We are human; therefore, we will suffer. Like Job, we want to know why. How can a loving, sovereign God allow the pointless pain evident in every level of every society? We rejoice at the miracle of life, seeing in our unconditional love for our children the reflection of God’s love for us. Logically, then, we feel betrayed when we suffer. God is silent, an adjective. We want a verb.
We want action, and we want explanation. Why must the innocent suffer alongside the guilty? Why isn’t the suffering distributed fairly? Why must we suffer at all, if a loving, sovereign God is in charge? Our answers, like Job’s, are nebulous at best, deleterious at worst. Perhaps ”Why?” is not the right question, although our human logic demands to know. Perhaps we would do better to ask not why, but rather how. How are we to absorb and survive the pain that inevitably accompanies our human condition? God’s answer to Job is, basically, “I am who I am.” God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind, simply reaffirming his creative power. A chastened, humbled Job reconciles with God, but he never understands his suffering; Job needs God—as we do—regardless of the suffering.
Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff’s short but powerful Lament for a Son[1] addresses the difficulty of reconciling the death of his 25 year old son with his faith in a loving and all-powerful deity. Wolterstorff describes the loneliness of grief (“grief isolates”, 56), inextricably juxtaposed against the need for quiet company on the “mourner’s bench” (34). Not “Why do we suffer?” Rather, “How do we survive this horror?”
In another short but pithy book, Stanley Hauerwas’ Naming the Silences[2], Hauerwas notes in the preface (after quoting Wolterstorff on the frontispiece) that his purpose is not to explain suffering but rather to explore why the question of suffering is so important to us; indeed, Hauerwas’ point is to question the question: “I cannot promise readers consolation, but only as honest an account as I can give of why we cannot afford to give ourselves explanations for evil when what is required is a community capable of absorbing our grief.” The explanations fail, always; we need look no further than Job to see that. Yet Job retained his faith, and reconciled to his God. How, not why. We suffer. We survive. We depend on one another. And on God.
Hauerwas closely examines suffering as a theme in Peter DeVries’ novel, The Blood of the Lamb[3] through the feelings, experiences, and faith challenges of the novel’s main character, Don Wanderhope, as he faces his young daughter’s losing battle with leukemia. Hauerwas focuses much of his discussion on the tension between medicine as a healing art and medicine as a means to delay death while sustaining suffering (“the art of prolonging disease… in order to postpone grief” [qtd. 21]), thus tackling our near-lunatic faith in the power of medical knowledge and technology.[4] We look for miracles, and we’re happy to credit God for working through medical technology. Anything to avoid the inevitable pain, and the inevitably painful questions. We want a verb.
Hauerwas makes no attempt to explain Wanderhope’s suffering; he merely describes it, in an almost detached, clinical tone. He also (thank heavens!) makes no attempt to place the suffering within a larger context as a means by which the dead girl’s father becomes better or stronger or more aware of life’s fleeting joys: “[DeVries] does not say…that Wanderhope through Carol’s suffering has learned to see the beauty in the olive drab of the hawthorn in autumn…sensing as he does the dishonesty in those who would have a child like Carol suffer and die from leukemia so that a father like Wanderhope could learn to see the particular beauty of the everyday” (33).
According to Hauerwas’ interpretation of DeVries’ novel, our only hope exists in seeing the pointless suffering of a Carol Wanderhope against the backdrop of Christ’s suffering; i.e., there is comfort in shared suffering.[5] Thus we can know that we aren’t abandoned; Jesus, “fully man and fully God,” knew the “silence” of suffering. For all the prayers, all the medical voodoo, all the frantic, desperate pleading, Carol Wanderhope dies; she suffers, and her grieving father suffers. We suffer. We survive. We depend on one another. And somehow, God is at the center of it, silent. An adjective.
Hauerwas devotes the middle section of this book to defining and ultimately countering the traditional concept of theodicy as the study of God’s relation to evil. In a detailed footnote on Job, Hauerwas quotes an article entitled “God and the Silencing of Job”:
The book of Job displays the cost of …silencing the voice of the sufferer…. Job shows the theodicists’ place is in the company of comforters…. [Job’s] comforters are ‘academics’ in the worst sense of the term, ineffective observers of the terrors of human suffering…. The book of Job makes no coherent claims…. As part of the Jewish and Christian religious canons, it reveals that no way of speaking of God and suffering will do. (Tilley, qtd. 45-46)[6].
Hauerwas has now ruled out both medicine and theodicy as adequate means to confront the problem of pointless suffering in an ordered world controlled by a benevolent, omnipotent God. For all his questioning, all his pain, all his arguing with God and man, Job receives no solid answers about suffering, although he reconciles with God. Job, a man, asks, “Why, God? I hurt!” God answers, typically cryptic, “Can you make a hippopotamus?” Say what? In the end, Job needs God—as we do. We suffer. We survive. We depend on one another. And on God.
Moving along in the biblical canon, Hauerwas points out the obvious: Early Christians suffered. They were persecuted relentlessly—harassed, oppressed, tortured, executed. The mother of a young martyr was no less devastated in ancient Rome than her modern counterpart in rural Indiana. Yet suffering doesn’t seem to be an issue: “Apparently, it never occurred to the early Christians to question their belief in God or even God’s goodness because they were unjustly suffering…. Suffering was not a metaphysical problem needing a solution but a practical challenge requiring a response” (51). And a couple of pages later: “[H]istorically speaking, Christians have not had a ‘solution’ to the problem of evil. Rather, they have had a community of care that has made it possible for them to absorb the destructive terror of evil that constantly threatens to destroy all human relations” (53). We suffer. We survive. We depend on one another.
Hauerwas explains the impact of various historical thought-movements, especially the Enlightenment, on modern Christian views. Because Christianity is now a “civilizational religion oriented to provide the ethos necessary to sustain an empire,” we modern Christians tend to try unsuccessfully to rationalize evil as somehow part of God’s plan which we aren’t yet capable of comprehending: “The way things are…is the way things were meant to be for any right-thinking person, converted or not” (55)[7].
So exactly what are we to do with the problem of suffering? I’m not sure. Hauerwas laps at the edges, giving us much to ponder without attempting to answer the unanswerable:
Obviously, suffering, seemingly unnecessary and pointless suffering, grips our lives in a manner that rightly leaves us numb. My point is not to deny the reality of suffering—in particular, suffering that bears the mark of evil (that is, suffering which seems ‘caused’ by a power for no reason)—but rather to suggest that there is no such thing as suffering that challenges belief in the existence of God as such.” (68)
Thus, Hauerwas returns us to his starting point: We need a new question. I certainly don’t know what the “right” question is, and Hauerwas refuses to give a pat answer. But he is clear that asking why we suffer is useless, perhaps even ludicrous, when we look honestly at the God who became a man—the God who is the Suffering Servant, the Crucified Christ, the Paschal Lamb; the man who cried out in lonely anguish, spiritually and physically parched, spiritually and physically suffocated, quoting the desperate plea of an earlier “man after God’s own heart.” That God—that man—suffered.
If it helps, I can cry out in angry, frustrated prayers, as Job did, as David did, as Jesus did. If it helps, I can analyze the suffering, taking comfort that Jesus knows my human pain. If it helps, I can recite Romans 8:28 like a mantra. If it helps, I can sit on the mourner’s bench and hope someone warm and quiet will sit beside me, shielding me for a minute from my pain.
Maybe in the end—as in the beginning—that is Hauerwas’ point.
I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, Eyes–
I wonder if It weighs like Mine–
Or has an Easier size.
I wonder if They bore it long–
Or did it just begin–
I could not tell the Date of Mine–
It feels so old a pain–
I wonder if it hurts to live–
And if They have to try–
And whether–could They choose between–
It would not be–to die–
I note that Some–gone patient long–
At length, renew their smile–
An imitation of a Light
That has so little Oil.
I wonder if when Years have piled–
Some Thousands–on the Harm–
That hurt them early–such a lapse
Could give them any Balm–
Or would they go on aching still
Through Centuries of Nerve–
Enlightened to a larger Pain–
In Contrast with the Love–
The Grieved–are many–I am told–
There is the various Cause–
Death–is but one–and comes but once–
And only nails the eyes–
There’s Grief of Want–and Grief of Cold–
A sort they call “Despair”--
There’s Banishment from native Eyes–
In sight of Native Air–
And though I may not guess the kind–
Correctly–yet to me
A piercing Comfort it affords
In passing Calvary–
To note the fashions–of the Cross–
And how they’re mostly worn–
Still fascinated to presume
That Some–are like My Own–
(Emily Dickinson)
[1] Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Lament for a Son. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s, 1987.
[2] Hauerwas, Stanley. Naming the Silences: God, Medicine, and the Problem of Suffering. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990.
[3] Devries, Peter. The Blood of the Lamb. Boston: Little, Brown, 1961.
[4] Accurate depiction, seems to me: Superdocs, with their white labcoat capes flying behind them as they flit hither and yon dispensing miracles.
[5] See Emily Dickinson, “I Measure Every Grief I Meet.”
[6] Tilley, Terry. "God and The Silencing of Job." Modern Theology 5 (Apr. 1989), 257-270.
[7] I would argue that a sort of autocratic Christianity undulates into world politics and global policy, without including Jesus—Christian-centric without being Christ-centered. Hence the need for a book such as this one and a branch of theology such as theodicy.
