Providence, Evil, and Suffering: Assignment 1"God is all-powerful, God is just, and people suffer." How can this be? This is the problem of theodicy, as summarized by Daniel Harrington. Let me add for emphasis: God is loving, and innocents agonize and perish at the hands of evil-doers.
The is the very stuff of cognitive dissonance. For many people, the easiest thing is to deny one of the terms of the propositions, for example: "There is no God," or "There are no innocents." The first is a theology of atheism, and need not worry us further at the moment. The second in essence captures the "law of retribution" that Harrington describes. Bad things don't happen to good people, they happen to bad people and it's no more than they deserve, really. The Judeo-Christian tradition is hardly the only one to flirt with this notion, rooted as it is in both observational experience and common sense; sooner or later, the idea goes, karma's gonna get ya. The cosmic tit for tat will prevail.
Except, of course, when it doesn't. At least not so's you'd notice. It's not enough that bad things happen to good people (like Job); good things also happen to bad people. We can all think of the examples of the person who lied and cheated and
whose career was enhanced by it, who embezzled from a poor widow and
lived happily ever after in Antigua on the proceeds, who raped a nation and
died peacefully in bed, surrounded by a loving family. "I will repay," says the Lord, and we try to figure out how that might actually happen. The appearance, in theology, of an afterlife of either punishment or reward seems overtly driven by a desire to see the "law of retribution" fulfilled more reliably and thoroughly, and in a way that it patently is not during our natural lives.
The Book of Job sets up this curious scenario, where God "tests" Job seemingly on a whim, or to score a point against the Adversary. It seems like a pretty slim thread upon which to justly hang such misery. This is hardly a God whom one is inspired to worship because of his loving-kindness. Job's friends come up with 600 hundred ways of saying the same thing: surely his suffering is just deserts for sin (and if he claims he hasn't sinned, well that's probably a sin itself, punishable by boils at the very least). His friends all eventually wind up saying it must be his fault, and they all ultimately lay at his feet the responsibility for fixing it. When God does finally deign to justify his ways to Job, his argument boils down to a simple proposition: I'M BIGGER THAN YOU (with a side of "Do you really want to question ME? Think carefully before you answer." *whiff of brimstone*).
In fact the godly bullying is followed by a strange sort of amnesiac reparation: one herd of cattle is very much like another, and apparently children and loved ones are pretty much interchangeable as well. Job gets a new set and all's well that ends well. No lingering trauma, it's all good. The depiction of Job's innocent outrage and despair is both recognizable and psychologically convincing, and even his final response to the frankly abusive behavior of God (smack you around and then praise you and give you flowers) is like that of a traumatized wife who rationalizes that her husband's cruel behavior must have a good reason ("he's testing me!" "I drove him to it!"), even if she can't truly imagine what it might be. Since I consider the deliberate, intentional infliction of suffering upon the blameless to be the very definition of evil, the Book of Job does little to assuage my theological concerns.
I wonder whether science will eventually provide us with an explanation of evil that shows that, in the end, it is not qualitatively different from — but rather an extension and consequence of — the "shadow side" of creation. Because we consider that evil-doers choose to do evil, to cause harm, to inflict pain and suffering, we think of evil as being something wholly different from the impersonal, 'natural' causes of suffering (e.g., death, illness, disaster). Yet the circumstances and innate (organic?) capacities that condition the perpetrator's state of mind and propel his actions may ultimately be just as attributable to "natural causes." We already have reason to question just how free our free will is. I'm not at all sure, however, that (
pace Pascal) even if we fully understand the causes of evil behavior that we will be ready to forgive it. That will probably still be God's province.
Readings:
Why do we suffer? by Daniel Harrington, S.J., Sheed & Ward: Franklin, Wisconsin, 2000.
Facing Evil, eds. Paul Woodruff and Harry A. Wilmer, Open Court: Chicago and La Salle, Illinois, 2001.
Labels: theology, writing
