The Victory of Christianity
When Heaven is going to give a great responsibility to someone, it first makes his mind endure suffering. It makes his sinews and bones experience toil, and his body to suffer hunger. It inflicts him with poverty and knocks down everything he tries to build. In this way Heaven stimulates his mind, stabilizes his temper, and develops his weak points.
—The Book of Mencius (Chinese, 300 BC)
We have seen how different societies equip their members to face suffering. Having looked at how different cultures have done this, we will now examine how this has played out in different centuries, particularly in the West.52
Philosophy to “Save One’s Skin”
The classical author Cicero famously argued that the main task of philosophy is to teach us how to face death. The fact of mortality and death, says Cicero, necessarily creates fears, unfulfilled desires, and sadness. It is the purpose of philosophy to give people relief from these things, to provide some way to care for the soul that is weighed down by them. And so “philosophy both allows and requires one to become one’s own spiritual physician.”53 Contemporary French philosopher Luc Ferry does not think Cicero’s definition of philosophy can be bettered. “One does not philosophize to amuse oneself, nor even to better understand the world . . . but sometimes literally to ‘save one’s skin.’”54 Living life well depends on learning to conquer our fears of “the various faces of death” as well as of “boredom, the sense of time slipping by.” Perhaps the most terrible truth we must face is that we will inevitably be separated from all those we love. Ferry asks, What do we desire above everything else? It is to be understood and loved rather than be alone, and therefore above all “not to die and not to have [our loved ones] die on us.”55
Ferry knows that many secular people today (as did Epicurus and other thinkers of ancient times) argue that death should not be given a second thought. It is merely the “end of life,” they say. When you die, you simply don’t exist—you don’t know anything, you are not around to worry about it—“Why [then] . . . would you bother yourself with such a pointless problem?” But Ferry replies that this line of reasoning is “too brutal to be honest.”56 What is it that primarily gives your life meaning? Isn’t it relationships with people you love? Can you really honestly say that you have no dread of a future state that will strip you of everything you hold dear now? Do your loved ones mean so little to you that you don’t care about being separated from them forever? But this loss of what gives life meaning begins even before we die ourselves. “The irreversibility of things is a kind of death at the heart of life.”57 It is this that we rightly call evil and suffering. And Ferry concludes that honest people must admit that death and all its consequences is an enormous human problem—perhaps the problem. To live well and freely, capable of joy and love, we must learn how to conquer the inevitable terrible fear of these irreversible losses.58
The ancient Greek philosophers believed that the very purpose of philosophy was to discover how to face evil, suffering, and death well. In fact, Ferry argues that only philosophy or religion can possibly help us deal with pain and death. Why? Suffering takes away the loves, joys, and comforts that we rely on to give life meaning. How can we maintain our poise, or even our peace and joy, when that happens? The answer is that we can do that only if we locate our meaning in things that can’t be touched by death. But that means locating the answers to the questions “What is human life for?” and “What should I be spending my time doing here?” in things that suffering cannot destroy. That can be done only by philosophy or religion. “It is an error,” he concludes, “to believe that modern psychology, for example, can substitute for this [process].”59 Ferry (who is not a religious man) knows he is bucking the secular worldview at this point, but he insists that science cannot help us with suffering, because it cannot help us find purpose. Science can tell us what is but never what ought to be—that entails philosophy and faith. Yet without determining these issues, we cannot handle the hardness of life.
And so each stage in history has offered sufferers its own “consolation” literature to train and aid them in their trials and losses. We will look at three eras of Western history—the ancient, the medieval, and the modern—and how each one sought to do this.
Salvation through Reason
Perhaps the most influential school of Greek philosophy was that of the Stoics.60 The Stoics believed that the universe has a divine rational structure to it called the Logos. They did not believe the universe is made up strictly of physical matter, but neither did they believe the universe had a God in the sense of a personal God who created and transcended it. Rather, the universe was divine, beautiful, well structured, and had an orderliness to it that was rational and capable of being perceived by our reason. They believed, therefore, that there were moral “absolutes”—right ways of behavior that were in accord with the order of the universe—as well as wrong ways of living that went against its grain. These could be deduced and inferred from what we could see of the world. Despite apparently chaotic times and disorderly places, the universe was at essence harmonious, with all things taking their rightful place and fulfilling their rightful role or task.
To the Stoics, then, the task of our human minds and reason was to perceive and align with the orderliness of the world. And this meant facing death and suffering in three ways. The first way meant “accepting the unexpected twists and turns of fate as the providential and beneficent workings of God.”61 If the universe itself is divine, rational, and perfectly ordered, then living “in accord with the universe” meant to fully embrace whatever the world sent you. For the Stoics, “the good life is a life stripped of both hopes and fears. In other words, a life reconciled to what is the case, a life that accepts the world as it is.”62
The second way was to give reason preeminence over emotion, and to learn to avoid too much attachment to anything in life, for that is where the overwhelming pain of suffering comes from. One scholar summarizes this principle well. It meant, “through the exercise of reason, becoming indifferent to all things that exceeded one’s reach. . . . The soul had to expel or suppress strong emotions.”63 For example, in the Discourses of Epictetus, the philosopher tells his students:
The principal and highest form of training, and one that stands at the very entrance to happiness, is, that when you become attached to something, let it not be as something which cannot be taken away. . . . When you kiss your child, or your brother, or your friend, never give way entirely to your affections, nor free rein to your imagination; but curb it, restrain it.64
Epictetus went on to tell his students to “remind yourself likewise that what you love is mortal, that what you love is not your own. . . . What harm is there while you are kissing your child to murmur softly, ‘Tomorrow you will die’?”65
Luc Ferry agrees this sounds enormously cold, but he defends Epictetus. He argues that the philosopher is not saying to be cruel to your children but “to love the present to the point of desiring nothing else and of regretting nothing whatsoever.”66 If you do that, then you can say to yourself, “When catastrophe strikes, I will be ready.” In fact, Ferry says, if you could achieve the Stoic goal, then you touch on something resembling salvation, in the sense that nothing further can trouble a serenity which comes from the extinguishing of fears concerning the dimensions of time. When he achieves this degree of enlightenment, the sage does indeed live “like a god,” in the eternity of an instant that nothing can diminish.67
The third thing Stoics offered to sufferers had to do with their own death. When we die, they taught, we don’t cease to exist. Death is a transformation from one state into another. The universe had need of you, as it were, in your form as a human person. But when you die, your substance—both soul and body—continues to be part of the universe in another form. Marcus Aurelius said, “You came into this world as a part: you will vanish into the whole which gave you birth, or rather you will be gathered up into its generative principle by the process of change.”68
Submitting to Fate, Detaching from the World
The two most influential writers on suffering in classical antiquity were the Roman thinkers Cicero and Seneca, both of whom were strongly influenced by the Greek Stoics. The central theme of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations is that death is not an evil and should not be regarded with fear and loathing. Your life is a loan from nature that can be recalled at any time. It is wisdom to recognize and agree to the terms of the loan, for there is no other choice after all. Cicero believed sorrow over the death of loved ones was unavoidable and right, provided it is kept moderate. Having granted this, Cicero maintained that grief is still a useless thing, with no positive function. It arises from false beliefs about the nature of things and therefore must be controlled.69 The other most influential Roman work of consolation was Seneca’s To Marcia on Consolation. Marcia was a woman who had lost a son and was still grieving three years later. Using arguments similar to Cicero’s, Seneca calls her to overcome her grief and “move on.” Nature gives us no promise that we are allowed to keep our loved ones forever or even for long. Though he died young, he avoided many evils in life—indeed, this may have been a way for him to escape some suffering that would have been far worse. All this points to one key to living life well—Marcia should submit to fate, and not protest or struggle against it.
Even as the Greek and Roman philosophers were formulating their understanding of fate and suffering, a somewhat similar view was already thriving in another part of the world. For centuries, Eastern cultures and religions held that this material world, and the perception that human beings exist as separate entities within it, is all an illusion. The Vedas, the oldest Scriptures of Hinduism and Indian thought, taught that all differences are ultimately unreal. The ultimate truth is Tat tvam asi—“Thou art That.” In other words, the physical world appears to contain many discrete individual objects. This object A is not that object B. That’s what our senses (and science and logic) tell us. While one person suffers losses, another person has plenty. But this is a deceptive appearance called maya. There is not only no evil but no good, no individuals, no material world. Everything is actually part of the One, the All-Soul, the Absolute Spirit. Nothing is outside of it.70 Ultimately we cannot lose anything. We are part of everything.
The most pure and influential form of this thought today is Buddhism.71 According to tradition, Prince Siddhartha Gautama was living a secure and secluded life of wealth and luxury, but when he went outside his palace, he was confronted with the “Four Distressing Sights”—a sick man, an old man, a dead man, and a poor man. In response, he determined to give his life to discovering how to live a life of serenity in the presence of human suffering. After a number of years, he achieved enlightenment under a tree. In his first sermon, he outlined for his followers the Four Noble Truths, namely that (1) all life is suffering, (2) the cause of suffering is desire or craving, (3) suffering ends only when craving is extinguished, and (4) this can be achieved by following the Eightfold Path to enlightenment. The Eightfold path is a comprehensive approach to all areas of life—right views, intentions, speech, conduct, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and meditation. It is an extremely balanced life, not demanding asceticism and deprivation but demanding a life of simplicity, service to others, and many disciplines of self-control.
The way to overcome suffering is to detach your heart, to not love anything in this world too much. The core problem of a sufferer, it is believed, is an unsatisfactory state of consciousness. Our craving and therefore our pain in suffering is based on the illusion that we are individual selves or persons. Put in simple language, if we see that everything is impermanent, we won’t be attached to it. If we see that everything is really part of us, we will not cling to it or mourn it as if it has been lost. You can’t in the end really lose anything, because each thing is part of the Absolute, the One that we all will return to eventually.
By now it may be evident that there are strong similarities between this and the approaches of the Greeks and particularly of the Stoics.72 The Stoics taught that the underlying reality of the world is an impersonal, universal Logos that is the heart of the cosmos and determines all things. And so the most practical way to live life well is, as we saw, to “never give in to your affections” but to restrain your love or joy in anything. French philosopher André Comte-Sponville points out the close connection between Stoicism and Buddhism. Both deny that it is a good thing to “live in hope.” On the contrary, they both say hope is a killer. If we live hoping that our plans will succeed, and if we tell ourselves our happiness depends on their fulfillment, we will be suffering anxiety during the interim and then devastation when the goals are not accomplished. And it will be our fault.73 As the Greek essayist Plutarch once wrote, we must submit “uncomplainingly and obediently to the dispensation of things.”74
A Greater Hope
When Christianity began to grow, its writers quickly began to bring many new ideas into the world of human thought, differing markedly not only from Western pagan beliefs, but also Eastern thought, especially on the topic of pain and grief.75 It is almost impossible to overestimate the importance of the Christian approach to suffering for its success in the Roman Empire and for its impact on human thinking.
Early Christian speakers and writers not only argued vigorously that Christianity’s teaching made more sense of suffering, they insisted that the actual lives of Christians proved it. Cyprian recounted how, during the terrible plagues, Christians did not abandon sick loved ones nor flee the cities, as most of the pagan residents did. Instead they stayed to tend the sick and faced their death with calmness.76 Other early Christian writings, like Ignatius of Antioch’s To the Romans and Polycarp’s Letter to the Philippians, pointed to the poise with which Christians faced torture and death for their faith. “Christians used suffering to argue for the superiority of their creed . . . [because] they suffered better than pagans.”77 The Greeks had taught that the very purpose of philosophy was to help us face suffering and death. On this basis, writers such as Cyprian, Ambrose, and later Augustine made the case that Christians suffered and died better—and this was empirical, visible evidence that Christianity was “the supreme philosophy.” The differences between the pagan and Christian population in this regard were significant enough to give real credibility to Christian claims. Unlike the current moment, in which the existence of suffering and evil makes Christian faith vulnerable to criticism and doubt, early Christians pointed to the pain and adversity of life as one of the main reasons for embracing the faith.
Why were Christians so different? It was not because of some distinction in their natural temperament—they were not simply tougher people. It had to do with what they believed about the world. Classics scholar Judith Perkins argues that the Greek philosophical tradition’s account of suffering was neither practical nor satisfying for the average person. The Christian approach to pain and evil, with both greater room for sorrow and greater basis for hope, was a major factor in its appeal.78
First, Christianity offered a greater basis for hope. Luc Ferry, in his chapter “The Victory of Christianity,”79 agrees that the Christian approach to suffering was a major reason that Christianity so thoroughly defeated Greek philosophy and became the dominant worldview in the Roman Empire. To Ferry, one of the main differences had to do with Christian teaching about the love and meaning of persons. The most obvious difference was the Christian doctrine of the future bodily resurrection and restored material world. The Stoic philosophers had taught that, after death, we continue as part of the universe, yet not in an individual form. As Ferry summarizes, “The Stoic doctrine of salvation is resolutely anonymous and impersonal. It promises us eternity, certainly, but of a non-personal kind, as an oblivious fragment of the cosmos.”80 But Christians believed in the resurrection—through its confirmation by hundreds of eyewitnesses of the risen Christ. That is our future, and that meant we are saved as our individual selves—our personalities will be sustained, beautified, and perfected after death. And so our ultimate future is one of perfect, unhindered love—love with God and others. Ambrose wrote:
Let there be this difference between the servants of Christ and the worshippers of idols, that the latter weep for their friends, whom they suppose to have perished forever. . . . But from us, for whom death is the end not of our nature but of this life only, since our nature itself is restored to a better state, let the advent of death wipe away all tears.81
The Greek philosophers and especially the Stoics had tried “valiantly to relieve us of the fears linked to death, but at the cost of obliterating our individual identity.”82 But Christianity offered something radically more satisfying. Ferry says that what human beings want “above all is to be reunited with our loved ones, and, if possible, with their voices, their faces—not in the form of undifferentiated fragments, such as pebbles or vegetables.”83
There is no more striking statement of this difference between Christianity and ancient paganism than that found in the first chapter of the New Testament gospel of John. There, John brilliantly co-opts one of Greek philosophy’s main themes when he begins his account saying that “in the beginning [of time] was the Logos” (John 1:1). But then he goes on to say, “The Logos became flesh, and made his dwelling among us, and we have seen his glory” (John 1:14). This was an electrifying claim. John was saying, “We agree that there is an ordering structure behind the universe, and that the meaning of life is to be found in aligning oneself with it.” But John was also saying that the Logos behind the universe was not an abstract, rational principle that could be known only through high contemplation by the educated elite. Rather, the Logos of the universe is a person—Jesus Christ—who can be loved and known in a personal relationship by anyone at all. Ferry summarizes John’s message to the culture like this: “The divine . . . was no longer an impersonal structure, but an extraordinary individual.”84 This, Ferry said, was an “unfathomable shift” which had an “incalculable effect on the history of ideas.”
The other major difference between the Greek philosophers and Christianity was seen in how Christian consolation gave far more scope to expressions of sorrow and grief. Tears and cries are not to be stifled or even kept under strict limits—they are natural and good. Cyprian cites St. Paul, saying that Christians are to really grieve—but to do so bathed in hope (1 Thess 4:13).85 Christians did not see grief as a useless thing to be suppressed at all costs. Ambrose did not apologize for his tears and grief over the death of his brother. Pointing to Jesus’ tears at the tomb of Lazarus, he wrote: “We have not incurred any grievous sin by our tears. Not all weeping proceeds from unbelief or weakness. . . . The Lord also wept. He wept for one not related to Him, I for my brother. He wept for all in weeping for one, I will weep for the all, in my brother.”86
For Christians, suffering was not to be dealt with primarily through the control and suppression of negative emotions with the use of reason or willpower. Ultimate reality was known not primarily through reason and contemplation but through relationship. Salvation was through humility, faith, and love rather than reason and control of emotions. And therefore, Christians don’t face adversity by stoically decreasing our love for the people and things of this world so much as by increasing our love and joy in God. Ferry says, “Augustine, having conducted a radical critique of love-as-attachment in general, does not banish it when its object is divine.”87 What he means is that, while Christianity was able to agree with pagan writers that inordinate attachment to earthly goods can lead to unnecessary pain and grief, it also taught that the answer to this was not to love things less but to love God more than anything else. Only when our greatest love is God, a love that we cannot lose even in death, can we face all things with peace. Grief was not to be eliminated but seasoned and buoyed up with love and hope.
Besides using love and hope to season our sorrow, Christians were also called to use the comfort of knowing God’s fatherly care. Ancient consolers had counseled sufferers to accept the inevitability of heartless fate. Fate was random, they said, a turning wheel of chance, without rationale or purpose. Therefore we should reconcile ourselves to it and not engage in self-pity or complaint.88 Christianity rejected this view strongly. Instead of multiple gods and power centers struggling against each other, and impersonal fate ruling over it all, Christianity presented Greco-Roman culture with an entirely new view. Historian Ronald Rittgers writes that Christians asserted a single Creator who sustained the world in personal wisdom and love, “in direct opposition to pagan polytheism and pagan notions of fate.”89 He summarizes it like this: “This God had created humankind for fellowship with himself” and imposed death and suffering only when the human race broke away from this fellowship to be their own masters—“mortality and hardship were not simply part of the original nature of things.” After the Fall of the human race and the coming of pain and evil, God began a process of salvation to restore human fellowship through Christ. During this time, “trials, tribulations, and adversities” were used by God “for the proving of human souls,” and along with them, he provided “hope of deliverance from them. . . . It was he who removed the sting of death.”90 In short, while God’s ways are often just as opaque to us as a parent’s are to an infant, still we trust that our heavenly Father is caring for us and present with us to guide and protect in all the circumstances of life.
The Victory of Christianity
Slowly but surely, Christian views supplanted the older pagan ones and became the dominant cultural ideas. One of the most important shifts had to do, again, with the doctrine of the resurrection. Christians taught that Jesus came in a physical body and will redeem and resurrect our physical bodies. In contrast to Greek teaching, this implied that this material life is good and worth enjoying fully. We are not to loathe or detach ourselves from the pleasures and comforts of ordinary life and relationships. “Though atheists would have us believe otherwise, the Christian religion is not entirely given over to waging war against the body, the flesh, the senses,” writes Ferry.91
But the resurrection means even more than this. Ferry poignantly describes the sense of irretrievable loss that characterizes our existence, with reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven.” The sinister bird can repeat only the word nevermore. With frightening pithiness, this conveys the irreversibility of life. Once our youth, our childhood home, our loved ones are gone, there is no going back. Irreversibility is a kind of death in the midst of life. But here is where the doctrine of the resurrection of the body comes in. Even religions that teach heavenly bliss for the eternal soul can offer only a consolation for the life we lost, but Christianity offers a restoration of life. We get our bodies back—indeed, we get the bodies we never had but wished we had, and one beyond our greatest imaginings. We get our lives back—indeed, we get the life we longed for but never had. It’s all because the Christian hope is not just an ethereal disembodied existence but one in which the soul and the body are finally perfectly integrated, one in which we dance, sing, hug, work, and play. The Christian doctrine of the resurrection is, then, a reversal of death’s seeming irreversibility. It is the end of “nevermore.”
Ferry comes to a remarkable conclusion, but one that is historically hard to refute:
Exploiting what it saw as a weakness in Greek wisdom, Christianity created a new doctrine of salvation so effective it opened a chasm in the philosophies of Antiquity and dominated the [Western] world for nearly fifteen hundred years. . . . [Christianity] would seem to be the only version of salvation that enables us to not only transcend the fear of death, but also to beat death itself.92
Having established these basic foundations for a groundbreaking new way to face suffering, Christian preachers and writers began to search the Bible and develop more detailed and practical resources for the consolation of sufferers. The result was an increasingly nuanced and sophisticated body of work on the consolation and “cure” of suffering souls. One of the most striking innovations was how Christian consolers began to recognize the great diversity of forms of suffering in a way that earlier thinkers did not.
St. (or Pope) Gregory the Great (c. 540–604) was perhaps the most influential author on the cure of souls at the end of the early history of Christianity. His most important works were his Book of Pastoral Rule and Moralia, a series of addresses on the book of Job.93 On the one hand, Gregory rejected the idea that suffering was an illusion or the result of capricious fate—suffering always had a purpose. Rather than being helpless victims of inexorable fate, people were in the hands of a wise God, and, as Gregory argued strenuously, we should not rail against cruel, blind fate but bear our suffering patiently, like Job.
And yet he also rejected the opposite error, that of moralism—as in the Hindu idea of karma, the belief that the proportion of our suffering is due to the proportion of our sins. Gregory taught that while suffering in general is caused by human sin, that does not mean particular forms of suffering are always the result of specific sins. He warned against making too direct a connection between sin and suffering, since that, after all, is one of the main lessons of the book of Job. In Moralia, Gregory shows that Job’s friends insisted that his great suffering had to be punishment for some equally great wickedness. But they failed to see that suffering in the world is of many different kinds and serves “a number of purposes in the divine economy.”94 Some suffering is given in order to chastise and correct a person for wrongful patterns of life (as in the case of Jonah imperiled by the storm), some suffering is given “not to correct past wrongs but to prevent future ones” (as in the case of Joseph sold into slavery), and some suffering has no purpose other than to lead a person to love God more ardently for himself alone and so discover the ultimate peace and freedom. The suffering of Job, in Gregory’s view, belonged to this last category.95
A personal God is a purposeful God, and in the Bible, it is possible to recognize different ways that suffering operates in lives. Early Christian pastors did not believe there was a “one size fits all” way to comfort or equip a person to handle adversity.
Luther’s Reformation of Suffering
After the time of Pope Gregory, a gradual but significant shift occurred within the church toward the belief that “the appropriate response to [suffering] was to endure it patiently and thus, with the help of divine grace, to merit heaven. . . .”96 In other words, suffering became a way to work off your sins, with echoes of the Eastern karmic religions. If you accept suffering with patience, it eliminates some of your sin debt and helps you earn God’s favor and admission into eternal bliss.
As an example of this, late medieval theologian Johannes von Paltz wrote Supplement to the Heavenly Mine in 1504. There he argued that patience under suffering was so morally valuable that even if you had lived your entire life in unrelenting sinfulness, you could merit complete remission for it all if you only accepted your death with calm faith at the very end. Ronald Rittgers points out that this emphasis on meriting salvation through suffering actually pointed away from early Christian teaching back into a more pagan prohibition of any expressions of sorrow. It resulted, in Rittgers’s words, in a virtual “Christianized Stoicism.”97 Demonstrations of grief or cries of pain could be interpreted by heaven as a lack of submissive faith, and therefore such outbursts would be less efficacious in procuring a remit from the debt of one’s moral failures. Therefore all that mattered was that you suppressed emotion and took your suffering calmly and without questioning. The eruptions of Job or the laments of the Psalms had no place in this understanding of things. The rich, multidimensional teaching of the Bible on how to understand and walk through pain and suffering was flattened out into a tight-lipped endurance.
But the coming of the European Reformation, and particularly Martin Luther’s biblical theology, brought not only a renewal of the Church in general but also a deepening of the Christian understanding of suffering in particular. Luther rejected the medieval view of salvation as a gradual process of growth in virtue that eventually merited eternal life. Instead, he saw salvation as coming through faith, and faith not primarily as an inner quality of purity but as “an essentially receptive capacity.” Faith is trust in the promise of God, the means by which we take hold of salvation as a free gift through Christ’s saving work, not our own. This had “revolutionary implications” for the Christian view of suffering.98
Luther preached that there was nothing more important for a person than to see that he or she could contribute nothing whatsoever to one’s own salvation. We can be fully accepted and counted legally righteous in God’s sight through faith in Christ, solely by free grace. To understand and grasp this is to finally know freedom from the crushing burden of proving yourself—to society, family, other people, or even to yourself. It means freedom from fear of the future, from any anxiety about your eternal destiny. It is the most liberating idea possible and it ultimately enables you to face all suffering, knowing that because of the cross, God is absolutely for you and that because of the resurrection, everything will be all right in the end.
The belief that we are saved by our virtue, the state of our hearts, or our good works injects a heavy layer of uncertainty and insecurity into our lives. If God’s treatment of us is conditioned by the quality of our lives, and the quality of our lives is always far from perfect, then we can never be sure he is completely for us, loving us. To escape this uncertainty requires that you dispel any illusion that through your wisdom and strength you can either create a safe and good life for yourself or put God in the position of owing you such a life.
In Luther’s view, suffering plays a dual role. Before we get the joy and love that help us to face and overcome suffering, suffering must first empty us of our pride and lead us to find our true joy and only security in Christ. Luther declares, “For since God takes away all our goods and our life through many tribulations, it is impossible for the heart to be calm and to bear this unless it clings to better goods, that is, united with God through faith.”99 Suffering dispels the illusion that we have the strength and competence to rule our own lives and save ourselves. People “become nothing through suffering” so that they can be filled with God and his grace.100 “It is God’s nature,” wrote Luther, “to make something out of nothing; hence one who is not yet nothing, out of him God cannot make anything,” and
therefore God accepts only the forsaken, cures only the sick, gives sight only to the blind, restores life only to the dead, sanctifies only the sinners, gives wisdom only to the unwise. In short, He has mercy only on those who are wretched.101
The Theology of the Cross
But suffering was much more than some preparatory spiritual process for Luther. It was he who coined the phrase “the theology of the cross” in contrast with a “theology of glory.” The world expects a God who is strong and whose followers are blessed and successful only if they summon up all their strength and follow his laws without fail. That was the view of Job’s friends, of the Pharisees in Jesus’ day, and, according to Luther, the mind-set of most of the leaders of the medieval church in his day. It was a “theology of glory,” but it was not the theology of the Bible. The Scripture’s startling message is rather that the deepest revelation of the character of God is in the weakness, suffering, and death of the cross. This is “the exact opposite of where humanity expected to find God.”102 In his Explanations of the Ninety-Five Theses, Luther includes the following:
That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things that have been made.
He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.103
Theologians of “glory,” says Luther, think that God’s ways are “clearly perceptible.” Thus Job’s friends were sure that if things are going well for you, you are living rightly and God is pleased with you, but if things are going badly for you, you are living wrongly and God has abandoned you. They thought it was easy to discern God’s purposes and plans. But Job’s sufferings were actually quite mysterious, and God’s purposes were hidden from Job and most of them even from the book’s readers. And yet out of Job’s agony and suffering came one of the most profound revelations of God’s nature in the Bible and indeed in all of literature—as well as a transformed character for Job.
In the same way, the religious leaders of Jesus’ day expected a nice, easy-to-understand Messiah who would defeat the Roman power and lead Israel to political independence. A weak, suffering, and crucified Messiah made no sense to them. Those looking at Jesus as he was dying on the cross had no idea that they were looking at the greatest act of salvation in history. Could the observers of the crucifixion “clearly perceive” the ways of God? No—even though they were looking right at a wonder of grace. They saw only darkness and pain, and the categories of human reason are sure God cannot be working in and through that. So they called Jesus to “come down now from the cross,” sneering, “He saved others . . . but he can’t save himself.” (Matt 27:42 NIV). But they did not realize he could save others only because he did not save himself.
Only through weakness and pain did God save us and show us, in the deepest way possible, the infinite depths of his grace and love for us. For indeed, here was infinite wisdom—in one stroke, the just requirement of the law was fulfilled and the forgiveness of lawbreakers secured. In one moment, God’s love and justice were fully satisfied. This Messiah came to die in order to put an end to death itself. Only through weakness and suffering could sin be atoned—it was the only way to end evil without ending us.
Luther regarded Jesus’ cry from the cross, “My God, my God—why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46) as “the greatest words in all of Scripture.”104 Luther knew personally about what he called Anfectungen, a word that means the “assaults” that the world, the flesh, and the devil make on human beings through the evils and suffering of life. For Luther “Anfectung is . . . a state of hopelessness and helplessness having strong affinities with the concept of Angst [or dread].”105 But in these words of dereliction from the cross, Luther saw a deep paradox. Christ suffered Godforsakenness in his human nature; he knew Anfectungen in infinite degrees, beyond anything any other human being will ever experience. Here, then, is what the New Testament letter to the Hebrews means when it exhorts us to approach Jesus for mercy and grace “in our time of need” because he is able “to sympathize with our weaknesses . . . having been in every respect tested as we are, yet without sin” (Heb 4:14–15 NRSV). Indeed, Luther saw that “in Christ, the God-forsaken sinner has a Savior who has taken on himself the full depths of human estrangement from God—and overcome it.”106
Why should we be surprised, then, asked Luther, that our lives are often filled with darkness and pain? Even God himself in Christ did not avoid that. But though God’s purposes are often every bit as hidden and obscure as they were to Job and to the observers at the foot of the cross, we—who have the teaching of the Bible and have grasped the message of the Bible—know that the way up is down. The way to power, freedom, and joy is through suffering, loss, and sorrow.
Not that these bad things produce these good things automatically, or in some neat quid quo pro way. Suffering produces growth in us only when we understand Christ’s suffering and work on our behalf. Luther taught, “Christians cannot suffer with Christ”—that is, they cannot imitate his patience and love under pressure—“before they have embraced the full benefits of Christ’s suffering for them” in their place.107 Luther had known in his own experience how much suffering tears us apart if we are uncertain of God’s love for us. The medieval teaching that we can earn God’s favor by the quality of our patience under suffering simply did not work. That could never give peace to the conscience, because we could never know whether we were suffering with a sufficient degree of submission and purity of heart.
And Luther rightly believed that this peace of conscience was perhaps the single most important prerequisite if suffering is to be faced well. We must not try to use patience to earn our peace with Christ—we need the peace with Christ already if we are going to be patient. We must rest in the sufficiency of Christ’s sufferings for us before we can even begin to suffer like him. If we know he loves us unconditionally, despite our flaws, then we know he is present with us and working in our lives in times of pain and sorrow. And we can know that he is not merely close to us, but he is indwelling, and that since we are members of his body, he senses our sufferings as his own (cf. Acts 9:4; Col 1:24.)
The Rise of the “Immanent Frame”
In the early modern era, Christianity was ascendant in Europe and in the New World colonies as well. But over the next five hundred years, things changed. As philosopher Charles Taylor asked, “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?”108 Over the past five centuries, the originally faith-filled and religious societies of the West have slowly become more secular. Religion and faith have decreasing influence in public institutions. Belief in God is allowed but regularly challenged as problematic and seen as just one option for life among many others.
Taylor coins a number of unique terms to describe contemporary secularity. He says that today we live inside an “immanent frame,” the view that the world is a completely natural order without any supernatural. It is a completely “‘immanent’ world, over against a possible ‘transcendent’ one.”109 Another phrase he uses is the “buffered self.” In older times, the concept of the self was “open and porous.” It included a soul, for example, which connected us to God and the spiritual world, and therefore much of our inner nature, feelings, intuitions, and attitudes were under the influence of forces outside of us, forces that we could not control. It was often assumed that one was required to look outside of the self—to nature and to God—to learn the right way to live. Modern people, however, have a “buffered self,” a self that is bounded and self-contained. Because there is no transcendent, supernatural order outside of me, it is I who determine what I am and who I will be.110 I do not need to look at anything outside myself in order to know how to live. Today the self is “master of the meanings of things for it”; indeed, now “we stake our claim as legislators of meaning.”111
The shift to this new sense of self, Taylor argued, required an enormous new growth in “confidence in our own powers of moral ordering.”112 In older times, there was a much greater humility about our ability to understand the universe. The reason was that it was a bigger universe. There was infinite mystery to it—depths that human reason could never plumb or know. There were “more things in heaven and earth” than could be “dreamt of” in our human philosophies. It was not a universe framed solely by immanence; it was shot through with the spiritual as well. But the immanent frame developed and grew alongside the buffered, self-sufficient self. While Taylor speaks in academic language, more popular and vivid expressions prove his points every day. Recently, a New York Times article observed a trend in people—particularly women—naming themselves. One woman who renamed herself after a divorce explained: “Naming myself was symbolic in many ways. It signified to me how I had to take full responsibility for my life. I had to create my own happiness, to build my strength, to be the engine of my momentum.”113
The shift to the immanent frame did not immediately remove all belief in God, but it altered it. The frame, as it were, was not solid on all four sides but had a small opening at the top. Taylor explains how Deism came in among the elites of the eighteenth century. The idea of Deism is that God created the world for our benefit and now it operates on its own, without his constant or direct involvement. This world works like a clock and can be understood scientifically, without any need for divine revelation. In this understanding of things, God exists but becomes someone or something more distant, not someone we can know. Our main responsibility is not to love, worship, and obey him, seeking his forgiveness when we fail to do so. Instead, human beings’ main purpose is to use our reason and free will to support human flourishing. In short, the older Christian idea that we exist for God’s glory receded and was replaced by the belief that God exists to nurture and sustain us.
Natural Evil and the Lisbon Earthquake
One of the first places that the new, modern self came up against evil and suffering was in the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, a famous example of what has been called “natural evil”—suffering caused not by human agents but just as part of the natural world. On All Saints Day, November 1, a massive earthquake almost completely destroyed the chief city of Portugal and killed tens of thousands of people. Many philosophers and thinkers of Europe, notably Voltaire, saw this as evidence against the existence of the loving God of the Bible. Looking back on this event from deep within a secular culture, we might think that the “problem of evil”—questioning God in the face of disaster—was completely normal. Today, every new major tragedy evokes the same kind of public questions and challenges to faith in the divine.
But Taylor points out that the “problem of evil” discourse about the Lisbon earthquake was actually a new thing. Of course people have questioned the ways and justice of God in human affairs since the book of Job and earlier. But virtually no one on record had previously argued that evil made the existence of God impossible. The assertion that evil disproves God’s existence was something that could arise only if immanent frame assumptions about God were already in place. Taylor writes that when Western society believed in a world that was mysterious and unknowable by reason—and in a God who was glorious and ineffable—the problem of evil was “less acute.” In that view, inexplicable evil was to be expected. But the secularity of Deism made the problem of evil much worse, for two reasons.
In earlier times, when suffering occurred, just because we couldn’t think within our own mind of good reasons for it didn’t mean there couldn’t be any. We were humbler about our ability to understand the world. But by the eighteenth century, we believed that with our minds and reason, we could eventually understand everything. We became confident in our powers of exhaustive observation, and this conviction changed the way human beings regarded suffering. Evil now became a much bigger problem.
The certainty that we have all the elements we need to carry out a trial of God . . . can only come in the age of the World-picture. . . . Earlier, in dire straits in the world [God] made, we can more easily be inclined to appeal to him as helper and savior, while accepting that we can’t understand how his creation got into this fix, and whose fault it is (presumably ours). Now that we think we see how it all works . . . people in the coffee-houses and salons begin to express their disaffection in reflections on divine justice, and the theologians begin to feel that this is the challenge they must meet.114
Second, people now believed we were not created primarily to serve God for his benefit. Rather, God had made the world for our benefit. But, Taylor goes on, it was this deistic concept of God—not so much the traditional Christian view—that the Lisbon earthquake threw into crisis. He wrote:
Once we claim to understand the universe and how it works; once we even try to explain how it works by invoking its being created for our benefit, then this explanation is open to clear challenge. . . . In Lisbon, 1755, it seems clearly not to have [worked for our benefit]. So the immanent order ups the ante.115
If you believe that the world was made for our benefit by God, then horrendous suffering and evil will shake your understanding of life. Horrendous evil is now a much bigger problem for those with a residue of Christianity—with a belief in a distant God who exists for our benefit—than it was for a full-blown orthodox faith not weakened by the immanent frame. In other words, suffering and evil disprove God’s existence only if you have a particular view of God that is already a departure from the more traditional, orthodox view. The skeptical conclusion is largely inherent in the premises. You could argue that, within the immanent frame, the game is rigged against the God of the Bible when we come to evil and suffering.
Residual Christianity and the Problem of Evil
It is often noted that the United States became secularized more slowly than Europe and Canada, but secularization has nevertheless moved forward. Despite the Deism of American founders such as Thomas Jefferson, several powerful spiritual awakenings kept American public culture characterized by Christian beliefs. In particular, those beliefs included the universality of human sin, that every person has a nature prone to and capable of great evil. This meant that “moral evil”—terrible suffering and pain inflicted by human beings on other human beings—was easy to explain. It was seen as part and parcel of living within the sinful human race. In addition, the doctrine of inherent human sinfulness also explained natural evil. Because we had turned from God, it was understandable that our world would be a dark and broken place, since it was under the judgment of a just God. And so earthquakes as well as invasions were occasions for public calls for widespread prayer and repentance.
But America began moving away from older beliefs in human sinfulness and in spiritual blindness and helplessness apart from the assistance of God. Andrew Delbanco wrote The Death of Satan, in which he traces how, during the early nineteenth century, American culture began losing its grip on the Christian doctrines of the evil of human nature and the reality of Satan. “Pride of self,” he wrote, “once the mark of the devil, was now not just a legitimate emotion but America’s uncontested god. . . . Liberal individualism assumed its modern form in these years.”116
And so we have come to our present day. All of Western societies live within the secular frame, and even though many people still profess fairly traditional beliefs in God, most are affected by this frame. We see ourselves as able to control our own destiny, able to discern for ourselves what is right and wrong, and we see God as obligated to arrange things for our benefit, especially if we live a good enough life according to our own chosen standards. Sociologist Christian Smith calls this mind-set “moralistic, therapeutic deism.”117 Many of the people within this mind-set would identify as believers in God and others would go beyond that and call themselves Christians. But secularization thins out traditional beliefs, as we have seen. And this secularized belief in God, or this residue of Christianity, may be the worst possible preexisting condition in which to encounter suffering.
In ancient times, Christianity was widely recognized as having superior resources for facing evil, suffering, and death. In modern times—though it is not as publicly discussed—it continues to have assets for sufferers arguably far more powerful than anything secular culture can offer. Those assets, however, reside in robust, distinctive Christian beliefs.
The first relevant Christian belief is in a personal, wise, infinite, and therefore inscrutable God who controls the affairs of the world—and that is far more comforting than the belief that our lives are in the hands of fickle fate or random chance. The second crucial tenet is that, in Jesus Christ, God came to earth and suffered with and for us sacrificially—and that is far more comforting than the idea that God is remote and uninvolved. The cross also proves that, despite all the inscrutability, God is for us. The third doctrine is that through faith in Christ’s work on the cross, we can have assurance of our salvation—that is far more comforting than the karmic systems of thought. We are assured that the difficulties of life are not payment for our past sins, since Jesus has paid for them. As Luther taught, suffering is unbearable if you aren’t certain that God is for you and with you. Secularity cannot give you that, and religions that provide salvation through virtue and good works cannot give it, either.
The fourth great doctrine is that of the bodily resurrection from the dead for all who believe. This completes the spectrum of our joys and consolations. One of the deepest desires of the human heart is for love without parting. Needless to say, the prospect of the resurrection is far more comforting than the beliefs that death takes you into nothingness or into an impersonal spiritual substance. The resurrection goes beyond the promise of an ethereal, disembodied afterlife. We get our bodies back, in a state of beauty and power that we cannot today imagine. Jesus’ resurrection body was corporeal—it could be touched and embraced, and he ate food. And yet he passed through closed doors and could disappear. This is a material existence, but one beyond the bounds of our imagination. The idea of heaven can be a consolation for suffering, a compensation for the life we have lost. But resurrection is not just consolation—it is restoration. We get it all back—the love, the loved ones, the goods, the beauties of this life—but in new, unimaginable degrees of glory and joy and strength. It is a reversal of the seeming irreversibility of loss that Luc Ferry speaks of.118
If one does not find consolation in these Christian doctrines, then I think total disbelief in God is better preparation for tragedy than the thinned-out, secularized belief in God that is so common in our Western world. Many people today believe in God, and may go to church, but if you ask them whether they are certain of their salvation and acceptance with God, or whether the idea of Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross is real and profoundly moving to them, or whether they are convinced of the bodily resurrection of Jesus and believers—you are likely to get a negative answer, or just a stare. Western culture’s immanent frame weakens intellectual belief in God, and it makes heart certainty even more difficult to come by. But this partial Christianity or theism is far more difficult to hold in the face of horrendous suffering than is atheism. As Taylor has shown us, natural evil offends those who believe in a God who exists for us, and confounds those who don’t believe we are all sinners needing salvation by sheer grace.
Atheist writer Susan Jacoby wrote in The New York Times that “when I see homeless people shivering in the wake of a deadly storm, when the news media bring me almost obscenely close to the raw grief of bereft parents, I do not have to ask, as all people of faith must, why an all-powerful, all-good God allows such things to happen.”119 She is right, of course, at one level. If you don’t believe in God at all, you don’t struggle with the question of why life is so unjust. It just is—deal with it. But you also have none of the powerful comforts and joys that Christian belief can give you, either. Jacoby says that atheism makes you “free of what is known as the theodicy problem” not needing to “square [terrible] things” in this life “with an unseen overlord in the next.”
But as we have seen in philosopher Charles Taylor’s writing, the “theodicy problem” is largely the product not of a strong belief in God and sin, but of a weaker form of belief. It is as we get larger in our own eyes, less dependent on God’s grace and revelation, and surer that we understand how the universe works and how history should go that the problem of evil becomes so intolerable. And it is only as God becomes more remote—a God who is all-loving only in the abstract, not in the sense of having suffered and died for us to rescue us from evil—that he seems unbearably callous in the face of pain. In short, theism without certainty of salvation or resurrection is far more disillusioning in the midst of pain than is atheism. When suffering, believing in God thinly or in the abstract is worse than not believing in God at all.
The End Has Not Been Written
by Tess
My crisis of faith occurred early in adulthood, detached from any significant personal suffering. In my training to be a physician, I had participated in the care of untold numbers of tragedies: seven-year-olds being thrown from pickup trucks, fatal automobile accidents, twenty-five-year-olds diagnosed with breast cancer, heart attacks on Christmas Day, etc. I had seen a lot. I had treated a lot. And as I wrestled with these challenging circumstances, working through them with my husband, Barry, our faith had been tested. God increased our faith such that we trusted Him, even if we didn’t understand Him. And over the next several years, as my understanding of the complexities of human physiology grew, I began to develop more and more amazement that anything in the human body ever went right. How any baby was born without birth defects was a miracle. How we could continue to breathe and digest and fight cancer while sleeping was a marvel.
The idea of nature being in a very delicate, very tenuous balance, all by the sheer grace of God was driven home to me almost on a daily basis. So the idea of pain and suffering occurring and people asking the question “Why me?” was not part of our narrative. More, the question became, “Why not me? What did I do to deserve this unmerited string of unbroken blessing?”
In early 2012, my mother was diagnosed with metastatic and recurrent ovarian cancer, with a terminal prognosis. We displaced our family of four, pregnant with our third boy, to my parents’ house in Arizona to be with her until the end. Three weeks after our arrival, she died and was reunited with our Lord. In the last days of her physical illness, she became increasingly delirious, but remarkably, what she was quoting was Scripture. It was so embedded in her heart, that when disease had ravaged her mind, and reduced her to incoherent ramblings, what was left was the Word of God. As we buried her, my prayer was that the Lord would place His Word so deep in my heart, so that when my mind was in extremis, I would only be able to speak His words back to Him.
In August 2012, we welcomed our third boy in three years; our oldest child turned age three six weeks later. Life was near perfect again. Fourteen weeks later, on a beautiful and mild November afternoon, I returned from work into the blissful chaos of our home, just when our nanny was waking our baby from his nap. Her screams of terror took several seconds to penetrate my consciousness. I walked into our bedroom, knowing exactly what had happened. I knew he had died before I laid eyes on him. My very first thought was Job 1:21, “The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord” followed closely by 1 Thessalonians 5:18, “Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” All the years of training, combined with the incredible power of the Holy Spirit to equip you with exactly what you need when you need it, came over me. I was on the phone with my husband at the time. I told him Wyatt had died and he needed to come home immediately. I performed CPR while on speakerphone with 911, but I knew it was just a formality. Policemen and detectives came and went, ruled out a homicide, then the medical examiner’s office arrived to take my baby’s body. I refused. I was not giving up my baby without a fight, or at least an argument, with God. I knew what He said about asking and receiving, and not receiving because we don’t ask, and the widow who annoys the judge enough to wear him down and grant her request, and faith the size of a mustard seed. For one hour, my husband and I, along with our nanny, prayed for resurrection over our son. Actual, physical resurrection, like Lazarus. We went to the throne of God boldly, completely lucid, not grief-stricken, and asked as forthrightly as we could to give us back our baby. Not my will, but Yours be done. God heard our prayer. And He said no. And I told Him, okay, but You’re going to have to get us through this, because we cannot do this ourselves. In the end, the cause of death was positional asphyxia, or SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome). He wasn’t even sick.
But the end hasn’t been written. The Lord has shown us over and over again how He never intended for us to go through this alone. He gave us Himself, and He gave us the Body of Christ. The morning after Wyatt died, two of our friends showed up without calling to look after our other two children. Our Redeemer Church community mobilized an army of prayer warriors and help warriors. Meals were sent, our families flown in from Nicaragua, Arkansas, Texas, and Arizona, people gave up their apartments for our families, rented an apartment down the block, delivered meals to our nanny in Brooklyn, planned and executed the memorial service, printed bulletins, etc. Every single last detail was taken care of, in typical Type-A New Yorker style, with precision and excellence, and all without our knowledge or consent. And so we were allowed to descend to the very depths of our grief, experience it in all its agony, and emerge on the other side. When we emerged, our community had been transformed in unity through suffering, and we were pregnant. “The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Tim Keller once said that God gives us what we would have asked for if we knew everything that He knows. The idea that the prince of Heaven would empty himself and become poor, to live and dwell among us is humbling. The idea that there is nothing in the human experience that God himself has not suffered, even losing a child, is sustaining. And the idea that in His resurrection, Jesus’ scars became His glory is empowering. God will use these scars for His glory, as they become our glory. Indeed, the end hasn’t been written.