A drunk driver crashes into a car killing three occupants of the vehicle and leaving one maimed for the rest of her life; the drunk driver lives. Six-million Jews were killed, tortured, and raped for years during the Holocaust yet decades later images of Darfour, Rwanda, and Bosnia remind us that humanity is not that much different. An ALS patient’s body slow deteriorates essentially imprisoning that person in a living tomb until the day when the body stops working. Cancer.

The problem of suffering when theology is directed to it mainly has to do with two related issues: the justice of God called a theodicy, and the compatibility between one’s idea of God and the reality of human suffering and pain in the world. The question of how God or why God would let suffering exist has to do with these important questions.

There has been recent discussion surrounding Bart Ehrman’s solution to the problem - belief in such a God as his tradition mediates is wholly incompatible with the evidence of suffering in the world and so, it is more rational, it just makes more sense, not to believe that such a God exists. The resolution for Ehrman is a sort of functional agnosticism. He is open to a new kind of revelation from God, but he will not hold his breath for it or maintain a worldview that understands reality as something contingent on such a God. To have a world contingent on a being that allows for such disorder and chaos does not make sense. Regardless of where you position yourself in relation to Ehrman’s conclusion, all of us must applaud his open and risky exploration of his journey with God that has lead him to this divorce with God if you will.

The question that he probes is not a new one and will continue to be one that is quite confounding. But why do we, meaning Christians or monotheists in general (polytheists and non-theist religious traditions have a very different way of dealing with theodicy) ask it? The central issue, even before we arrive at a question of what constitutes the attributes of God including the compatibility of God’s justice with the conditions of a world that include suffering, is that of order versus chaos. As sociologists like Berger and Stark among others will point out, the construction of religion has to do with the cognitive and social ordering of reality in a way that any circumstance of experience can be understood in some way. Our religious beliefs can create a sense of order that makes the world habitable for us. It is a way for one to rationalize why suffering happens. The problem therefore, is when one’s religious understanding of the world no longer enables one to make sense of suffering. This is what happened to Ehrman and the answers were not forthcoming, especially when looking at the source of his tradition in Scripture.

So what kind of order does one need in order to make the world a habitable place? By this, I am suggesting that habitability and making sense of things are mutually exclusive. The classic problem in Christian theodicy focuses on the attributes of God that can be worked in a kind of algorithm:

If suffering exists:

• God is not all-knowing, or
• God is not all-powerful, or
• God is not all-loving, or
• Then Reality is an illusion, or
• God does not really exist…

Solutions to hold these attributes together have tended to focus on the aspect of God’s predestining activity. In this way, God causes suffering for a purpose to teach us something about human nature in order for us to correct it through receiving God’s grace after an admission of sin. Or, it takes the form of saying that God does these things with a higher purpose that we just do not understand. A pragmatist like myself looks at these solutions as not only intellectually unsatisfactory, but pastorally appalling since they invalidate the very experience of suffering itself “in-the-moment”.

The source of disorder is death. How one makes sense of death, pain and complete affliction of the human being is what will determine the way that one will make sense of suffering and therefore, make the world a more habitable place. In the Christian tradition, Scripture is quite clear that this death will be sensible when the dead are resurrected at the final fruition and materialization of the Kingdom of God for which time and space are now and forever in the process of revealing. Death is made sensible through the lens of hope. Therefore, hope is that which makes the world habitable. The problem is that this does not make immediate order establish itself in the midst of the experience of suffering and death in any present moment.

Simone Weil’s solution to this is to say that in the very act of creating free human being who are endowed with the capacity to receive the good, God elected to limit God’s own being. She thus solves the compatibility of God and an imperfect world by doing away with omnipotence as traditionally conceived. She refers to the act of creation, which itself is a myth of God establishing order in the midst of chaos, as the first crucifixion. The second crucifixion of Christ meets affliction, the state of being when one cannot receive the good and flourish by any act of will, and redeems it. Humanity and suffering exist in the middle of this tension between the suffering of the very order of the world in the crucified logos, the very incarnation of God in Christ, and the reality of God that cannot be directly accessed except through the revelation of Christ who redeems suffering. Thus a future hope becomes a present hope.

When we obligate ourselves to creating order among the afflicted, we act as media for the love of God to flourish in our midst. The very idea that we question God about suffering is evidence that our understanding of reality external to our individual spheres of life is severely limited. Moreover, it is evidence that our practice is not attuned either to those who are truly afflicted or directed towards obligation to the other. Rather, when we ask the question “Why God?” or “Why me?” our perspective is self-directed and not therefore directed towards our neighbor as an act of obligation.

Perhaps then the question is not,

Why Does God Let This Happen?

Perhaps the right question is,

How Can I/We Help God to Relieve the World of its Suffering?