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CHAPTER 1
Christ and the Crocodiles
Suffering and the Goodness of God in Contemporary Perspective
ROBERT W. YARBROUGH
Even newspaper brevity could not hide the harrowing nature of what happened in Costa Rica in early May 2007. A thirteen-year-old boy was wading in a placid lagoon. Suddenly he screamed. A crocodile's jaws had closed on his leg. Like a rag doll he was whisked beneath the water. He surfaced just once. Witnesses say he called to his older brother, "Adios, Pablito." He blurted out to horrified onlookers never to swim there again. Then there were only ripples.
One report observed that crocodiles do not normally chase and assault their prey. They just lie motionless until something blunders within their kill zone. Another report stated that crocodile attacks are fairly common in Central America and Mexico. An Internet search will readily turn up reports of fatal incidents in Africa, Australia, and elsewhere.
Hardly less unnerving, particularly if you happen to be a parent, is a June 2007 report from North America. A family of four was asleep in their tent in a Utah campground: dad, mom, and two brothers, ages eleven and six. In the dark of night the eleven-year-old was heard to scream, "Something's dragging me!" The frantic parents suspected a violent abduction. Only hours later did they realize that a black bear had slit an opening in the tent with a claw or tooth, sunk its fangs into the nearest occupant, and fled with its flailing booty still in the sleeping bag. The boy's lifeless body was eventually found a quarter-mile away.
The victim's grandfather, according to news reports, agonized: "We're trying to make sense of this. ... It's something that just doesn't make sense. ... Some things you're prepared for, but we weren't prepared for news that our grandson and child was killed by a bear. That's one of the hardest things we're struggling with — the nonsensical nature of this tragedy."
In this age of Internet connectivity we are aware of life's incomprehensible cruelties like never before. Sometimes we hear such shocking news within minutes of its occurrence. We even glimpse it live if a videocam or camera phone is at the scene. Most of us have images of the December 2004 tsunami, caught on film under blue skies amid white beaches and palm trees during Christmas holidays, seared in our memories. About 230,000 souls departed this earth within scant hours. Terrible! Yet more people died of AIDS in a single nation (South Africa) in the next year (2005) than in the tsunami. The world is full of the wails of the suffering and perishing to an extent humans can hardly quantify, let alone comprehend. Like the stunned grandfather above, at times all we can do is stop, ponder the ailing and dead, and wrestle with the question, why?
This points to the contemporary significance of the issue of suffering: we cannot escape the fact that it nips at humanity's flanks in all locales and at all hours. Too frequently the nip is a vicious bite that finds the jugular. And natural disaster, whether a tsunami or a wild animal, is just a small part of the picture. All too much suffering has a direct connection to human intention or negligence: beatings and murders, skirmishes and wars, robberies and riots, tortures and rapes, displacements and bombings, plagues and famines and genocides resulting from human malice. Or take just a single disease: on the day you read this, about 2,500 people will die of malaria, "most of them under age five, the vast majority living in Africa. That's more than twice the annual toll of a generation ago." Each year one million people die of malaria, and the number is rising. As world population increases, so does suffering.
At the same time, the Christian church around the world and through the ages has the charge of believing and proclaiming the excellencies of a good and loving God, who they claim created this world and whom they profess to love and joyfully commend to others. The juxtaposition of these conflicting claims — the empirical claim of daily calamity on a global scale, and the confessional claim of God's present and eternal benevolence — touches off the turbulence that this volume explores. By way of introduction, this chapter will unfold eleven theses on suffering's significance in a world created and ultimately redeemed by the God of historic Christian confession. The cumulative argument will be that suffering must be in the foreground, not the background, of robust Christian awareness today. Yet far from jeopardizing the credibility of claims of God's goodness, it serves to highlight those claims and draw us toward the God who makes them.
Thesis 1: Suffering Is Neither Good nor Completely Explicable
Current world threats and conditions have given rise to acute consciousness of the human plight. It is therefore understandable that books addressing suffering abound. A quick Amazon.com check will list dozens, with new ones appearing steadily. More than a few of these give the impression that, seen from the right perspective, suffering is actually not all that bad and in fact may just be an illusion. Alongside this move may come the claim to explain (away) suffering to a significant degree — to give a coherent account of its origin, causes, or purposes such that its scandal is essentially dispersed by proper exercise of reason, faith, or some combination of these. I recall a pastor being asked in a Bible study class why God allows sickness and death to come to the people we love and need. His quick and unflinching reply: to bring glory to himself. Maybe there was a history to this exchange between pastor and church member that I was missing, but the tone and implied substance of the reply struck me as pastorally unwise and theologically underdeveloped. (For more on suffering and God's glory see Thesis 6, below.)
Something is afoot in the world that is on a collision course with God's wrath, which may be as inscrutable, finally, as the suffering God permits. The Bible uses many words to point to this something: sin, evil, wrongdoing, lawlessness, transgression, suffering, death. Scripture also refers to a superhuman being intimately connected with all that exalts itself against God and delights in defying his truth and trashing his creation: the Devil, the Evil One, Satan, the ruler of this age, the Father of Lies, and the father of murder. The existence of sin and the Devil, and God's ongoing determination to root them out and finally destroy them, are reminders that a primary existential calling card of this world's fallenness — human suffering — is not in itself good. Of course God can use it for good purposes and unerringly does so. But suffering in itself is not a good thing — as we realize when suffering invades, infects, and affects our lives personally.
If suffering is not something blithely to be called "good," neither should we allege that it is fully understandable. The enormity of human agony associated with either individual or collective experiences of suffering rightly leaves the godliest of persons scratching their heads, if not howling in misery and perhaps repenting in sackcloth and ashes (see the book of Job). Such agony has driven many to suicide in despair. Why did God permit or cause the tsunami, or in another era the Holocaust? Why the woe of Hurricane Katrina? Why the maimed veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars and of dozens of previous military actions? Why the human carnage on the ground in the lands in which those wars were and are being fought? Why Joni Eareckson Tada's paralysis, or fifteen million AIDS orphans in Africa? Even Jesus asked a question about the mystery of sin and suffering: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matt. 27:46). How much more should we decline to claim for ourselves a reasoned, settled mastery of suffering, its causes and purposes, and its effects?
Thesis 2: Suffering in Itself Is No Validation of Religious Truth
The Baal prophets oozed blood from self-inflicted wounds (1 Kings 18). Jesus spoke of agonized self-denial that advertised itself (Matt. 6:16) and Paul of self-immolation by burning (1 Cor. 13:3). The quasi-religious Stoics of antiquity upheld suicide as a noble trump card for making a rational statement in the face of cosmic adversity. Many religious assertions are backed by reports of individual or collective suffering for the sake of the cause. Mormons recall the opposition they and their early leaders faced, for example, in Illinois and Missouri. Certain Muslim groups can point to present or historic sufferings to bolster their claims about proper politico-religious order in Islam. Real or perceived unjust suffering at Israeli or US-British hands may be used to justify suicide bombings at least partially in the name of religious interests.
This volume will study and at times commend suffering as a possible condition or entailment of a living faith in Jesus Christ. But it should be understood that suffering in itself, although commanded and modeled by Jesus, is by no means always a token of faithful Christian discipleship. There are many reasons for this. Our suffering may be brought on by our own folly rather than noble decisions or actions. Ministers who molest children cannot plead the sanctity of their vocation to avoid a prison sentence. Or our suffering may be the result of false religious claims, not true ones. A theology professor who loses his job for teaching that is way off base may be getting his just deserts. Or our suffering may be the result of immaturity or bad judgment or self-righteousness. A youthful church staff member who is dismissed for upbraiding the congregation during Sunday morning worship could be serving as a courageous prophet — but she could also be giving in to petty anger, a rebellious spirit, and an unwillingness to trust the Lord of the church regarding matters for which she has no business condemning others.
The point here is that keen discernment is required for accurate assessment of suffering. It is not as easy as saying, "I suffer for these convictions; therefore, these convictions are sound." That could be the case. But those words could also be delusional. In an era like ours, where both suffering and demands to be heard based upon it are ubiquitous, careful reflection guided by Scripture's teaching, God's personal guidance, and the collective wisdom of God's people are essential. Hence this book.
Thesis 3: Accounting for Suffering Is Forced upon Us by Our Times
This book originates in the United States, a land of relative security and affluence. There have been decades within living memory where North Americans, most of us healthy, well-fed, and gainfully employed, could live relatively untouched by acute personal consciousness of many kinds and dimensions of suffering. Starvation, imprisonment for Christian faith, and being "tortured for Christ" (the title of Richard Wurmbrand's famous book) have sounded distant, exotic, and vaguely unnecessary. Naivete and obliviousness to suffering, especially by Christians for their faith in Jesus, probably should never have been so prevalent in the North American church, composed of ostensible followers of Jesus, who took up a cross and taught his disciples to do likewise. But suffering has been widely overlooked or suppressed, as in too many quarters it continues to be.
The days are now over for this mentality to be countenanced. A summer 2007 edition of a national newsweekly, for example, carried a four-page ad for The Voice of the Martyrs smack in the middle. There were two tear-out cards. Anyone with a mailing address can request a free monthly newsletter. Much the same information and offer appeared in the July 2007 Reader's Digest. Anyone with Internet access can visit www.persecution.com and find out more than enough to break even a stony heart. (Just google "Christian persecution" for numerous other sites.) Anyone with a conscience and a sense of urgency to honor Christ can find multiple ways to become aware of, and respond to, the dire, ongoing, and increasing human misery and need.
The point is that what the din and self-preoccupation of the American way of life (often equating to pursuit of material security and self-indulgence, measured by gospel standards) may formerly have obscured — the terrible suffering of persecution — has now gone mainstream. There is no excuse for pastors or churchgoers failing to wrestle with our and my obligation to put a shoulder to the wheel of the task of selfless and long-term Christian response — and perhaps even personal exposure — to suffering for Christ's sake.
Nor can we reduce the task here to responsiveness to only Christian suffering. Jesus wept over Jerusalem, not just for followers who he knew would suffer for his name. The problem of suffering includes but extends beyond the circles where fellow Christians are especially affected. It may be that our collective will to embrace this issue with moral seriousness will prove to be either our salvation or our undoing. It may be, for example, that the responsiveness of upcoming generations — believers between, say, childhood and young adulthood — to the gospel message propounded by their parents and leaders hinges largely on the urgency with which we respond to the suffering that cries out to us from every direction and emerges from the shadows of our own lives. Will we encourage the young to a response that will move beyond the probably pitiable foundation we may manage to lay? Or will we, like contemporaries of Jesus, be guilty of raising a generation who are twice as much children of hell as we are (Matt. 23:15)? To flinch or take umbrage at this question probably indicates lack of knowledge of the enormity of the task at hand. It could also indicate self-righteousness in the face of crisis that should long since have driven us to profound repentance and transformed life direction.
Thesis 4: Suffering May Be a Stumbling Block to Gospel Reception
One impediment to suffering getting due attention in some quarters is lack of awareness of its corrosive effect, in principle, on people's receptivity to the saving gospel message. In early Christian centuries the suffering caused by earthquakes, plagues, and other calamities was actually blamed on Christians, who were sometimes hounded and punished for their presumed destructive mischief. Suffering served to impede reception of the Christian message. In more recent times, the Lisbon earthquake (1755) shook the faith of Europe as it claimed the lives of perhaps one-third of Lisbon's 275,000 inhabitants. It took place on November 1, All Saints' Day, a religious holiday when many would have attended mass. Philosophers of immense influence like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Kant concluded that the notion of a benevolent God directly superintending all human affairs was no longer tenable. This conviction persists today among many, from the unlettered to the intellectual elite.
The catastrophic loss of life in the trenches of World War I and the historically unprecedented brutality of new war technology (machine guns, high explosives, chlorine gas) are widely credited with shattering the cultural optimism of Europe and prompting a turn away from Christian or even theistic belief in Western intellectual culture, including the United States. World War II brought its own set of moral monstrosities, as wars always do — but with the unique features of the Holocaust and then the atomic bomb detonations in Japan. Looking back on the twentieth century as a whole, it is indeed justified to speak of "a century of horrors."
North America has been untouched by the devastation of its cities, countryside, and population that many other nations of the world have experienced in recent generations. This may account, in part, for why a much larger percent of the population here still attends church than in other nations. We may well be thankful that we have been spared so much grief. At the same time, we should not let our good fortune make us callous to the effect of suffering on most of the world's population. We are a land still rich in the presence of churches and denominations that are committed, in principle, to sending the light of the Christian message to all peoples, locally and beyond. But we will be hamstrung in our mission to the extent that an overly rosy view of life and God, derived from our relative freedom from destitution and suffering on the scale common elsewhere, infects and distorts our theological reasoning and outreach. Historically this has sometimes taken the form of a hypocrisy eager to preach the salvation of souls but too stingy to address listeners' material needs as well.
To summarize, the problem of suffering may seem distant to us, whose "suffering" may arise chiefly every decade or two when we or a loved one receives an unfavorable medical report. We need to open our eyes to a larger historical and geographical context. We cannot pray for, speak to, and serve with integrity alongside Christians of our era worldwide if we underestimate the relevance of suffering to all we seek to do in Jesus' name. We will either lack motivation for radical discipleship, not being gripped by and possibly sharing in the pain of others elsewhere, or we will tend to propagate and export a distorted rendering of the gospel, one that comports with our prosperous setting but does not ring true among the majority of the world's peoples, who on a daily basis live close to bare survival's jagged edge.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Suffering and the Goodness of God"
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Copyright © 2008 Christopher W. Morgan and Robert A. Peterson.
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