One of the most common stories you will hear in progressive church settings, places where people are deconstructing and reconstructing their faith, is that of empty comfort. A person endures something more difficult than they could imagine – the death of a parent, a child, or a spouse; physical, mental, or sexual abuse; prolonged unemployment, financial instability, or homelessness – and when they turn to their church or their Christian friends and family, all they get are empty platitudes and harmful theologies.
“God wouldn’t give you more than you can handle.”
“Its all part of a bigger plan.”
“They are in a better place now.”
“Heaven needed another angel.”
“God must be testing you.”
“Are you sure you didn’t do something that angered God?”
Its really not hard to hear these kinds of stories, read the data about church attendance we thought about last time, and start to understand why people are leaving the church. These kinds of phrases – while often uttered with good, loving intent, by people who want to help, but who may not know a better way to do so – drive people far from God and the church. Who wants to worship a God that they are told is responsible for the death of a child, or the loss of a job? Who wants to be part of a community that turns a blind eye to abuse, or justifies it as punishment for sin, or part of God’s plan for you?
We’ve been thinking about God and the presence of suffering in the first two parts of this series. How are we to reconcile the existence of God with the reality of hurt and death in the world? What does it say about God? Why would we invest our times and our souls with a church that not only can’t give us good answers to these questions, but so often contributes even further to that hurt? These are questions all Christians should be grappling with, and not dismissing with snide comments about sin and a lack of faith.
The reason so many Christians and their churches respond in that way, however, is because their vision of God allows for no other response. Further, their distorted vision of God is the one that is too often presented as the “correct” vision, and thus when someone experiences moments of suffering, this false God is what they are confronted with, and which they rightly reject. The reason the conversation around suffering and God is so fraught is because, too often, the concept of God being debated is so toxic.
This isn’t to say that a better understanding of God will resolve all the issues of theodicy, if only we better understand the true God intellectually. This is the heresy of Gnosticism at its worst. A better idea of God – that which we are grasping towards in this series of essays – is one that we still must confront with the same cry uttered by Jesus on the Cross: “Why have you forsaken us?” As we will see in the next essay, this cry must always be on our lips as long as sin and death exist in the world. Remember, we aren’t looking to “solve” anything this week. We are resting in the darkness of the Saturday before Easter, sitting with the suffering of the world.
But, one thing we can do in that darkness is demolish the false God that we are told is both responsible for causing and overcoming human suffering.
In Chapter 6 of The Crucified God, Jurgen Moltmann asks the question, “Is Christian faith applicable to the theistic concept of God?” I want to use this essay to understand just what he means by the “theistic concept of God”, because in doing so, we will start to understand why the kinds of answers the church tries to give to the suffering and the hurt so often cause more harm, and drive people away. By taking apart the traditional theism espoused by the church, we can then begin to see a different way to conceive of God.
Moltmann calls this section of the chapter “Theism and the Theology of the Cross”; by theism, he simply means the belief in the existence of god, and especially in a single god who created and controls all of the universe. This is the common definition of theism, one that is intertwined with what we mean we say “Christianity.” The important move Moltmann makes here is to decouple theism from Christianity, and to replace the idea of a theistic God with a Crucified God. We’ll get to that move in the next couple of essays, but for now let’s focus on what Moltmann understands “theism” to mean. He clearly views the common understanding of God as theistic. But what does that entail?
Moltmann writes, “the nature of divine being is determined by its unity and indivisibility, its lack of beginning and end, its immovability and immutability.” There are three attributes given to the divine theistic being here: it is singular, it is infinite, and it is static or stable. Let’s look at each of these before getting to the question of why God is conceived of in this way.
Unity and indivisibility seems to comport very well with something that is considered essential to Christianity (and, by extension, the Judaism that it evolved out of): monotheism. What set Israel apart from the other nations was its belief that only one God exists; this is enshrined in the First Commandment, and is a common theme in Israel’s dealings with God throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. God is One, and other gods are false pretenders: dumb wooden or metal totems at best, demons and other fallen spiritual beings at worst.
Christianity obviously embraced this monotheism, but with the Trinitarian twist that has confounded believers and critics for so long. God is one, but God is also three, according to the Trinity. For some, rejecting the Trinity outright was the way past this dilemma; unitarianism has a long and rich history stretching back to the earliest church, with Arian often being credited as the first official unitarian. But for most Christians, the Trinity was accepted as a necessary piece of the faith, but one that didn’t make much sense in their everyday experience of faith. Theistic Christianity is functionally unitarian, even if it pays lip service to the Trinity. This is so because of the adherence to the other two legs Moltmann attributes to theism: that of the infinity, and the immovability and immutability, of God. God must be outside of creation and unable to be changed, and if God is somehow three in one (one of which is a human) then the idea of singular divine being starts to crumble.
To say God has no beginning and no end would not seem problematic to any Christian understanding of God; it is easily accepted that God existed before the creation of the universe (which includes time). Without a Creator, after all, there is no Creation. But I think Moltmann is pointing to the lack of a beginning and end in a different way. Despite God’s preexistence outside of our concept of time, God is not separate from creation. To assert a God completely removed from any concept of time is to assert a deistic and distant God. As we will explore in further essays, in Christ, God stepped into time, and thus, into a real and active relationship with Creation. The theistic God, on the other hand, holds itself completely aloof from creation, for fear of experiencing the decay and change associated with time.
That decay and chance obviously leads us to the third aspect of the theistic God: immutability and immovability. This is probably the most important leg for theism to stand on, and the one people most often associate with a theistic God. God is supposed to be in control over all aspects of creation, but in order to put trust in an all-controlling God, that God must be free of the possibility of the unexpected or the contingent. Thus, a theistic God cannot change or be changed; it is always solid, stable, and static, and cannot be swayed by creation or anything inside of it.
All of these things come together to create what Aristotle posited as the “Unmoved Mover”, a conception of God that Christianity very readily adopted as its own. For Aristotle, this divine being set in motion all of creation, but what not itself set in motion in any way. The Unmoved Mover cannot be affected by Creation, but is sufficient in itself and always and forever the same; to be otherwise would be to concede less than total perfection and complete omnipotence.
As Moltmann points out, humans crave this Unmoved Mover because of the anxiety of mortality we face as created beings. In order to not devolve into existential terrorist, we require assurance that “death, suffering and mortality…be excluded from the divine being.” In a traditional theistic worldview, the only way to overcome our lack of control is to put all our assurance in a controlling being. This is a completely understandable instinct. But it is also one that carries with it great danger for our relationship with God, especially in light of our inherent dignity as beings. Furthermore, this theistic concept of God very quickly clashes with the God we see in Scripture and in the life of Jesus. By posing such a theistic God, we do that which we are claiming cannot be done: we are limiting God, striking from the Divine all love and feeling and passion.
What does the Unmoved Mover have to do with the problem of suffering, and the weak answers the church gives to the hurt of the world? This is the central question we are driving towards, and which we will unpack in detail in our next essay. The Unmoved Mover is inevitably a false God that cannot stand up in the face of genuine human experience of a limited world and mortality, because it is a God that cannot conceive of suffering and hurt. In order to get a better idea of how this is so, we must take seriously the critiques of God that atheism raises. Only then can we start to look for a God that evokes better responses to suffering than “this must be part of God’s plan for you.”
Before we do that, however, one last note on the role of the Unmoved Mover plays in driving forward churches that do harm in the world. It is easy to see how some churches are so committed to the classic theistic view of God. This is the case in almost all evangelical and fundamentalist churches; the omniscient, omnipotent, immutable God is crucial to versions of Christianity that survive on exercising control. The theistic God is an authoritarian God, and this justifies authoritarian models of leadership. It becomes easy to declare who is in and who is out, who can fill a pulpit and who can’t, who is deserving of God’s love and forgiveness and who isn’t, when your view of God is that of a Divine Being who is only and always one way, and can never be changed or affected by human experience and dignity.
But it isn’t just evangelicals and fundamentalists who make their living on the back of the theistic God. Many progressives and critics of Christianity also rely on the existence of this kind of God to sustain their critique and rejection of the church. It becomes harder to hang on to that identity as an opponent of all religion when the church not only agrees with your critique of theism, but also takes concrete steps towards reimagining what God is like. I point this out because I want our grappling in this series to not be cheap and easy, like the easy and (false) answers we started this essay with, but to have some meat behind it: when we demand of God why suffering exists, we are going to get a response, like Job. We aren’t doing this to score points or get clicks. We expect a God who is in relationship with us, and thus who is going to have a conversation. We expect – we demand – more than the silence of a nonexistent God or the wrath of an authoritarian God. That conversation is where we begin to turn next.
Justin DaMetz 