GOD IN THE FACE OF A CHAOTIC EVIL

Christ in the Garden, Heinrich Hofmann, 1890.

FAITH AFTER THE REALIZATION THAT GOD ISN’T OBLIGATED TO HELP OR PROTECT YOU BECAUSE YOU ARE OBEDIENT AND PIOUS

By Bp. Joseph (Ancient Church of the West)

The Psalms are filled with a contradictory message. On one hand, David insists that God rewards the righteous and judges the wicked. In the same breath, David also acknowledges that the good suffer and the evil are successful. I’m glad that he documents both of these contradictory perceptions, because, after serving God my whole life and being rewarded with evil, I would have a harder time believing in the Bible if it just insisted that the good are rewarded and the evil receive their just deserts.

The problem of evil is one of those entry-level philosophical contradictions that every smart 15-year-old struggles with in high school. It also comes up in every personal tragedy: random, chaotic, unjustifiable things happen to normal people all the time, and the brutality seems undeserved and spiteful. Religion is full of men and women claiming that their group or interpretation will lead to extra-special status in God’s eyes, bigger blessings, or more rewards and success. Because we live in a broken world in which pain is a constant reality, people hear these promises and have hope, which turns into more success, more connections, and a unifying narrative of blessing and happiness that is a self-fulfilling prophecy - working until it doesn’t - when something horrible happens and the “true believers” scatter, trying to preserve their illusions (“well, that person must have done something to deserve it”), and the devastated, bewildered, and confused victim finds themselves suddenly standing alone, holding the realization that all those empty promises were, in fact, empty.

People who suffer the loss of a child, spouse, family member, or close friend know what this feels like. I had an academic, pastoral appreciation for it before - when I knew that I had to “walk through the valley of death” with people, listen to them, and understand that I couldn’t understand their pain. When I lost my son, I started to realize how truly empty and unhelpful all of that truly was. No one understood, and there was nothing anyone could say. I also had a profound dawning that God had betrayed me - or at least appeared to have done so within a world ruptured by the Fall. He didn’t care for me as I had been taught. All my obedience, suffering, and hard decisions leading up to everything didn’t count for anything. I had no accumulated merit or status that would spare me. Under the intense, laser-like ray of death, I felt like an ant under a little boy’s magnifying glass. It was as if I could praise and worship the little boy for his greatness, but it didn’t make him less likely to fry me. No, such pious platitudes and humble obediences only lead to a more horrific understanding.

The problem of evil here is easy to see. If God is the Creator, giver, and sustainer of life, and He inserts Himself into human affairs to accomplish His will, then God is evil - as He appears from within a world fractured by the Fall. He must take responsibility for the six hundred thousand children who, by credible estimates, lax borders allowed to be illegally trafficked into the country, abused, killed, and then chemically reduced to a slurry. At any time, He could have interjected Himself and stopped the unimaginable pain and tragedy caused by these truly evil monsters. If God does not interject into this reality, but stands at a distance, allowing for human agency to be fully realized and prohibiting any kind of interference, you can lawyerly explain away God’s responsibility and any perceived evil, and the cost of human pain and suffering can be understood as the price of human freedom, so that we can love God freely and have a true relationship with Him. Both answers ring hollow, though, because they do not answer the problem of where the pain goes, to what point it is experienced, and if this brutality is necessary. And if humans are not saved by being the victims of pain, it is truly meaningless, since many are born, tortured, and die, only to be eternally tortured because they were not born into a sufficiently sheltered or privileged situation to learn the truth of the Gospel. This, then, makes God evil in lived experience again. So God must be distended from His creation - relationally and experientially, but somehow not ontologically. That is what the Fall must mean.

The Calvinists and the Muslims have come to terms with loving and worshipping a God whose is ultimately evil, rather than resisting it. Catholicism and Orthodoxy often culturally abstract pain to a point where it becomes a tool for holiness, focusing on a few monastics who willingly underwent torture in a meaningful process of self-emptying, kenosis, which rivets the people around them and proves the claims of their denomination based upon the high cost of their decisions. Investment bias is real and comes in many different forms. Seen from the outside, it is both confirmation bias and a bias of exclusive claims bought at the highest price, which lends huge amounts of authority to an organization. Seen from the inside, suffering is inevitably part of life anyway, so it is better to suffer and die for a cause than suffer and die pointlessly.

In all these scenarios, the problem is not solved but merely moves its focus from an ontological question to one of cultural context and interpretation. In this situation, we ask, “Was it worth the suffering and death?” The culture always answers, “If it made our cohesion, peace, love, and harmony a possibility, then yes!” The greater good is served, and the hero receives something in reward for his or her suffering that exceeds most - a form of immortality. Cultures remember those who suffer in a way that helps other people. This memory is a rarity for anyone else, but for those who die for a cause, helping others’ lives become a bit more bearable, this is the bare minimum. People see this bestowed immortality, this bequeathed beatification, and they know the value and shudder at the cost. Just as celibacy becomes a diffuser of jealousy amongst privileged clerical classes, people are glad that they do not have to undergo the sacrifice, and thus peace is maintained in a culture, and those who suffer beyond measure have hope that their memories will not be forgotten.

But all of this does not deal with the problem. Is God evil? Why does He insist that He is not in Christian revelation, and yet many Christians believe that He is anyway - the gory Latin Catholicism that knows God was out for blood; the fatalistic Russian Orthodoxy of Dostoyevsky that knows God predestines man to great suffering, not because the person will be saved in the end through it, but as a way of showing the cost of sin; and the aforesaid Calvinists who glory in importing an Islamic God into a Christian context, delighting in a God who creates some for honor and pleasure and others for pain and suffering, without nary a choice in sight.

In the end, faith is an unreasonable decision to grab on to something this world doesn’t prove or support. Do good. Receive evil. Die. Job’s refusal of false explanations stands as Scripture’s clearest witness that unresolved suffering is more faithful than dishonest theodicy. The Apostles and the Fathers heard this message, and they realized something that modern men do not: life is suffering, and nothing we can do will change it. If they embraced the Gospel, there was hope that this world would come to an end and something better would replace it. If they did not believe this, nothing they did would change the brutal reality anyway. “Faith is the evidence of things hoped for…” as the anonymous author of Hebrews says. Faith itself is somehow a supernatural thing that proves the goodness of God and that there are better things to come. By faith, we can believe that God is good, even though every logical formulation we conceive and every unjust pain we experience seems to tell us otherwise.

With this kind of attitude, you may wonder, how can you even be a Christian? This is a fair question. You definitely cannot be a Christian in the institutional, cultural sense of the word, because you realize Christianity does not unequivocally answer life’s fundamental questions and does not offer you any of the advantages that many claim that it does - peace, assurance, happiness, contentment with the world as it is, all go right out the window. Instead, you realize that most of Christianity is cultural and, in many ways, fake. It is the mistake of a tribe that cannot see beyond its own little island and believes that if they build airstrips, airplanes will miraculously come and give them free stuff. It is a cargo cult. On the other hand, Christianity as a hope in a recreated world in which things are set right - where suffering, death, disease, fear, and injustice no longer exist in their triumphant forms - can still exist. It just no longer has the twin guardians of fear and greed - punishment and blessing - that classically guard all popular versions of the faith. You will be ripped apart. Your closest loved ones will be taken from you. Your worst fears will be realized. And whether or not you are a good person, this is your ultimate end. All the blessings you think you are owed and the merit you think you have accrued are non-existent. Any good you receive is unmerited and unearned - completely grace. Any evil you experience is simply the way things are: unavoidable and expressive of how the world actually functions. Thinking that you can escape this is not faith but self-deception.

Based on this tragic realism, you can hope. Hope in having good things. Hope in dying before your children. Hope in trying your best and trying to do good. There is always trying. But expecting is foolish. People who teach you to expect are lying and manipulating. So are those who teach you to hope in miracles, as if God will especially protect you, help you, or bless you. God let His beloved Apostles die horrible deaths. God let the early Church be thrown to lions. The Apostolic Fathers did not believe in Him any less because they were ripped apart by wild beasts. They saw, rightly, that they lived in a world of suffering, death, and horrific injustice. They simply stopped being afraid, because they believed that there was hope in a world far away, where things would be better and they would be reconstituted by a loving, eternal, personal, all-powerful God. This is why our faith is, ultimately, not rational, not emotional, not philosophical, and not propositional or apologetic. All of these falter and fail, melting under the bright light of suffering.

We started with an observation of the contradictions in the Psalms. These are never resolved in the New Testament. Christ obeys, is crucified, and dies. The only hope of the Gospel centers on the Resurrection: transforming the whole world if such is true, and making Christianity worse than a waste of time if it is not. His disciples obey His Great Commission and all die horrible deaths, save St. John. The early Church did the same. Scripture and the history of Christianity do not resolve the tension, do not give a theodicy, or offer a revolutionary resolution aside from the Resurrection and the promise of a Coming Kingdom. 

Instead, all that remains in a small, weak voice…

“Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”

Job on an Ash Heap, William Blake, 1823-26