2.8 Job as the Problem of Evil

• The Sufferer

If physical pain is the only problem for the sufferer, then morphine is theodicy. Indeed, for small children suffering from terminal illnesses, simple faith and pain-killers go a long way toward resolving the problem of suffering; the pain for which they are often far more accepting and philosophical than their parents and caregivers.

If a child is emotionally damaged or scarred through suffering at the hands of others, say, survivors of Kosovo, Botswana, or Sudanese slavery, it would be more accurate to say that this child was a victim of human depravity, a casualty of sin. Such suffering has a distinct cause and cure, and while injust, is only relevant to the the other audiences. Which is to say, if a child is being abused by adults, we have laws in our land to halt the evil, and places for cure. The character of that evil is as old as the Garden, but not the issue we address here, though it will be the subject of another book, for the issue here is suffering without cause, without reason, without cure.

It is perhaps the teenager and adult who fully experience the emotional and spiritual aspects of incurable suffering. For only one who is able to see the potential of the future, the promises of life, recognizes the denial of death. So the poignant tragedy of Jephthah's teenage daughter (Judges 11) is almost mythic in the purity of its emotion. How do we speak to the cognizant sufferer out of our own weakness and ignorance? Is there anything we can say to a cancer patient that will comfort? Is there any answer for the grave?

If there is an answer, it must lie in our total weakness, in our gross inability even to hinder Death, much less cure it. It is out of that weakness that we cling to each other, be it sitting silently as Job's friends, or wailing loudly as the maidens of Jephthah. Why should there be comfort in company? Why should mourners bring consolation? Why is human companionship morphine for the soul?

As I ponder this riddle, I am astonished by its opposites. Death, so final, so absolute, yet so infinitesmally brief. Life, so lengthy and full, yet as fragile as a breath. Memories, as immaterial as love, carved by life, yet triumphant over death. To die unmourned and unremembered, as Job himself implies in 27:15, is a life not lived. The memory of our friends is an everlasting promise engraved in lead. If our friends bring us solace, it is because they hold us alive in their hearts. Immortality, while not ours to hold, is ours to give. Our Death can be accepted, once we are certain of our Life.

I am reminded of our lonely friend, dying of cancer, over whom we wept when she could not, soaking her hospital sheets. When she finally made her peace with Heaven, and her tears had washed away fifteen years of bitterness, her dying words relayed over the Atlantic to us were "Don't let the Sheldons mourn for me." She knew we would. We did. And because she knew, her comfort was complete. And in that comfort, she comforted us.

The mystery deepens. For hope in the memory of our friends is fading hope indeed--far better to have a building named for you than to depend on friends. Yet engraved granite has no arms to hold, no tears to wash away the fear. Memory that is frail and free is all the more dear. I have read of oriental despots who had hundreds slaughtered at their death to ensure that tears were shed at their funeral. This story is powerful for what it doesn't say, that despots had no faith in friends, that angry tears are better than none at all, that genuine mourning is better than professional wailing. Comfort seems to come through the intangibles of genuine relationships, of Personal Truth.

Job's mysterious comfort in the face of certain death comes when the same God who caused his pain makes a personal appearance (42:3-6). An appearance without apologies or explanation, yet this personalization of truth satisfies Job's heart. How can such subjective experiences provide eternal comfort? Somehow Death turns all things inside out, so hope that looks inward sees the farther. For hope that is seen is not hope, who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we shall see it when our flesh is gone(19:27).



• The Observer

Although many books purport to comfort the sufferer, most appear written to soothe the observer. Doug Muder writes a lengthy critique of Kushner, arguing that the book is a defense of Anger, replacing belief in God with a belief in the goodness of man. Kuschner must be addressing a different audience than the sufferer, or how else can we explain his emasculation of God masquerading as hope? As we analyze the many books written for the observer, we find that Kushner stands in a long tradition of authors who defend the observer's soul. Forrest Baird points out that the particulars of the observer's defense depend on his presuppositions, whether he be a believer, a moral atheist or a traditional atheist. Yet there is something universal about all these books, they all engage in triage amid the carnage of some great battle nearly lost.

We could fill this book with anecdotes and personal reminiscences of death and its radioactive fallout, not to mention the manifold pages already published on the subject. We could even compare and criticize the many approaches we have found, though the end result of such analyses would likely be the mundane labelling of their all-too-familiar worldviews. Perhaps such analyses can provide comfort to the reader, though I suspect it serves only to reinforce his already firmly held beliefs. A more fruitful approach, I hope, can be found in analyzing Job's story. Here there is more than another anecdote, more than another nuclear devastation, but a transformation of both the sufferer and his observers. It is a fierce battle of worldviews and dissonance with no survivors, yet where all are saved. If there can ever be hope for the observer who finds himself in free fall into the black hole of meaningless suffering, it is somewhere in this book.

Although Job is the sufferer at the center of this book, he begins by being an observer of suffering; first the death and destruction of his servants and his wealth, then the death of all his children. His response, despite Satan's boast, was not anger. Death did not frighten Job. It was not a "fight or flight" reaction on Job's part. It was acceptance, yet not fatalism. "Dust to dust" might have been fatalism, but for Job it was a return to something familiar, something with meaning. "Naked I came in the world, naked I return. Blessed be the name of the Lord". Somewhere in these words is a familiarity, a relationship, a personal truth. It will take 30 more chapters to flesh it out, but the significance of these words was not lost on God, or Satan.

Perhaps it was this desire to move Job from an observer to a participant that prompted Satan's next request, and God's acceptance. Job was afflicted with painful boils, sleepless nights, a depressed wife and abandoned by friends. He begins falling, falling, falling with no support but the breath in his lungs. He has become the sufferer, his three friends, the observers.

It is the genius of Job that we are given the dynamic of the faultless observer who critiques his own observers, for only Job who has already lost everything has a moral right to correct his comforters. We have spoken earlier of the worldview held by the three friends: their normative ethics, their expectations of God's justice, their complacency about earning a righteous man's reward. Job's situation, while not yet terminal, was nonetheless a tremendous rent in the seamless fabric of their world. These friends engage in every practice denounced by Kushner or Muder. They minimize, they look for happy endings, they accuse, they lecture. Beneath all these defenses, Job finds their real weakness--they see something dreadful and are afraid (6:21).

At first blush, fear seems so inappropriate. Here it is Job who is afflicted and in great need yet it is his friends who are afraid? Without being too Jungian, let me rework a threadbare analogy. Suppose you belong to a tribe of Stone Age hunters gathered around a smoky campfire in a wild jungle full of unknown dangers. Suddenly your chief falls backward out of the circle of firelight with a loud cry and you see a large animal, magnified by the flickering shadows, crouching over him. Wouldn't fear be the appropriate response to his plight? Should we rescue or retreat, fight or fly? In the same way we, who live in the civilized world, organize our lives by unwritten rules that define and protect us. What mother would not feel a pang of fear seeing a small child chasing a ball out into a busy street? In a no less abstract way, what businessman would not cringe seeing a colleague invest his life savings on an unseen gold mine in Indonesia? Nor should it be surprising if a Hindu or Buddhist might fear for a Westerner who begins a business venture without proper sacrifice.

When these three friends see clear evidence of heavenly retribution on a trusted and respected colleague, every fiber of their soul cries "DANGER!" Can what Job has be catching? Is there a secret sin that might swallow them up if they come too close? What is this shadowy form crouching over Job? So we spoke earlier about their fear of similar retribution, their need to brainwash Job to protect themselves and so validate their knowledge of God's justice. This fear was not merely academic or theological, but a gut-wrenching panic, inciting them to attack their friend in his weakened state with more than the barbed platitudes Muder and Kuschner condemn, but with the outright hatred reserved for venomous snakes. It is a general truth that when we observe unexpected suffering close at hand we are afraid and experience an adrenaline fueled "fight or flight" response, striving to defend ourselves against an unseen danger.

Before we get too caught up in the defenseworks, perhaps we can step back and observe the battleground. For the sufferer, the destruction is too vast, Death too immanent for defense, and his world is turned inside out. Looking inward, he finds solace in the most ephemeral aspect of life, genuine relationships, personal truth. It is a transformation few observers can understand and none can follow. Instead the observer is left with a black hole into which the sufferer has gone, a discontinuity of space-time, a unravelling of a life's meaning, a cognitive dissonance in his worldview. Depending on how many threads of memory disappear into that cancerous tangle, the observer may find himself dragged into this suffering, spiralling into the Abyss of Meaninglessness. Is it no wonder then, that survivors of this battle feel the urge to write about their narrow escape, to describe the elements of their salvation, to warn against false foundations? These works are in no way intended to help the sufferer, rather they are a defense of the soul against the onslaught of Death.

If theodicy for the sufferer is compassion, then theodicy for the observer is protection. We want to find safe haven, security from the Scylla of suffering and the Charybdis of chaos which threaten to pull us down into the abyss, by filling our quivers with stout arrows and building our walls high and wide. This is why Job tells his friends, "your maxims are proverbs of ashes, your defenses are defenses of clay" 13:12. The paradox of Job is that after demolishing their strongholds, he provides no replacement armor, nothing to protect them from the howling wilderness, a tactic which turns out to be their best defense. Vulnerability becomes protection.

We see this all the time. Every Boy Scout knows that when trapped in quicksand he should never struggle, but he should lay down gently in the sand and float. Likewise, every beginning pilot is taught that should he become disoriented and let one wing dip into a graveyard spiral, he should resist the impulse to pull back on the stick, which will only cause a tighter spiral, but he should do the very thing he fears and push the stick down into a dive and so escape. Drunks survive car accidents better than their victims because their bodies are so relaxed. Somehow, no defense is the best defense.

"Ahh", I hear you thinking, "but this is self-contradictory, for how can one defensively imperil oneself?" Muder calls it quiet acceptance. Kuschner asks for noble suffering. C.S. Lewis seeks a revelation. Job provokes divine justice. In contrast, the three friends and Elihu rationalize, minimize and theologize. What is the difference? The difference is one of attitude. Muder says it most gently, for acceptance implies a giver, and Muder insists we remain the object of an unspoken verb. Kuschner draws his power from a similar clouded insight, that we are co-sufferers with God. Lewis persistantly asks for the clear insight, and Job boldly demands it. The antagonists of Job, however, need no such help, but are content to be the subject of every verb. Under the guise of defending God, they become gods, reshaping reality into their own private creation. Even Elihu, with his defense of a transcendent God, leaves no place for God to disagree. The difference is that between transitive and intransitive verbs, between personal and impersonal truth, between wisdom and knowledge, between hearing about God and seeing Him.

As we stare into the Abyss, we realize we are staring into ourselves. Only by abandonning our rationalizing defenses and embracing the chaos, only by turning our back on our cozy worldview and reaching into the sucking darkness can we find the hand of God reaching for us. It is never trivial, never easy, never simultaneous, for we must fall if we want His arms to catch us. Falling into a black hole lasts for eternity to those who watch outside, yet is but a measurable instant for those who take the plunge. Is this Kirkegaard's irrational leap in the dark? No, though we must abandon our rationality when we let go, it is more precisely an arational leap. It is more like falling in love, if one can compare love and death, for it is the willing abandonment of self for the sake of another. It is the memory of the fingers of his hands, of the smell of his garment, of the warmth of his breath that takes us across the chasm. It is the remembered God we see in shapeless void, making all our life but preparation for this last step. That true memory of Him is faith, the falling is hope, His arms are love.



• The Theologian

Lest I be accused of cynicism, calling every moral atheist a theologian, let me quickly say that the converse is not true, not every theologian is a moral atheist. Because theology is the process of converting abstractions about God into instances and applications for today, it seems appropriate to say that the moral atheist is doing theology. "Shouldn't I say anti-theology?" you ask. No, it is precisely theology, for the opposite of theology is not atheism, but idolatry, the substitution of human aspirations for divine justice. Idolatry replaces God with something patently false, simply to make God more malleable, more manageable, more liveable. It is idolatry that incites the outrage present in the theodicy of the moral atheist. "How dare they redefine justice and mercy to make God into the reflection of the status quo! God's justice is not redefinable." Look at Frisen's attack on RBC, for an example. Calling these works "angry", doesn't do justice to the sense of injustice, the personal grief, the real outrage felt by these authors. Which is exactly how Job responds to the arguments of his friends. To deny or condemn this anger as inappropriate would be to deny or condemn Job. Rather we ask where does this outrage come from, and where did God depart to?

Our family had to take a long trip recently, without the use of our BMW, "Big Mormon Wagon", and the built-in VCR. With commendable foresight, my wife checked out a dozen "books on tape" from the library, and during the 2000 mile trip we listened to Grimm's Fairy Tales, James Herriot's life, and a biography of Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa felt this same outrage, seeing the poorest of the poor who had been denied every opportunity in life, now denied even a respectable death, lying like so much roadkill on the side of the city streets, encrusted by flies. So she started ministering to them. Carrying them to a bed. Washing them. Holding their hands while they died. It was only a drop in the ocean, what can one short, frail woman do for the hundreds dying on the streets of Calcutta every night? Not much.

Hanging on the wall of at least one of the many chapter houses of the Missionaries of Charity, the order she began, is a plaque entitled, Do It Anyway. It consists of a series of angry sentences, answered by the same terse reply. An example is, "The good you do will be forgotten tomorrow... do good anyway." Her persistance, her nineteen hour workday, her recruitment skills, her ability to turn outrage into compassion, enabled her to achieve worldwide recognition as a modern saint. Despite her truly superhuman accomplishments, which gained her a listing in Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of this century, the tribute Time printed was appalling, preferring to find fault with her faith than praising her manifold accomplishments. The Klu Klux Klan could have written a better obituary. I can almost hear her quiet laughing answer, Do it anyway.

How could she not feel outrage? How could she avoid it? Yet not only she, but the hundreds of sisters and brothers in the Missionaries of Charity have achieved this same elevated state, now continuing in the absence of their founder. And remember, she began recruiting in this most un-western of nations, among the most unpromising of candidates, in the slums and streets of Calcutta. If she found an answer, it must answer the polytheistic Hindu, the pantheistic Buddhist, and the rigidly monotheistic Muslim. It must cut across all religions, all lifestyles. It must appeal to East and to West. It must answer both the idealistic young and cynical aged.

"Is God just?", you might ask her, as she busied herself washing a weak and wizened woman who had just been brought to the converted Leprosarium. "I don't know", she might have replied, "just what you mean by just? Here hold her up while I get a sari." Suddenly you are confronted with an instance of the injustice that brought such outrage. And you must help. And hold. And comfort. Railing against injustice is not what this woman needs, she needs a clean sari. And a clean bed. As you lay her in the bed, you notice the woman's eyes, she hasn't said a word to you, but her eyes... "Wait", you call out, as Mother Teresa quickly moves toward her next task, "it's doing the right thing. That's what I mean by just." "Are you?" she asks, handing you a sheet, expecting you to tuck it under the plastic-covered mattress. "No, I mean God. God doing the right thing." She pauses, looking over the half-lifted mattress, "And how will you know what is doing the right thing, unless you do it?"

Make no mistake, we do not achieve equality with God by our actions, rather we achieve rapport with Him. The many volunteers who contributed their testimonials to the tape all talked about the life-changing effect of ministering to the poorest of the poor. Intellectually they were doing what every parent does, washing bodies, doing laundry, cooking food, yet emotionally and spiritually something dramatic happened. For the outrage against idolatry rises out of impotence--if only we were God, we would show the world what justice is! Mother Teresa's insight is that we are God inasmuch as we are His hands that wash the beggar, His feet who carry the dying to a bed, His mouth that pronounces the burial rites. In these seemingly insignificant actions we are omnipotent in the wilderness, we conquer the chaos the way a candle defeats the darkness. As Mother Teresa emphasizes over and over, our poverty becomes unassailable wealth, our weakness becomes omnipotence, our anger becomes compassion. Why? Because truth became personal, justice gained a face, love found a name.



• The Philosopher

Perhaps you've heard the schoolboy conundrum on why God can't be omnipotent. Can God make a rock bigger than He can lift? Either way, it appears that there is something God cannot do. Once you get the hang of it, you can construct an infinite variety of these statements, proving either that God is a lot less intelligent than we are, or that we are spouting nonsense. Many people have pointed out that grammatically correct statements can still be meaningless. "Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.", was Charles Dodgson's contribution to the debate over 100 years ago. So too the classic theodicy argument--God's omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence are incompatible with the existence of evil--teeters on the brink of being as meaningless as Jabberwocky.

I say "teeters" because of the ambiguity within the argument. Take for example, "omnipotence". As our schoolboy prattle demonstrates, there are lots of things God cannot do, such as lying. This does not interfere in the slightest with his omnipotence, because His power is not our power. And when we try to understand omnipotence, we naturally magnify our potency, or worse, negate our impotence and think we've described His power, but what we have really described was only our ambition. The same argument goes for omniscience, thinking that God's knowlege of evil stops with what we can see, when He can follow the black thread of that disease through the tangles of spacetime to its bitter root. Yugoslavia is a recent example of treating the present symptom without respecting the historical antecedents. Finally God's benevolence might be quite different from the negation of a parental malevolence, the grandfatherly negligence that passes for kindness in our estranged culture today. No wonder Isaiah writes about God's benevolence (51:8), "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD. "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."

Therefore since these words are not clearly defined, our conclusion clearly cannot be definitive. Indeed, these definitions are explored in great detail in the various replies described in the appendices. Alvin Plantinga argues that omnipotence is limited by free will, producing the Free Will Defense. RBC argues that God knows what we need, not what we want, so it is his omniscience that forsees the good that comes from evil, and his benevolence that gives us the good disguised as evil. These discussions serve to make us think about God, but the danger of course, is that they substitute for the real thing. When we are too persuaded by our consummate logic, we have created an idol, a God made in our image. This is precisely what Elihu and the three friends do to Job, and rightly received their punishment. This exercise often provokes the anger we saw in the previous section. It is therefore a nearly futile exercise, which in my outrageous moments, would say is even sinful.

The fact of the matter is, a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent is incompatible with the existence of evil. Which should show us that we are totally incapable of making a God in our image. Every God we manufacture according to accepted specifications, will be utterly, totally inadequate to account for suffering. Is this so incredible? Do you think that an imaginary friend will ever be as satisfying as a real one? Can an imaginary friend save us? Can an imaginary friend explain why he has abandonned us? The only God that can answer the problem of pain is the God who created pain, and He answers only to us. Were we to write His answer down and pass it to another, we would have filtered Him through our human understanding and inadvertantly constructed an idol. No, the only answer is the personal answer. The only truth is personal truth. As Job said, (42:5,6) My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes."