The Patience of Faith 2: the Longsuffering b)

That we exist within time is a hidden aspect of the traditional debates about the problem of suffering and evil. We experience evil and suffering as deeply problematic in relation to faith in God because on the one hand we have the expectation of Beckett’s audience that a beginning will lead to an end, and on the other we cannot envisage a ‘solution’ or a ‘remedy’ occurring within the span of life we have to lead. Three score years and ten is the  length by which we tend to measure time; that we have this habit is evidence merely of the framing of all our experiences by our bodily existence in the world. 

And yet the writers of Scripture know this already. I find it remarkable how the debate about the problem of evil goes on as if the Bible knows nothing of it at all – as if the Bible were written from a great height. But suffering and evil are deeply troubling to the writers of what we call the Word of God. They write not from some point of eternity, but in the midst of time. History swirls around them as they work. They record genocide, murder, tyranny and rape. They tell of the exploitation of the poor and the desecration of sacred spaces. They know what it is like to call out ‘my God, my God, why?’ They plead with God to make good his claim to sovereignty over history and to moral purity and goodness. The Bible is a messy book, stained with the many tears of its authors who wept not only over the sins of the people of God but also with bewilderment at God’s inaction. 

This isn’t the whole story of course: the Bible is, at the same time as it is a recognition of the sense of bewilderment at God’s absence and inaction, also a testimony about God’s active presence and his promise to come again. A faith such as the one we encounter in the pages of the Bible is not going to be a belief that pretends that evil and suffering don’t exist. Neither is Biblical faith the sort of faith that minimizes the impact of suffering by saying something glib like ‘it’ll all work out in the end’. 

This is the difficulty with the two standard defences against the problem of evil offered by Christians – Augustine’s ‘free-will’ defence, and Irenaeus’ ‘soul-making’ defence. Augustine (in very brief) argued that the good of giving us free-will outweighed the bad of having us harm each other and suffer harm. The Irenaean argument (likewise in very brief) claims that suffering and evil are necessary in some way to human moral development – a process which is at the present time unfinished. Both of these arguments involve us in making the highly problematic claim that God intends to bring about a good by means of evil and suffering. Even though Augustine could see the problem with making evil something necessary for the ultimate good, it is hard to see how his theodicy escapes this problem. The pastoral problem this argument causes highlights just how inadequate it is. If you have heard a well-meaning relative say to a teenager whose father has just been killed ‘God has some higher purpose in this’ (as I have) you’ll know what I mean. 

Irenaeus’ solution at least has the advantage of pointing us towards an unseen future. Some ultimate purpose justifies this penultimate experience of pain, in this view. This is something like the Biblical answer, though the Bible writers don’t attempt the justification. What the Bible does with evil and suffering does not amount to a justification for them, as if they are necessary to the whole plan of the universe – as if the creation included the fall already within it. That line of thought leaves us with a monstrous God, or none at all. The Bible simply recognizes the existence of evil and suffering and turns us to the character of God, which is revealed to us in what he does in history to make himself a people and live in a loving proximity to them.