Part Five
The Future: In this particular view unjust suffering and evil are happening all the time. They are part of life and will always be a part of life. But, this view asserts: One day, in the future, God will come and defeat the power of evil. When this will happen is known only to God. In the Jewish tradition some Jews hold that a messiah (anointed one) will come to inaugurate a time of peace throughout the world. They hope that time will be soon. Until that time arrives we are called upon to do Torah each and every day and to wait with patient impatience for God to act. For some, a part of this hope in the future is that while evil is real in our time, in the afterlife, that is in heaven and in hell, everyone will get what they deserve. The advantage of this response to undeserved suffering/evil is that it gives people hope that the pain they are presently experiencing, regardless of what it is, will not last forever. God is real and one day soon God will come and deliver his people and radically change the way the world works. One day the people who have done evil will get their just rewards.
The problem with this view is that while God delays, people pay everyday with the hours and days of their lives. The fact is, some will say, it is too late for Messiahs. Too much unjustified, pain, suffering and evil has occurred in the past two thousand years. These people argue that there is no such thing as a Messiah. No one is coming to save us and waiting around for such a person is a waste of time. Waiting for justice in the afterlife is wishful thinking. We are each better off getting to work and doing what we can where we are to resist suffering and evil. To the extent we do that, we will be the Messiah wherever we live. I am reminded of a comment by Elie Wiesel when he visited Augustana some years ago, that the greatest enemy of the Jews in the concentration camps was hope. They hoped that God would never allow them and their children to be burned in the ovens by the Nazis. They were wrong. The hope for the future works and it does not work.
Strength and Company: This response asserts that unjust absurd suffering and evil are part of life. There is moral and natural evil. The first is caused by human beings. The latter is part of the nature of nature. When God decided to create a world of matter, this world is what you get. God is not able or willing to extricate us from the injustice of our situation. And extrication or salvation is not what God does. What does God do? God gives us strength and courage to endure whatever life brings us. Not only that, God accompanies us through all we have to go through. We are not alone. God is with us. Many people speak of having survived all sorts of suffering and evil because God gave them the wherewithal to walk through the pain and survive. To listen to these stories is to believe the sincerity of the tales. To these people God is real and a present reality. The problem with this view is that there are many persons who go through terrible tragic suffering and either do not survive, or are so damaged by what has happened to them that the rest of their lives are a tortured existence. Many Jews in the concentration camps when asked how they happened to survive will testify that they survived by luck or chance alone. These people even those who were religious, speak of experiencing the silence or hiddeness of God. Many did not have the strength or courage to keep going and they did not feel accompanied. In fact, they questioned and accused God of being indifferent. It appears then that this experience of God is at best inconsistent for some mysterious reason or at worst,wishful thinking. Either way, speaking of God in any reasonable way is problematic. Being accompanied and strengthened by God works and does not work.
Conclusion
There are certainly many variations and modifications for each of these responses but none that has resolved the tension. There are two temptations I struggle to avoid in this situation. I diligently try not to retreat back into my religious tradition in order to hide from the questions. The fact is: God has become problematic. Maybe God was always problematic but we ought not run away from the truth. Whatever God is about is the truth. Faith, prayer and devotion are fine but they are not a medication that reduces the importance of the questions. On the other hand, I am trying to not reject my tradition and capitulate to the cultural notion that there is no God.
So, where to from here.? From a Jewish perspective, we will need to realize that all human language is insufficient. Why so? Because the word, “God” points to that which we cannot control or define. Of course, we will use language but all our words, as the words of our various Bibles, are inevitably inadequate. When we recognize this fact we will be eager to examine and listen to each other’s religious traditions and explanations with humility, in the hope of gleaning some wisdom.
Having said all this it needs to be asserted that for most people it is not easy to live in the tension between modernity and their religious tradition. It has certainly not been easy for me. I have to admit that I continue to “hope against hope” there is a God who in some way is monitoring and interacting with what happens on this earth. And I ask myself why? Why do you so badly want there to be a God? Maybe it is ultimately fear. To think of the world as it is, with all its daily suffering, evil and craziness, being under the purposeful gaze of a God is frightening. To think about such a world without a God is even more frightening.
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