Tag: theology of suffering

The Suffering God: Ash Wednesday Reflections on Lent

The season of Lent is one of the most meaningful times of the year for me. I am a lover of the overall rhythms of the church’s liturgical calendar, and I am especially fond of the movement beginning with Ash Wednesday, through the 40 days of Lent, into Holy Week, and finally culminating with Easter. Its a theologically rich time of year, especially for a theologian like myself whose academic work focuses on suffering, both human and Divine.

Lent commemorates Christ’s 40 days in the desert, where he fasted and withstood the Temptations he had to endure at the hands of Satan. Just as Christ sacrificed and meditated on the failings inherent in humanity, so we are called to a practice of sacrifice and contemplation. This time prepares us to walk with Christ through Holy Week, into his Suffering Death and, ultimately, the Resurrection. Scripture tells us many times Christ foreknew his coming fate, and he must have contemplated it during his days in the wilderness. Being human, he surely felt pangs of great sorrow and foreboding, alongside the assurance he felt in the righteousness of his sending.

The Temptations themselves – temptations to wield economic, religious, and political power – serve as reminders of those things which Christians are called to reject. Just as Christ refused the temptations and instead launched a public ministry predicted on humility, compassion and peace, so we are called to remember our Discipleship by refusing to live as usual, as society expects, during this time. And unlike the weak Lenten “fasting” practiced by much of popular Christianity, this isn’t a call to simply shed the trappings of the world for 40 days, followed by a post-Easter return to life as it was. No, Lent is to be a time set aside for reflection and contemplation on the kind of life we are called to at all times by Christ, the kind of life demanded by the self-sacrificial love of Christ envisioned at the end of these days by Christ’s suffering and death. These forty days are our time to remember our calling as disciples, and to re-dedicate ourselves to that way of being.

Fasting does have its place, however. For Western Christians, we can look to our Eastern brothers and sisters, who engage in a much more committed practice, where not only are diets restricted, but intense study of Scripture and the Church Fathers is accompanied by intensified prayers and spiritual exercises, as well as more time spent in and with the Church. All of this serves to preoccupy the disciple, reminding them of the overwhelming call on their lives made by Christ. We in the West, especially here in America, would be well served to pattern our own observance on these more ancient and more meaningful practices. I certainly hope to do so this year, and in future Lents.

As I mentioned earlier, Lent is a time that I feel especially called to, as a theologian who has spent much time thinking about the nature of human suffering, and the shocking reality of God’s own suffering. Christ suffered from the pangs of hunger for forty long days, not to mention the pangs of temptation he felt. We end this time in the liturgical year by observing and mourning the suffering death Christ endured, as we try to make sense of it for our own lives and our world, before we get to the beauty of Easter morning. The suffering God endured as Christ is central to our understanding of who God is. Our God is a God who suffers alongside us, who can relate to our limited existence because They have experienced it. The suffering of God on the Cross through Christ the man opens up new paths of relationality for us to have with the Divine. Lent is the time when, through voluntary self-abnegation, we ruminate on our limits, and the amazing fact that God emptied God’s self to take on those same limitations, and ultimately, even death.

Lent is my favorite time of year to revisit one of the most important books in my life of faith, The Crucified God by Jurgen Moltmann. In particular, I am drawn to my favorite passage of the book over and over again (which I will quote in full; emphasis all mine):

What kind of a poor being is a God who cannot suffer and cannot even die? He is certainly superior to mortal man so long as this man allows suffering and death to come together as doom over his head. But he is inferior to man if man grasps this suffering and death as his own possibilities and chooses them himself. Where a man accepts and chooses his own death, he raises himself to a freedom which no animal and no god can have.

…a God who cannot suffer is poorer than any man. For a God who is incapable of suffering is a being who cannot be involved. Suffering and injustice do not affect him. And because he is so completely insensitive, he cannot be affected or shaken by anything. He cannot weep, for he has no tears. But the one who cannot suffer cannot love either. So he is also a loveless being. Aristotle’s God cannot love; he can only be loved by all non-divine beings by virtue of his perfection and beauty, and in this way draw them to him. The ‘unmoved Mover’ is a ‘loveless Beloved.’

[…]

Finally, a God who is only omnipotent is in himself an incomplete being, for he cannot experience helplessness and powerlessness. Omnipotence can indeed be longed for an worshipped by helpless men, but omnipotence is never loved, it is only feared. Wha sort of being, them, would be a God who was only ‘almighty’? He would be a being without experience, a being without destiny and a being who is loved by no one. A man who experiences helplessness, a man who suffers because he loves, a man who can die, is therefore richer than an omnipotent God who cannot suffer, cannot love and cannot die. Therefore a man who is aware of the riches of his own nature in his love, his suffering, his protest and his freedom, such a God is not a necessary and supreme being, but a highly disposable and superfluous being.

[…]

The only way past protest atheism is through a theology of the cross which understands God as the suffering God in the suffering of Christ and which cries out with the godforsaken God, ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ For this theology, God and suffering are no longer contradictions, as in theism and atheism, but God’s being is in suffering and the suffering is in God’s being itself, because God is love.

Today is the day we take the ashes, in remembrance of our own mortality and impending death, but also in the hope that the love of God has overcome that death. God was able to do this through taking on willingly that death, out of love, and thus to show death impotence in the face of what really matters. So, let us remember, as we enter this season of denial, suffering and sacrifice, that through it all, we are called to love one another in a new and radical way, as God loves, not because it is a duty, but because we can know what it means to love and be loved.

What Good is God?

The following is an essay I wrote last semester, for my Introduction to Theology class.

The Christian faith has a role to play as more than a personal salvation machine. Too often, especially in the American context, Christianity operates as little more than fire insurance for fearful souls, an incantation of proper belief that assures one of heaven and requires little else than allegiance and a tithe. To approach the Christian faith this way is to ignore the rich tradition of prophetic social critique it arose from and has engaged in for two millennia, and its ability to address the social injustices present in the world today. In particular, I believe Karen Baker-Fletcher’s Dancing with God brings powerful theological tools to bear on what is the pressing theological question of our times: how does God relate to a world that is seeing patterns of authoritarianism, war, and suffering play out again and again?

dancingwithgodThe present historical moment is one of great instability and upheaval. The rise of far right elements in the West, religious extremism in the Middle East and Africa, and authoritarian nationalism around the world has put any talk of an “end to history” to rest. The rising tide of extremism mirrors the interwar years, when fascism rose amidst economic struggles and cultural upheaval. To compound our present crisis, the fading impact of religious belief and growing distrust of institutions puts the church in a crisis of necessity. Due to the fact that Christian evangelicalism has played such a large role in getting the world to this point (through its political fealty to right wing movements), the church at large is facing the question of what good it can do, or whether it is even necessary anymore.

This question pulls out further for many outside of the faith, to ask “what good is God?” If we are seeing a pattern of historical repetition, where this kind of crisis happens again and again, and if in fact Christianity has helped usher it in multiple times, why should anyone trust God or those who claim to represent the divine? Amidst so much human suffering, where is God? What does God have to offer?

Karen Baker-Fletcher engages strands of open and process theologies in Dancing With God that work towards an understanding of God that can have meaning in today’s world. For Baker-Fletcher, “God is a divine community, consisting of three distinctive, interrelated agents or actions.” (Baker-Fletcher, 54) These three agents are in relationship with one another, taking part in a divine dance. This relational, creative nature is reflected in God’s plan for Creation: a loving community of being. (Baker-Fletcher, 64)

She then moves to answer the question, “why evil and suffering?” (Baker-Fletcher, 75) In her view, God created the world, but preserves the free will of beings in the world. This free will, combined with a limited view of creation, comes up against the laws of creation. “When violated, these laws result in negative consequences, namely experiences of suffering, pain, and death.” (Baker-Fletcher, 76) God is not responsible for the suffering and death in the world; rather, we are. Sin is a consequence of mortality. To eliminate our ability to sin would be to eliminate our freedom to be.

What, then, is God’s role, if not as a fixer? Is God any good if God cannot or will not stop us from hurting ourselves? Baker-Fletcher answers in the affirmative. Through the Incarnation, God came to know what it is to suffer. God experienced this human reality, and thus, gained understanding of it. Because of this, God can now be an authentically “healing and resurrecting” (Baker-Fletcher, 153) presence in the world. God can speak with authority to our situations because God knows what it is to suffer. And consequently, the justice of God’s kingdom can be understood as the good news it is, because we know it comes from a place of experience and not abstraction. Humanity can draw on God in order to create a better world. By ourselves, we only eventually destroy and hurt; but by being in relationship with a healing God who knows our struggles, we can envision, and create, a better future. (Baker-Fletcher, 163)

This vision of God – source of creation and beauty and community and life – that Baker-Fletcher sketches answers the question of what good is God in the midst of our historical moment. God is the hopeful center towards which we orient ourselves, knowing that evil and death don’t get the last word. The Spirit that created the entire universe is a Spirit of love and live, and we only have to trust that Spirit and draw on it to begin the work of healing and reconciliation. Without it, we are adrift, answering to the law of power. God is the universal truth that can guide us into a better future.

Christianity has a duty to reclaim the notion of God as good, as having a role to play. But this means rejecting the lure of worldly power and might for the better way of humility and love. Working with God in a co-creating relationship, Christianity can be a force for a better world.

The Bookshelf: Escape Routes

Christianity provides an extensive theological framework for a variety of important topics. Perhaps the most important subject it gives a lens to is that of human suffering. The Christian faith centers itself around the suffering act of God, experienced in the person of Jesus Christ. The Suffering Servant is a widely popular image of Christ, and the stories of the martyrs feature prominently in church tradition.

In this light, Johann Christoph Arnold’s little book, Escape Routes: For People Who Feel Trapper in Life’s Little Hells, is a vitally important read on how to apply real-life theological understandings to the suffering nature of human existence.

Any regular reader here knows I am not a fan of the “self help” model of religion that 21st century American Christianity so often falls into. Yet, over the past month, I have begun to become intensely interested in a “theology of suffering,” chiefly as a result of reading Moltmann’s The Crucified God. While I certainly don’t want to narrow the life and message of Jesus down to a simple how-to guide of dealing with the hard parts of life, I do think the faith, at it’s core, should be oriented towards better lives for all human being. And a crucial part of that work is addressing and putting into perspective the suffering every person experiences in their lives.

Arnold, through the use of stories about people’s life’s, addresses the various aspects of suffering. Running through lonlieness, despair, difficult pasts, the struggle of success, and (interestingly) sex, he shows the universality of suffering in the human experience, and thus is able to effectively address the loneliness someone struggling though any of these areas surely feels. This arc culminates in the highlight of the book, Chapter 7, entitled, simply, “Suffering.” Arnold tells several stories again, culminating in the life of Bishop Oscar Romero.

The book ends on more positive notes. One of the most noteworthy, and surprising, moments of the book, is in the chapter entitled “Travel Guides.” Arnold illustrates the lives of three people who endured much suffering, and yet persisted, carrying through to significant and lasting impacts on the world. Surprisingly, one of the people he highlights at this point is Che Guevara, the Communist revolutionary who fought in Cuba and Angola. 

To encounter words of praise towards the leftist icon from someone within traditional Christianity is, well, rare, to say the least. And Arnold certainly doesn’t gloss over the most unsavory aspects of Guevara’s life and legacy. But crucially, he is able to draw out Guevara’s love for the regular people of Latin America, a love that drove him to fight against oppression and imperialism around the globe.  As a young left-leaning person, I obviously grew up around images of Che. I have always been intrigued by the man and the passion he exemplified, but was troubled, as a pacifist, by the violent methods he employed at times. Arnold, in this section of the book, is able to put my mind at ease.

He does all this in service to his broader goal, of normalizing the act of suffering and reassuring those who suffer that they aren’t alone, that even great men and women in history suffered greatly on their way to the things they did in the world. I found this little book an easy and enlightening read. Indeed, as Arnold shows, suffering is a key component to the Christian experience. For every Prosperity Gospel success story of big houses and helicopters, there are a thousand suffering campesinos, toiling everyday for pennies. Their experience is the dominant experience of the Christian movement. Their lives provide the primary paradigm for understanding Christian theology. And it is their suffering that Jesus took on and identified with, and called us all to recognize. The Suffering Servant isn’t an unobtainable ideal; the Suffering Servant is each of us.

As always with the books I receive from Plough, I of course was bothered by the allusions to traditional views on sexuality and reproductive issues, but they are few and far between here. Escape Routes is a lovely little book, and can be a highly useful resource for those enduring suffering (that is to say, all of us), and those who are called to be shepherds to those who suffer.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from Plough Publishers. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”