From Our Archives

Debie Thomas, What Must I Do? (2021); Debie Thomas, The God of Change (2018).

This Week's Essay

At the Democratic National Convention on August 21, Jonathan Polin and Rachel Goldberg gave a deeply human and remarkably non-partisan speech about their son Hersh. He was one of the 251 hostages from 29 countries who were abducted by Hamas on October 7, 2023. People from 40 countries were massacred that day — "every single one of them a treasured human being," said Rachel. "There's a surplus of agony on all sides of the conflict in the Middle East," said Jon, "and in a competition of pain, there are no winners." Ten days later, Hamas murdered Hersh and five other hostages.

Our surplus of agony is why many people lose their faith. During his last two years of college at Princeton, the American political philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002) considered studying for the Episcopal priesthood. That was before he fought in World War II as an infantryman, and before he saw Hiroshima after it had been bombed. Before he heard a pastor preach that God used Allied weapons to kill the Japanese and protect the Allies. And then after the war, Rawls was deeply shaken to learn about the Holocaust.

The surplus of agony in World War II, in which 50 million "treasured human beings" perished, made Rawls doubt any connection between human prayer and divine providence: "How could I pray and ask God to help me, or my family, or my country, or any other cherished thing I care about, when God would not save millions of Jews from Hitler?" In the end, Rawls lost his Christian faith. He found it impossible to reconcile the perfect will of God with the violence of humanity.

If you look at the lectionary you'll see that it assigns the book of Job for all four Sundays in October. It's like we can't escape the perennial questions about the problem of evil. Job longs to plead with God, to state his case before him, and to protest his unjust suffering. He knows that God is righteous and that he would hear the cry of an innocent person.

But there's a problem — he can't find God, and he doesn't know where to look for him. Job searches up, down, left, and right, but God feels absent and he feels abandoned. "If I go to the east, he is not there; if I go to the west, I do not find him. When he is at work in the north, I do not see him; when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him" (Job 23:8–9). Using his spiritual compass to detect some hint of divine activity, Job can't determine the truth north of God's presence.       

Civil War in Sudan.

I take some consolation from Job's cries of anguish, which are really authentic expressions of faith. The same is true for the other readings this week — Psalm 22's cry of dereliction, Amos's protest about how the rich "trample" the poor, Psalm 90's description of the futility of our brief lives, which are "filled with trouble and sorrow," and the affirmation in Hebrews 4:15 that God sympathizes with our many weaknesses. 

But having given the problem of evil and our surplus of agony its due respect, we shouldn't overstate the case. Many people who have suffered much have held fast to their faith. Consider just two examples.

In his book God's Universe (2006), the Harvard astronomer Owen Gingerich (1930–2023) acknowledged that we all have "questions without answers." When he was seventeen, his only brother was killed by a car while delivering newspapers on his bike. Decades later, in one of the last entries in his diary, Gingerich's devout Mennonite father still agonized over why God would allow such a tragedy to befall his teenage son. But like his devout father, Gingerich remained a deeply committed believer.

Similarly, in his book The Language of God (2006), Francis Collins, the former head of the Human Genome Project and the National Institutes of Health, writes about his daughter's rape and how it challenges his faith even today. Why did God not intervene to protect his daughter? Why was the perpetrator never caught and brought to justice? 

Palestinian refugees in Gaza.

Whereas Rawls lost his faith, Gingerich and Collins did not; they held fast to their Christian confession. Forfeiting your faith does nothing to solve the problem of evil. The problem of evil remains for every person and world view. Some people have even argued that whereas the problem of evil is difficult to reconcile with believing in a good God, the problem of good becomes impossible when we don't. 

Our world is neither purely good nor only evil, neither all black or all white. Rather, it contains black, white, and many shades of gray, much light but many shadows. Job's unjust suffering rightly troubles us, as does mass starvation and displacement in Sudan, or the billions of people who barely subsist on a few dollars per day and die because they lack clean water. But just as mysterious are human altruism, our unimaginably vast, complex, and finely-tuned cosmos that gave rise to intelligent life that can ask those "questions without answers," human conscience, and breath-taking beauty.

In his poem Pied Beauty the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) described our world as "dappled." 

Glory be to God for dappled things —
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced — fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Hopkins finds God's presence even in "dappled things" — things mottled as well as uniform, crooked as well as straight, sweet as well as sour, blemished as well as beautiful, surprising as well as predictable, and, yes, in things painful as well as pleasurable. God does act in our imperfect, irregular, dappled world, and in our frail personal lives, says Gingerich, "but not always in the ways most obvious to our blinkered vision." This became "excruciatingly clear," he notes, in Psalm 22 for this week, which centuries later Christians recounted hearing from the parched, cracked lips of Jesus who screamed, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning?" (Psalm 22:1). 

In that anguished cry of dereliction, though, in some mysterious way, God was in Christ reconciling the dappled cosmos to himself. Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274) gave us the startling phrase “O felix culpa!” in reference to the fall of Adam. “O fortunate crime!” The fall of Adam as a blessing? Sin and evil, however radical and ugly, are the occasion for something far greater — the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Jesus. God uses our sin, suffering, and even satan himself for his purposes of goodness, so that St. Augustine writes, “God judged it better to bring good out of evil, than to allow no evil to exist.”

Ukrainian refugees.

Some people look at our dappled world and see only blind chance. In this view, humanity would seem to be an unimaginably lucky accident resulting from 15 billion years of random events, void of any transcendent meaning or purpose. Such genuinely consistent atheism, though, comes at a high cost. In his book Nothing To Be Frightened Of (2008), the British novelist and atheist Julian Barnes wonders whether he can honestly assign any meaning to his personal story given his disbelief in God. Does his life enjoy a genuine narrative? Or is it only a random sequence of events that ends with total extinction, such that any and all meaning-making is what he admits is pure "confabulation?"

Others follow Hopkins and amidst the dappled shadows see God's action in human history. God, as believers like Gingerich, Collins, and Hopkins understand him, is not merely a Cosmic Other who flung the stars into space. He's not a what but a who, a someone and not merely a something, a personal redeemer who loves us in what the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber called an I-Thou relationship. 

The New Testament reading this week reminds us that in Jesus "we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted and tried in every way, just as we are — yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need." (Hebrews 4:15–16). 

Weekly Prayer

Psalm 22

¹ My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
    Why are you so far from saving me,
    so far from my cries of anguish?
² My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
    by night, but I find no rest.^[b]

³ Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One;
    you are the one Israel praises.^[c]
4 In you our ancestors put their trust;
    they trusted and you delivered them.
⁵ To you they cried out and were saved;
    in you they trusted and were not put to shame.

⁶ But I am a worm and not a man,
    scorned by everyone, despised by the people.
⁷ All who see me mock me;
    they hurl insults, shaking their heads.
⁸ “He trusts in the Lord,” they say,
    “let the Lord rescue him.
Let him deliver him,
    since he delights in him.”

⁹ Yet you brought me out of the womb;
    you made me trust in you, even at my mother’s breast.
¹⁰ From birth I was cast on you;
    from my mother’s womb you have been my God.

¹¹ Do not be far from me,
    for trouble is near
    and there is no one to help.

¹² Many bulls surround me;
    strong bulls of Bashan encircle me.
¹³ Roaring lions that tear their prey
    open their mouths wide against me.
¹⁴ I am poured out like water,
    and all my bones are out of joint.
My heart has turned to wax;
    it has melted within me.
¹⁵ My mouth^[d] is dried up like a potsherd,
    and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;
    you lay me in the dust of death.

¹⁶ Dogs surround me,
    a pack of villains encircles me;
    they pierce^[e] my hands and my feet.
¹⁷ All my bones are on display;
    people stare and gloat over me.
¹⁸ They divide my clothes among them
    and cast lots for my garment.

¹⁹ But you, Lord, do not be far from me.
    You are my strength; come quickly to help me.
²⁰ Deliver me from the sword,
    my precious life from the power of the dogs.
²¹ Rescue me from the mouth of the lions;
    save me from the horns of the wild oxen.

²² I will declare your name to my people;
    in the assembly I will praise you.
²³ You who fear the Lord, praise him!
    All you descendants of Jacob, honor him!
    Revere him, all you descendants of Israel!
²⁴ For he has not despised or scorned
    the suffering of the afflicted one;
he has not hidden his face from him
    but has listened to his cry for help.

²⁵ From you comes the theme of my praise in the great assembly;
    before those who fear you^[f] I will fulfill my vows.
²⁶ The poor will eat and be satisfied;
    those who seek the Lord will praise him—
    may your hearts live forever!

²⁷ All the ends of the earth
    will remember and turn to the Lord,
and all the families of the nations
    will bow down before him,
²⁸ for dominion belongs to the Lord
    and he rules over the nations.

²⁹ All the rich of the earth will feast and worship;
    all who go down to the dust will kneel before him—
    those who cannot keep themselves alive.
³⁰ Posterity will serve him;
    future generations will be told about the Lord.
³¹ They will proclaim his righteousness,
    declaring to a people yet unborn:
    He has done it!

Dan Clendenin: dan@journeywithjesus.net

Image credits: (1) United States Institute of Peace; (2) The Japan Times; and (3) The Brookings Institution.