God's Problem (22 page)

Paul also felt that God brought suffering to induce humility and to help him, Paul, remember that the positive results of his ministry came from God, not from his own remarkable abilities. This is the point of the well-known passage in which Paul talks about having a “thorn in the flesh.” In this passage, in 2 Corinthians, Paul has just described an exalted vision that he had of the heavenly realms, and he indicates that God did not want him to feel overly exultant in the fact that he had been privileged to have such a special revelation. And so God gave him a thorn in the flesh to induce humility:

There has been considerable debate about what Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” actually was: some have suggested that Paul had epilepsy (that’s allegedly why he fell from his horse when “blinded by the light” in Acts 9) or failing eyesight (that’s why he mentions the “large letters” that he uses when he writes his epistles; Gal. 6:11), or some other physical ailment. The truth is that we’ll never know. What we can know is that Paul came to see his suffering as a good thing. It did not come as a punishment for sin; it did not come simply because other people were behaving wickedly toward him. It came from God (even though it arrived through a messenger of Satan!), and in the end it was redemptive, because it allowed God’s own power to show forth.

In all these ways, Paul thought that suffering, ultimately, was a good thing. Sometimes it had a silver lining; sometimes it was the will of God to keep his people humble; and sometimes it was the very essence of salvation.

Redemptive Suffering: An Assessment

The idea that God can bring good out of evil, that suffering can have positive benefits, that salvation itself depends on suffering—all of these are ways of saying that suffering is and can be redemptive. This idea is found throughout the Bible, from the Jewish Scripture to the New Testament, starting with Genesis and continuing on all the way through the writings of Paul and the Gospels. In some ways it is the core message of the Bible: it is not simply despite suffering but precisely through suffering that God manifests his power
of salvation, whether the salvation of the children of Israel from their slavery in Egypt at the exodus or the salvation of the world through the passion of Jesus.

A lot of people today resonate with this notion that suffering can have positive effects—sometimes highly positive, even salvific effects. I suppose all of us have had experiences that were miserable at the time but led to a greater good. I know I have, starting when I was fairly young. I’ve always attributed my entire career, indirectly, to an accidental and rather painful incident that occurred when I was a teenager.

It was the summer of 1972, before my senior year in high school, and I was playing baseball in an American Legion summer league, rather enjoying myself, when suddenly, back from a road trip we had taken to play in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, I started feeling lethargic and generally miserable. I went to a doctor and found that somehow or other I had contracted hepatitis A. So much for a summer of fun (and baseball). I was taken out of action, and it was not pleasant. But there was nothing I could do: I was stuck indoors with little to do but sit around and take care of myself.

It took about three days to become bored out of my skull. (I’ve always had a passion for the outdoors, especially when it’s hot and sunny, as it often is during Kansas summers.) I decided that I needed to do something besides watch TV all day, and thought that maybe I could start working as much as my energy would allow on the high school debate topic for the coming year. I had been on the debate team both my sophomore and junior years and was decent enough at it but by no means one of the stars. My high school had one of the best debate programs in the state (we had won the state championship the previous two years, even though I had had little to do with it as a lowly underclassman), and I wasn’t projected to be one of the leaders on the team. Each year a different debate topic was assigned, and teams had to be prepared to debate affirmative or negative on the resolution in tournaments that took place over a series of months in the autumn. The team’s stars spent the summers
preparing; I personally preferred playing baseball (and tennis and golf and anything else that was outdoors). But there I was, with nothing else to do and lots of time on my hands.

And so I arranged for books to be brought to the house, and I started doing research, and before I knew it, I was head over heels into the project, devoting almost every waking hour to it. It suddenly came to be a huge challenge, figuring out the intricacies of that year’s resolution (it had to do with whether the federal government, rather than localities, should assume all funding for primary and secondary education)—as big a challenge as playing second base had been just weeks earlier.

When I got over the hepatitis, I was still hooked on doing research. My senior year was unlike any other school year I had had. I was still involved in sports, especially tennis in the spring; but in the fall I was completely inundated with work on the upcoming debates. My star began to rise, I was eventually chosen to be one of the team leaders, my colleague (who had been a star for years) and I won big tournaments, eventually I was chosen to be on the team representing the high school at regional and state tournaments, and we won the state championship.

The reason all that mattered in the long run was that it got me interested in doing academic research. When I went off to college, I threw myself into my studies more than I had ever done in high school. As a direct result, I became a scholar. No one—absolutely
no one
!—would have predicted that of me before my senior year in high school. I did well in school, but a career in the academy was as unlikely as a career in the Moscow ballet.

If I hadn’t caught hepatitis, I’m still convinced, it never would have happened. I can’t describe how happy I am that I got hepatitis. Sometimes something good can come out of suffering.

At the same time, I am absolutely opposed to the idea that we can universalize this observation by saying that something good
always
comes out of suffering. The reality is that
most
suffering is not positive, does not have a silver lining, is not good for the
body or soul, and leads to wretched and miserable, not positive, outcomes.

I simply do not believe it’s true that “Whatever does not kill us only makes us stronger.” Would that that were true, but unfortunately it’s not. A lot of times, what does not kill you completely incapacitates you, mars you for life, ruins your mental or physical well-being—permanently. We should never, in my view, take a glib view of suffering—our own or that of others.

I especially, and most vehemently, reject the idea that someone else’s suffering is designed to help
us.
I know there are people who argue that recognizing the pain in the world can make us nobler human beings but, frankly, I find this view offensive and repulsive. Sure, our
own
suffering may, on occasion, make us better people, stronger, or more considerate and caring, or more humane. But other people do not—decidedly do not—suffer in order to make us happier or nobler. It is one thing to say that I enjoy the success I now have because for so many years I had bad luck or misfortune; that I enjoy the fine food I can eat now because for years I lived on peanut butter sandwiches; that I enjoy my vacations now because for years I could barely afford gas to drive to the store. It is a completely different thing to say that I better enjoy the good things in life because I see other people without them.

To think that other people suffer horrible diseases so that I can appreciate my good health is atrocious; to say that other people starve so that I can appreciate my good food is completely egocentric and cold-hearted; to say that I enjoy life so much more now that I see people all around me dying is the self-centered raving of an adult who hasn’t matured beyond childhood. On some occasions, my own misfortune may have something good come of it. But I’m not going to thank God for
my
food because I realize other people don’t have any.

Moreover, there is a lot of suffering in the world that is not redemptive for
anybody.
The eighty-year-old grandmother who is savagely raped and strangled; the eight-week-old grandchild who suddenly turns blue and dies; the eighteen-year-old killed by a drunk driver on the way to the prom—trying to see good in such evils is to
deprive evil of its character. It is to ignore the helplessness of those who suffer for no reason and to no end. It robs other people of their dignity and their right to enjoy life every bit as much as we do.

And so there must be yet other answers to why there is suffering in the world. Or perhaps, in the end, there is simply no answer. That, as it turns out, is one of the answers given by some of the biblical writers, as we will see in the next chapter. The answer is that there is no answer.

Does Suffering Make Sense? The Books of Job and Ecclesiastes

 

Everyone has experienced physical suffering and will experience still more before they die. From broken fingernails to broken bones, from hardened arteries to cancer to failed organs; diseases curable and incurable. My dad was taken by cancer eighteen years ago at the ripe young age of sixty-five. In August of that year we were together on a fishing trip, and he seemed fine. Six weeks later he was on his deathbed in the hospital, his physical appearance changed almost beyond belief, with cancer metastasized throughout his body. Six weeks later, after excruciating pain—one doctor didn’t want to increase his morphine because he might get “addicted” (you wonder sometimes what people are
thinking
)—six weeks later, he was dead.

Just now, many years later, I was sketching this chapter in an airport in Pennsylvania, coming home from a memorial lecture I had given at Penn State University for a friend and colleague, Bill Petersen, a brilliant linguist and historian of early Christianity who had died of cancer at the peak of his career, aged fifty-nine. It can hit any of us anytime. Even the more prosaic sicknesses that drive us to our beds and make us think the world is surely going to end soon—flu, for example, so bad that it makes you want to die, or to think that you will.

Actually, many people do die of the flu. The worst epidemic in American history was the 1918 influenza epidemic, overshadowed
in history by the First World War but far more deadly for American soldiers, not to mention civilians. In fact, it killed more Americans than all the wars of the twentieth century put together. It broke out in an army camp at Fort Riley, Kansas, in March 1918; doctors thought that it was a new strain of pneumonia. And then it seemed to disappear. But it came back with a vengeance, both among civilians and among the troops—who managed to take it over to Europe when transferred to the front lines, so that soldiers from other countries contracted it and took it back to their homelands. It ended up being a worldwide epidemic of apocalyptic proportions.

The symptoms were unlike anything anyone had ever seen. It seemed to attack the young and healthy—twenty-one-to twenty-nine-year-olds were most at risk—rather than the very young, the very old, or the very weak. Symptoms would appear without warning and worsen by the hour. The lungs would fill with fluid, making breathing difficult; body temperatures would soar so high the hair would begin to fall out; people would turn blue and black; they would eventually die by drowning in the fluid gathered in their lungs. All this might occur within twelve hours. Someone you saw healthy at breakfast could well be dead by dinner. And the numbers of those infected were extraordinary.

In September 1918 twelve thousand died in the United States—and then it got worse. There were army units in the war who lost 80 percent of their soldiers; Woodrow Wilson had to decide whether to send support troops, knowing that the virus could kill the majority of those on ship before they reached the war theater, with the impossibility of quarantine and the lack of any vaccine. Back home, places like New York City and Philadelphia were in high-crisis mode: by October 1918, New York was recording more than eight hundred deaths a day; in Philadelphia, eleven thousand died in a month. They ran out of caskets, and the ability to bury the caskets that were used.

Despite intense efforts, medical scientists could not come up with a vaccine (part of the problem: they assumed the disease was caused
by a bacterium when, in fact, it was a virus). Eventually the disease ran its course and stopped the killing, mysteriously, on its own. But not before the majority of the human species had been infected. In the ten months of the epidemic, the influenza had killed 550,000 Americans and a whopping thirty million people worldwide.

How do we explain an outbreak like this? Do we appeal to a biblical answer? Many people did. Could God be punishing the world? Some people thought so and prayed for a respite. Was this a human tragedy inflicted on humans? There was a rumor that the Germans had started the flu by releasing a top-secret chemical weapon. Was there anything redemptive in the suffering? Some people saw it as a call to repentance before Armageddon, which was hastening to its completion in the European conflict.

Or maybe it was just one of those things. Maybe what happened had nothing to do with a divine being who intervenes for his people or against his enemies. There were, after all, numerous precedents in human history. The so-called plague of Justinian in the sixth century was even worse than the influenza outbreak of 1918, destroying something like 40 percent of the inhabitants of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, and as much as one-fourth of the population of the entire eastern Mediterranean. And there was the infamous Black Death, the bubonic plague of the mid-fourteenth century, which may have killed off as much as one-third of the population of Europe.

We ourselves are not exempt, as we know so well. Despite some improvements in treatment, the AIDS crisis continues as a hellish nightmare for millions. The numbers provided by ALERT, an international HIV and AIDS charity based in the United Kingdom, are staggering. Since 1981 more than twenty-five million people worldwide have died of AIDS. In 2006, some forty million people were living with HIV/AIDS (nearly half of them women). Three million people died in that year alone; more than four million were newly infected. Worldwide, still today, with all the awareness out there, some six thousand young people (under the age of twenty-five)
become infected with HIV each day. At present, Africa has twelve million AIDS orphans. In the country of South Africa alone, more than a thousand people die of AIDS
every day
, day in and day out.

It is not only homophobic and hateful but also inaccurate and unhelpful to blame this epidemic on sexual preference or promiscuity. Unsafe practices might spread the disease—but why is there a disease in the first place? Are those who suffer the unspeakable emotional and physical agonies of AIDS more sinful and worthy of punishment than the rest of us? Has God chosen to punish all those AIDS orphans? I frankly don’t see how the biblical answers to suffering that we’ve seen so far can be helpful for making sense of their plight—or the deaths of those struck down by influenza in 1918 or the bubonic plague in 1330. This isn’t God who is creating excruciating pain and misery; it certainly isn’t something human beings have done to other human beings; and I see nothing redemptive in the innocent young child who contracts AIDS, through absolutely no fault of her own, and who can expect nothing but the nightmarish torments that the disease produces. Are there other explanations for suffering in the world?

There are, and some of them are in the Bible. The best-known wrestling with the problem of suffering comes to us in the book of Job.

The Book of Job: An Overview

Most people who read Job do not realize that the book as it has come down to us today is the product of at least two different authors, and that these different authors had different, and contradictory, understandings of why it is that people suffer. Most important, the way the story begins and ends—with the prose narrative of the righteous suffering of Job, whose patient endurance under duress is rewarded by God—stands at odds with the poetic dialogues that take up most of the book, in which Job is not patient but defiant, and in which God does not reward the one he has made to suffer
but overpowers him and grinds him into submission. These are two different views of suffering, and to understand the book we have to understand its two different messages.
¹

As it now stands, with the prose narrative and the poetic dialogues combined into one long account, the book can be summarized as follows: it begins with a prose description of Job, a wealthy and pious man, the richest man in the eastern world. The action then moves up to heaven, where God speaks with “the Satan”—the Hebrew word means “the adversary”—and commends Job to him. The Satan claims that Job is pious toward God only because of the rewards he gets for his piety. God allows the Satan to take away all that Job has: his possessions, his servants, and his children—then, in a second round of attacks, his health. Job refuses to curse God for what has happened to him. Three friends come to visit him and comfort him; but it is cold comfort indeed. Throughout their speeches they tell Job that he is being punished for his sins (i.e., they take the “classical” view of suffering, which is that sinners get what they deserve). Job continues to insist on his innocence and pleads with God to allow him to present his case before him. At the end of the dialogues with the friends (which take up most of the book), God does show up, and overwhelms Job with his greatness, forcefully reproving him for thinking that he, God, has anything to explain to Job, a mere mortal. Job repents of his desire to make his plea before God. In the epilogue, which reverts to prose narrative, God commends Job for his upright behavior and condemns the friends for what they have said. He restores to Job all his former wealth and more; he provides him with another batch of children; and Job lives out his life in prosperity, dying at a ripe old age.

Some of the basic discrepancies between the prose narrative with which the book begins and ends (just under three chapters) and the poetic dialogues (nearly forty chapters) can be seen just from this brief summary. The two sources that have been spliced together to make the final product are written in different genres: a prose folktale and a set of poetic dialogues. The writing styles are different
between these two genres. Closer analysis shows that the names for the divine being are different in the prose (where the name Yahweh is used) and the poetry (where the divinity is named El, Eloah, and Shaddai). Even more striking, the portrayal of Job differs in the two parts of the book: in the prose he is a patient sufferer; in the poetry he is thoroughly defiant and anything but patient. Correspondingly, he is commended in the prose but rebuked in the poetry. Moreover, the prose folktale indicates that God deals with his people according to their merit, whereas the entire point of the poetry is that he does not do that—and is not bound to do so. Finally, and most important, the view of why the innocent suffer differs between the two parts of the book: in the prose narrative, suffering comes as a test of faith; in the poetry, suffering remains a mystery that cannot be fathomed or explained.

To deal adequately with the book of Job, then, we need to look at the two parts of the book separately and explore at greater length its two explanations for the suffering of the innocent.

The Folktale: The Suffering of Job as a Test of Faith

The action of the prose folktale alternates between scenes on earth and in heaven. The tale begins with the narrator indicating that Job lived in the land of Uz; usually this is located in Edom, to the southeast of Israel. Job, in other words, is not an Israelite. As a book of “wisdom,” this account is not concerned with specifically Israelite traditions: it is concerned with understanding the world in ways that should make sense to everyone living in it. In any event, Job is said to be “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil” (Job 1:1). We have already seen that in other Wisdom books, such as Proverbs, wealth and prosperity come to those who are righteous before God; here this dictum is borne out. Job is said to be enormously wealthy, with seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yokes of oxen, five hundred donkeys, and very many servants. His piety is seen in his daily de
votions to God: early each morning he makes a burnt offering to God for all his children, seven sons and three daughters, in case they have committed some sin.

The narrator then moves to a heavenly scene in which the “heavenly beings” (literally: the sons of God) appear before the Lord, “the Satan” among them. It is important to recognize that the Satan here is not the fallen angel who has been booted from heaven, the cosmic enemy of God. Here he is portrayed as one of God’s divine council members, a group of divinities who regularly report to God and, evidently, go about the world doing his will. Only at a later stage of Israelite religion (as we will see in chapter 7) does “Satan” become “the Devil,” God’s mortal enemy. The term
the Satan
here in Job does not appear to be a name so much as a description of his office: it literally means “the Adversary” (or the Accuser). But he is not an adversary to God: he is one of the heavenly beings who report to God. He is an adversary in the sense that he plays “devil’s advocate,” as it were, challenging conventional wisdom to try to prove a point.

In the present instance, his challenge has to do with Job. The Lord brags to the Satan about Job’s blameless life and the Satan challenges God about it: Job is upright only because he is so richly blessed in exchange. If God were to take away what Job has, the Satan insists, Job would “curse you to your face” (Job 1:11). God doesn’t think so, and gives the Satan authority to take everything away from Job. In other words, this is to be a test of Job’s righteousness: can he have a disinterested piety, or does his pious relationship to God depend entirely on what he manages to get out of the deal?

The Satan attacks Job’s household. In one day the oxen are stolen away, the sheep are burned up by fire from heaven, the camels are raided and carried off, all the servants are killed, and even the sons and daughters are mercilessly destroyed by a storm that levels their house. Job’s reaction? As God predicted, he does not utter curses for his misfortune; he goes into mourning: