Walking with God through Pain and Suffering

Timothy Keller

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781444750263
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The problem of pain is a perennial one; and for those who undergo particular sufferings it can often be the largest obstacle for trusting in a good and loving God. If such a God exists, why is there so much suffering in the world? And how do we deal with it when it comes into our lives? In his most fullest and most passionately argued book since 2008's bestseller THE REASON FOR GOD, New York pastor and church planter Tim Keller brings his authoritative teaching, sensitivity to contemporary culture and pastoral heart to this pressing question, offering no easy answers but giving guidance, encouragement and inspiration.

PART ONE

Understanding the Furnace

ONE

The Cultures of Suffering

“What’s the point?” my father asked as he lay dying.

Training for Suffering

Suffering seems to destroy so many things that give life meaning that it may feel impossible to even go on. In the last weeks of his life, my father faced a great range of life-ending, painful illnesses all at once. He had congestive heart failure and three kinds of cancer, even as he was dealing with a gall bladder attack, emphysema, and acute sciatica. At one time he said to a friend, “What’s the point?” He was too sick to do the things that made his life meaningful—so why go on? At my father’s funeral, his friend related to us how he gently reminded my father of some basic themes in the Bible. If God had kept him in this world, then there were still some things for him to do for those around him. Jesus was patient under even greater suffering for us, so we can be patient under lesser suffering for him. And heaven will make amends for everything. These brief words, which were expressed in the most compassionate spirit, reconnected my father to Christian beliefs he had known for years. It restored his spirit to face his final days.

We will look at length at those Christian resources later, but at this point, it is necessary only to understand this: Nothing is more important than to learn how to maintain a life of purpose in the midst of painful adversity.

One of the main ways a culture serves its members is by helping them face terrible evil and adversity. Social theorist Max Scheler wrote: “An essential part of the teachings and directives of the great religious and philosophical thinkers the world over has been on the meaning of pain and suffering.” Scheler went on to argue that every society has chosen some version of these teachings so as to give its members “instructions … to encounter suffering correctly—to suffer properly (or to move suffering to another plane.)”¹² Sociologists and anthropologists have analyzed and compared the various ways that cultures train its members for grief, pain, and loss. And when this comparison is done, it is often noted that our own contemporary secular, Western culture is one of the weakest and worst in history at doing so.

All human beings are driven by “an inner compulsion to understand the world as a meaningful cosmos and to take a position toward it.”¹³ And that goes for suffering, too. Anthropologist Richard Shweder writes: “Human beings apparently want to be edified by their miseries.”¹⁴ Sociologist Peter Berger writes, every culture has provided an “explanation of human events that bestows meaning upon the experiences of suffering and evil.”¹⁵ Notice Berger did not say people are taught that suffering itself is good or meaningful. (This has been attempted at various times, but observers have rightly called those approaches forms of philosophical masochism.) What Berger means rather is that it is important for people to see how the experience of suffering does not have to be a waste, and could be a meaningful though painful way to live life well.

Because of this deep human “inner compulsion,” every culture either must help its people face suffering or risk a loss of its credibility. When no explanation at all is given—when suffering is perceived as simply senseless, a complete waste, and inescapable—victims can develop a deep, undying anger and poisonous hate that was called ressentiment by Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, and others.¹⁶ This ressentiment can lead to serious social instability. And so, to use sociological language, every society must provide a “discourse” through which its people can make sense of suffering. That discourse includes some understanding of the causes of pain as well as the proper responses to it. And with that discourse, a society equips its people for the battles of living in this world.

However, not every society does this equally well. Our own contemporary Western society gives its members no explanation for suffering and very little guidance as to how to deal with it. Just days after the Newtown school shootings in December 2012, Maureen Dowd entitled her December 25 New York Times column “Why, God?” and printed a Catholic priest’s response to the massacre.¹⁷

Almost immediately, there were hundreds of comments in response to the column’s counsel. Most disagreed with it but, tellingly, disagreed in wildly divergent ways. Some held instead to the idea of karma, that suffering in the present pays for sins in past lives. Others referred to the illusory nature of the material world, which comes from Buddhism. Still others accepted the traditional Christian view that heaven is a place of reunion with loved ones and will serve as consolation for suffering on earth. Some alluded to how suffering makes you stronger, implicitly drawing on the thought of Stoic and pagan thinkers from the classical Greek and Roman era. Others added that since this world is all we have, any recourse to “spiritual” consolation weakens the proper response to suffering—namely, action toward eradicating the factors that caused it. The only proper response to suffering, in this view, was to make the world a better place.

The responses to the column were evidence that our own culture gives people almost no tools for dealing with tragedy. Commenters had to look to many other cultures and religions—Hindu, Buddhist, Confucianist, classical Greek, and Christian—to address the darkness of the moment. People were left to fend for themselves.

The end result is that today we are more shocked and undone by suffering than were our ancestors. In medieval Europe approximately one of every five infants died before their first birthday, and only half of all children survived to the age of ten.¹⁸ The average family buried half of their children when they were still little, and the children died at home, not sheltered away from eyes and hearts. Life for our ancestors was filled with far more suffering than ours is. And yet we have innumerable diaries, journals, and historical documents that reveal how they took that hardship and grief in far better stride than do we. One scholar of ancient northern European history observed how unnerving it is for modern readers to see how much more unafraid people fifteen hundred years ago were in the face of loss, violence, suffering, and death.¹⁹ Another said that while we are taken aback by the cruelty we see in our ancestors, they would, if they could see us, be equally shocked by our “softness, worldliness, and timidity.”²⁰

We are not just worse than past generations in this regard, but we are also weaker than are many people in other parts of the world today. Dr. Paul Brand, a pioneering orthopedic surgeon in the treatment of leprosy patients, spent the first part of his medical career in India and the last part of his career in the United States. He wrote: “In the United States … I encountered a society that seeks to avoid pain at all costs. Patients lived at a greater comfort level than any I had previously treated, but they seemed far less equipped to handle suffering and far more traumatized by it.”²¹ Why?

The short response is that other cultures have provided its members with various answers to the question “What is the purpose of human life?” Some cultures have said it is to live a good life and so eventually escape the cycle of karma and reincarnation and be liberated into eternal bliss. Some have said it is enlightenment—the recognition of the oneness of all things and the attainment of tranquility. Others have said it is to live a life of virtue, of nobility and honor. There are those who teach that the ultimate purpose in life is to go to heaven to be with your loved ones and with God forever. The crucial commonality is this: In every one of these worldviews, suffering can, despite its painfulness, be an important means of actually achieving your purpose in life. It can play a pivotal role in propelling you toward all the most important goals. One could say that in each of these other cultures’ grand narratives—what human life is all about—suffering can be an important chapter or part of that story.

But modern Western culture is different. In the secular view, this material world is all there is. And so the meaning of life is to have the freedom to choose the life that makes you most happy. However, in that view of things, suffering can have no meaningful part. It is a complete interruption of your life story—it cannot be a meaningful part of the story. In this approach to life, suffering should be avoided at almost any cost, or minimized to the greatest degree possible. This means that when facing unavoidable and irreducible suffering, secular people must smuggle in resources from other views of life, having recourse to ideas of karma, or Buddhism, or Greek Stoicism, or Christianity, even though their beliefs about the nature of the universe do not line up with those resources.

It is this weakness of modern secularism—in comparison to other religions and cultures—that we explore in these first few chapters.

Edified by Our Miseries

Richard Shweder provides a good survey about how non-Western cultures today help their people to be “edified by misery.” Traditional cultures perceive the causes of suffering in highly spiritual, communal, and moral terms. Here are four ways such societies have helped victims of suffering and evil respond.

There is what some anthropologists call (not pejoratively) the moralistic view. Some cultures have taught that pain and suffering stem from the failure of people to live rightly. There are many versions of this view. Many societies believe that if you honor the moral order and God or the gods, your life will go well. Bad circumstances are a “wake-up call” that you need to repent and change your ways. The doctrine of karma is perhaps the purest form of the moralistic view. It holds that every soul is reincarnated over and over. Into each life, the soul brings its past deeds and their latent effects, including suffering. If you are suffering now, it is likely your desserts from former lives. If you live now with decency, courage, and love—then your future lives will be better. In short, no one gets away with anything—everything must be paid for. Your soul is released into the divine bliss of eternity only when you have atoned for all your sins.

There is also what has been called the self-transcendent view.²² Buddhism teaches that suffering comes not from past deeds but from unfulfilled desires, and those desires are the result of the illusion that we are individual selves. Like the ancient Greek Stoics, Buddha taught that the solution to suffering is the extinguishing of desire through a change of consciousness. We must detach our hearts from transitory, material things and persons. Buddhism’s goal is “to achieve a calmness of the soul in which all desire, individuality, and suffering are dissolved.”²³ Other cultures achieve this self-transcendence by being communal in a way almost impossible for contemporary Western people to comprehend. In such societies, there is no such thing as an identity or sense of well-being apart from the advancement and prosperity of one’s family and people. In this worldview, suffering is mitigated because it can’t harm the real “you.” You live on in your children, in your people.²⁴

Some societies address suffering with a high view of fate and destiny. Life circumstances are seen as set by the stars or by supernatural forces, or by the doom of the gods, or, as in Islam, simply by the inscrutable will of Allah. In this view, people of wisdom and character reconcile their souls with this reality. The older pagan cultures of northern Europe believed that at the end of time, the gods and heroes would all be killed by the giants and monsters in the tragic battle of Ragnarok. In those societies, it was considered the highest virtue to stand one’s ground honorably in the face of hopeless odds. That was the most lasting glory possible, and through such behavior one lived on in song and legend. The greatest heroes of these cultures were strong and beautiful but sad, with high doom upon them. In Islam too, surrender to God’s mysterious will without question has been one of the central requirements of righteousness. In all these cultures, submission to a difficult divine fate without compromise or complaint was the highest virtue and therefore a way to find great meaning in suffering.²⁵

Finally, there are those cultures with a “dualistic” view of the world. These religions and societies do not see the world under the full control of fate or God but rather as a battleground between the forces of darkness and light. Injustice, sin, and pain are present in the world because of evil, satanic powers. Sufferers are seen as casualties in this war. Max Weber describes it like this: “The world process although full of inevitable suffering is a continuous purification of the light from the contamination of darkness.” Weber adds that this conception “produces a very powerful … emotional dynamic.”²⁶ Sufferers see themselves as victims in this battle with evil and are given hope because, they are told, good will eventually triumph. Some more explicit forms of dualism, like ancient Persian Zoroastrianism, believed a savior would come at the end of time to bring about a final renovation. Less explicit forms of dualism, such as some Marxist theories, also see a future time in which forces of good overcome evil.

At first glance, these four approaches seem to be at odds with one another. The self-transcendent cultures call sufferers to think differently, the moralistic cultures to live differently, the fatalistic cultures to embrace one’s destiny nobly, and the dualistic cultures to put one’s hope in the future. But they are also much alike. First, each one tells its members that suffering should not be a surprise—that it is a necessary part of the warp and woof of human existence. Second, sufferers are told that suffering can help them rise up and move toward the main purpose of life, whether it is spiritual growth, or the mastery of oneself, or the achievement of honor, or the promotion of the forces of good. And third, they are told that the key to rising and achieving in suffering is something they must take the responsibility to do. They must put themselves into a right relationship to spiritual reality.

So the communal culture tells sufferers to say, “I must die—but my children and children’s children will live on forever.”²⁷ Buddhist cultures direct its members to say, “I must die—but death is an illusion—I will still be as much a part of the universe as I am now.” Karmic sufferers may say, “I must suffer and die—but if I do it well and nobly, I will have a better life in the future and can be freed from suffering someday altogether.” But in every case, suffering poses a responsibility and presents an opportunity. You must not waste your sorrows. All of these ancient and diverse approaches, though they take suffering very se...