sure we’ll ever know for sure. Regardless, I think there are some things we can say about the situation — at least I’m going to say some things! (Though remember that we shouldn’t expect to solve the problem of pain and suffering once and for all).
How could God say the created world was good, even very good — if it included pain, suffering, and death? First, remember that God didn’t create things initially the way they were ultimately intended to be. In this sense too we might understand how the initial creation could be pronounced “good” even though it wasn’t yet the good it was supposed to become. Think of this like a baby who is pronounced by the doctor at her six-month checkup to be healthy and in very good shape. But she doesn’t have any teeth yet, she can’t walk, and she can’t talk; if she is still in that condition at her six-year checkup, the doctor will probably give a very different assessment of her condition.
When we look at the world today and see all the pain and suffering, our assessment of it as “not good” is because we know that it should be something different by now. Its initial condition was good for that stage of its development—it produced an astounding lavishness of life as well as the capacities in us for moral maturity. But it wasn’t intended to stay that way.
According to Christian theology, the cross of Christ and his resurrection inaugurated a new era, and it is from this vantage point that we can recognize all creation as groaning, the way it is described by Paul in Romans 8.
The second thing I’ll say about God creating a world that had pain and suffering in it comes from the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil. For those of you who followed my travels on sabbatical a year ago (hmm… now a year and half ago I see), one of the entries was about taking a pilgrimage to see her gravesite south of London.
Central to her understanding of pain and suffering is Weil’s claim that the act of creation—of giving existence to something else—must be understood as God withdrawing the divine being from that creation. That might sound strange or even heretical, but she doesn’t mean it in the sense that God abandons creation. It’s more like the idea of kenosis found in the New Testament book of Philippians: God “emptied himself ” (that’s how most English versions translate the kenosis passage) to become human in the person of Jesus Christ (Phil. 2:7). But according to Christian theology, Christ was still God—just now with certain limitations that go with being human. How much more emptying must it take to give existence to something that is not God?
God is supreme goodness, and created things are not God (to say otherwise would be heretical!). So according to Weil, giving created things their own existence has to make them something other than the absolute goodness of God. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, to find suffering and pain in the created order.
There is much more to say about all of this, but again I’m not sure that even after saying all the things that could be said we’ll completely understand. That was the lesson Job learned. But it seems fitting to end this preview of my book on the eve of Easter. The Christian story is nothing if not cruciform: suffering and love are intimately bound together on the cross of Christ. And I don’t think it’s reading too much into the story to think that is the pattern for the entire universe. God has chosen to bring good out of suffering.
Weil wrote in one of her notebooks, “The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.” I’m grateful that suffering is not the final word (that comes tomorrow), but that it has been used for centuries and millennia to make us what we were intended to be.
Happy Easter.