God, Suffering and Evil: Part Three

Since I am a student of the Bible, I study  its texts for clues.  The Biblical texts provide a variety of responses to the question of the justice of God.  These responses work and do not work.  By “work” I mean that these explanations make sense to our experience.  Of course, this statement immediately raises the question, does it matter if it makes sense to our senses? But, let’s examine the responses anyway.  By the way, a new book just out from Fortress Press by Mark S. M. Scott, Pathways in Theodicy, does a nice job of covering the varying theodicies (theodicy=the justice of God, justifying God in the face of suffering and evil) including their strengths and weaknesses.

Free will defense:  The Biblical stories give us the impression that human beings were created by God with the freedom to make moral choices,  to obey or disobey the commandments of God.  Not only do people have this freedom, but they use it to do what they want to do and what they think is right.  If they do what is wrong, that is certainly not God’s fault.  When they do what is wrong, humans are the responsible party since they have free will.  Parts of this response make some sense to our modern ears.  Each and every day we see people make choices and by the choices they make they decide what their lives will be about.  If an automobile driver has been drinking too much, crashes his vehicle into another car, killing a number of people, we think this is tragic but we certainly would not blame God.  We understand that the man driving drunk is responsible.  He had free will and chose to drink and drive.  On the other hand, the young student at the beginning of this essay, who concluded that his life was not worth living also made a choice.  But was it a free choice?  Was he completely free or in some way mentally ill?  Given his tortured state of mind, wasn’t God morally obligated to interfere despite God’s commitment to free will?  Another problematic example:  A mother is walking with her seven year old child on the street.  She has brought up the child to be independent and responsible.  She believes that every child has free will.  As they are walking on the street one day, some boys are playing ball and the child sees the ball fall into the street.  Instinctively, the child darts into the street to retrieve the ball.  The mother quickly notices that the child is about to be hit by a passing car.  What should she do?  Should she say, I see that my child is about to be hit by that car but I believe in free and responsible will , so I cannot interfere?  Or does she run into the street and save her child?  Most of us know what she should do.  Free will is fine but is it a legitimate reason that should  prevent God from acting in the world?  To my mind, limited and self serving as it is, God is morally obligated to act on behalf of those incapable of acting on their own. The free will defense of God works and does not work.

Retribution:  The Biblical text, particularly in the Book of Deuteronomy declares that those that follow the commandments of God will prosper and those who do not obey God’s laws will be cursed.  This response or explanation of the way God works in the world seems to be true.  You shall reap what you sow.  What goes around comes around.  Indeed it seems today to be true that many who do wrong are found out and visited by punishment in all sorts of forms.   And those who do right succeed in life.   This response seems to work.  But, it is not always so.  And the Biblical text in the Book of Job argues with this retribution explanation.  Job is an innocent man who is made to suffer terrible calamities.  He protests, questions and accuses his God of wrongdoing.  Job is eventually told by that God that he is right to question and accuse and his religious friends are wrong to defend their notion of retribution.  The fact is: there are many in the world who suffer evil who have not done anything to merit the pain and suffering they are forced to undergo.  In point of fact there are many innocent victims throughout history that bear witness to the inadequacy of the retribution response.  Retribution works and  it does not work.

God, Suffering and Evil: Part Two

As a Jew, I am certainly not alone in my wrestling with and about God.   Thousands of years ago the writers of the Jewish Bible also wrestled with these questions.  I studied these stories: Abraham questioning the justice of  God, Jacob wrestling with the God in the middle of the night, Moses puzzled about God’s methodology, Job questioning and accusing God of wrongdoing, Jeremiah disputing with God about the ethics of his calling. I immersed myself in the laments of the Psalter.  Over one third of these prayers are  made up of questions addressed to God.  I even wrote a doctoral dissertation on these laments.  But there was a difference  For all of their questions, the biblical writers would not or could not conclude that there was no God.  As the text asserts, “The fool says in his heart there is no God.” (Psalm 14:1) The writers of the Bible looked at and experienced  the nature of the world and trusted in God despite. And right there was the real difference.  They experienced the world and trusted despite.  So many Rabbis throughout Jewish tradition were able to trust God despite, in spite and even to spite God.  

I experience the world today as a modern person  and sometimes conclude that there is no God.  Am I wise or a fool?  

News!

There are three new things on my blog this morning. To the right there is a link to subscribe my email if you wish. At the top is a new tab called 'Ask Dr. Haar' where I invite you to post your burning questions about  religious topics and I will respond to the best of my ability. There is also a new post below, which is the first in a five part series about God, Suffering and Evil. As always, I welcome your comments and questions. Thanks for reading and thinking with me. Stay sane out there!

God, Suffering and Evil: Part One

Today I'm posting the first of a five part series on God, Suffering and Evil. As always, I welcome your comments and questions. 

As I write these words on a December afternoon in 2014, I am aware that one of my students has committed suicide this morning.  This has happened before and it is always very sad.  A student overdoses, drinks too much, becomes so overwhelmed with his life, his mind, his memories, his depression, and decides there is no other way out.  It is sad indeed.  As a religious person who wants to believe that there is a God, I wonder what goes on inside the divine mind when a young man so full of promise kills himself.  I know all about the free will defense of God (how God has given people free will and so can no longer interfere in their decisions).  But I still cannot help but ask: How can a God, who in any shape, way or form speaks about loving his people, not be moved to act?

Growing up in New York, my parents always encouraged me to be a good Jew and a good American.  But they did not tell me how to do that.  Today, as a 66 year old man I continue to wrestle with their admonition, particularly when it comes to God. When I was 10 years old, I attended YMHA (Young Mens Hebrew Association) day camp.  On the bus ride to the camp in New Jersey we heartily sang the song, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”   I close my eyes today and I am on the bus, going to camp singing the song.  I was Jewish and American and it all held together quite well. But today, that is  no longer true.

I understand myself to be a modern Jew.  What that means is that I am immersed in both the traditions of modernity and Judaism and trying to figure out what that means.  As a modern person, I primarily see and hear myself as an “I” who walks around with my own reason deciding day in and day out what I think is true and right and what is false and wrong.  As an American,  I believe that I have the right to think as I would like and do what I think is right within the bounds of the law.  And as a thinking modern individual, a part of my brain has concluded that God does not seem to be a reality in my life or in the world.  I experience daily all sorts of joys and pains, no less, no more than anyone else.  

My parents, both Holocaust survivors, died of pancreatic cancer with all the pain and misery that goes with that.  If there is a God at work in my life, it is difficult to discern where and how that God operates.  The word coincidence easily trumps or explains away any notions of divine design. in my own life  Religious traditions seem to be human creations or constructions that speak more about human hopes and fantasies than any real divine reality. I am encouraged to think this way by my education, my technological and scientific culture, my historical study of events, particularly the Holocaust and my own day to day experience of the world.  I am a walking and floating “I” alone in an absurd, random and meaningless world or so it seems.

But, I also understand myself to be a Jew who lives in the modern world.  As a boy, for about six years, I attended a Yeshiva (Jewish parochial school) where I was taught God is real and becomes real to us through the Torah.  I was also taught that Jews are not merely individuals, but they are part of a community, the Jewish people.  When I was 13 years old I became a Bar-Mitzvah, a son of the commandment, a responsible member of the community.  I was taught that “we do not know who God is but we do know what God wants.”  And God wants us to follow the laws of the Torah.  God was pictured to us in Yeshiva as a holy mystery whose name was so mysterious that it could not even be spoken out loud.  In fact, my Rabbis called him Ha Shem, the Name.  We could not say much about who he was in himself but we could and did study and argue about how to best live out God’s laws.  God was beyond human comprehension.  God was the mystery of mysteries.  God inscrutably worked in human history.  The main message was: God is God and  you are not!  Obey the Torah and you will be doing what God wants you to do.

It was only a matter of time before there was a collision between these two ways of looking at the world.   For me the collision came when I first read Elie Wiesel’s book, Night.  Here was a religious Jew who captured the spiritual madness or craziness of being modern and religious.  Wiesel was a young boy in a Nazi concentration camp who believed that God was the protector of the Jewish people.  Soon, he hoped, God would come to vanquish the Nazis.  Soon, God would remember his promises to the Jewish people.  In a few moments the Jewish children would be set free from the camps.  But it was not to be.  And Wiesel courageously, I thought, raised  his voice with terrible and frightening questions I had not heard in my synagogue or my yeshiva.  Wiesel’s questions became my questions.  His questions were the right questions.  If God was real and had promised to care for the Jewish people, where was he now?  Why had he remained silent or absent?  What was one to make of the hiddeness of God?  My Jewish world was crumbling and I prayed everyday to God with questions.  But God remained silent.  I became a college teacher of Religion and Jewish studies.  I studied and taught my  Christian students about the Holocaust.  I traveled to Israel, visited and spoke at a conference at Yad Vashem.  I read and I read and I struggled with God.  And the more I studied, the more the collision between being modern and being Jewish became a terrible tension from which I have not be able to escape to this day.  At a certain point I even became a Christian, entered deeply into that faith for a number of years and studied their responses to the problem of evil, but that tradition could not answer my questions nor stop my struggle.  The Christian scripture and tradition does recognize that even after Jesus the world remains a dangerous and uncertain place.  It asserts that regardless of what suffering, pain or evil we are living through, “nothing shall separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  I understood and tried to believe what they were saying: we are accompanied through our experience, and as Jesus died and was raised so we too would die and be raised.  Some even asserted that justice would be taken care of in the afterlife.  But it seemed and seems terribly insufficient given all the suffering and evil of this world.   And I called to mind the haunting words of Rabbi Irving Greenberg :  No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children.

Notes from The Door

The door to my office at Augustana is covered with quotes, sayings, poems and an assortment of other things I find helpful, interesting or meaningful. Throughout the years, a number of you have mentioned how these quotes have been helpful, interesting or meaningful to you as well. So, once a week or so, I will be posting something from my door on this blog in the section entitled "Notes from The Door."   Stay sane out there!