The morning of Saturday, November 1, 1755 dawned as another
beautiful day in the seaside town of Lisbon, Portugal. It was All Saints Day,
and most of the population was in church that morning, reflecting the fact that
Lisbon was one of Europe’s most religious countries in the 18th
century. Of its 250,000 residents, at least 10% were priests or nuns. The
church of the city’s most prominent saint, Saint Vincent, was packed to
capacity, as were the other basilicas and places of worship in a city so devout
that penitents were often seen in its streets whipping themselves as atonement
for their sins.
At 9:30 that morning, just sixty miles out in the North
Atlantic, a massive earthquake heaved up the ocean floor and sent tremors
rippling toward the unsuspecting worshippers. A 9:40, the first tremors hit the
city and the walls of Saint Vincent’s began to shake violently. The bell towers
swayed, sending the bells clanging, candles fell to the floor, shards from
stained glass windows showered the congregation. Terrified priests fled the
altar while some parishioners stayed in their seats to pray as the church fell
down around them, and on them. Others fled into the streets, only to experience
the next wave of tremors, which some seismologists estimate at 8.5 to 9.0 on
the Richter scale, that destroyed the most of the rest of the city. Amidst the
rubble, fires started to rage, most likely sparked by the fallen candles in the
many churches.
Panicked by the earthquake and the fires, people began to
flee toward the Targus River and the harbor, which seemed like the only safe
place to go. When they got there, thousands waited on the docks hoping to board
ships that would take them away from the burning city. Suddenly and
mysteriously, all the water in the harbor was sucked out to sea, dragging the
ships with it and revealing old shipwrecks on the now waterless harbor floor.
Stunned by this development, the people then looked up only to see a massive
wall of water coming toward them. Before they could even run, the wall of water
obliterated those standing on the shore and killed thousands more in the
resulting inland surge.
Estimates are that up to 60,000 people died that morning.
Bodies floated in the harbor for weeks. This event was the 18th
century’s version of the Holocaust, Nagasaki, and September 11—an event that
literally and figuratively shocked the world in more ways than one.
Certainly, there had been other disasters before this one.
The Black Plague had ravaged Europe for two centuries—a vicious epidemic that
wiped out a third of the population, taking people from health to death in a
matter of hours. But Lisbon was different somehow. As Professor Tom Long puts
it, Lisbon “was a catastrophe that not only destroyed a city but also
symbolized the destruction of a worldview.”
Prior to Lisbon, almost everyone in Christian Europe
believed that every disaster—earthquakes, famines, floods, epidemics,
accidents—came directly from the hand of God. God was the first cause of every
human ill, which God used as punishment for some sin. For years before the
earthquake, religious prophets had predicted that Lisbon was ripe for some kind
of divine judgment. It had, after all, been the headquarters of the Inquisition
and the place where many so-called heretics received their sentences to burn at
the stake or lose their heads. The question of who was responsible for human
suffering was never in doubt—it was always God. Doctors would prescribe acts of
penitence along with leeches to try and cure a person’s disease. Can you
imagine going to the doctor today and having him say, “I’m writing you a
prescription, but you also need to say your prayers of confession since God is
punishing you for some sin?” That’s how it was in the medieval period.
Actually, our insurance companies maintain the medieval worldview, where every
disaster is “an act of God.”
But the Lisbon disaster happened in the midst of a world
undergoing a major cultural shift. This was the time of the Enlightenment, the
period of history when science and reason were gaining traction. For the first
time, human cells could be seen under the microscope, telescopes observed the
movements of planets, the mercury thermometer was invented, Benjamin Franklin
experimented with electricity. The early scientists were known as “natural
philosophers” and what they discovered caused a radical shift in thought—that
the world seemed to operate on its own steam. Rather than waiting on God to put
the sun in the sky every day, the universe and nature seemed to be
self-regulating according to a set of universal natural laws—like gravity, for
instance, or the orbit of the planets or the behavior of human cells. Isaac
Newton, who was one of the early pioneers in science, was a Christian who
believed that God was the creator, the “first cause” of all things, but that
God designed the universe to run according to these natural laws. For the first
time in history, people began to believe that disasters like Lisbon were caused
not by God’s arbitrary wrath, but by the natural shifting of tectonic plates—a
law God set at the creation of the world.
We might call advancements of the Enlightenment the
“disenchantment of the world.”
An enchanted world is one in which God is in everything—from
a baby’s smile to the rain falling. A disenchanted world is one where
everything happens according to natural law—a baby’s smile means he has gas and
rain falls because of meteorological constants in the atmosphere.
Interestingly, we in the 21st century have
learned to live in both of those worlds. We pray for rain or snow, and when it
happens we say, “God has blessed us with rain.” At the same time, we will also
watch the Weather Channel and know the scientific reason that clouds form and
move and we’ll track the radar to our particular location. We know that certain
conditions are necessary for rain to form. The result of this way of thinking
is that we can now choose to see the world and God as two separate realities—a
worldview we call theism—or we can choose to see the natural world without
God—a worldview we call atheism.
It’s this choice that confronts us whenever we encounter
disaster either in the news or in our personal lives. It seems like every time
we open the newspaper or turn on the TV there is another Lisbon happening: an
earthquake, a flood, a tsunami, a deranged man walking into a school and shooting
innocent children. We might receive that unexpected call about the death of a
loved one, that diagnosis of a devastating illness. In some sense we know the
scientific causes of earthquakes and floods, even the cause of mental illness
that leads to heinous acts. But when these things happen we tend to first cry
out to God. Why? Why did this happen, God? Why didn’t you stop it? Why were my
prayers unanswered? Where were you, God?
These are not new questions, of course. The psalmist in
today’s text cries out to God in anguish: “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me
forever? How long must I bear pain in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all
day long?” Psalm 22 is even more poignant – “My God, my God, why have you
forsaken me?” The Scriptures are full of such laments and crying out to God for
answers.
To ask these questions, of course, means that we still
believe in God—a God who is good and who is all-powerful. But we ask, if that’s
the case, then why is there innocent suffering?
Nearly fifty years before Lisbon, the German mathematician
and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz coined the term “theodicy” to
describe the problem of evil and suffering and the presence of a good and
powerful God. The word is a mash-up of two Greek works: theo (God) and dike (judgment).
In a world where terrible tragedies happen and where people suffer in ways that
are out of proportion to any sense of deserving, Leibniz believed that God had
some explaining to do. The ways of God need to be justified and understood. God
needed a good defense, and theodicy was the mean of coming up with one.
Many others, of course, have taken a completely different
tack. Rather than wrestling with the question of theodicy, many have taken the
option of atheism—believing that there can be no God in a world that is full of
suffering. The Scottish philosopher David Hume, who was around when Lisbon
happened, posited a theory that is still used today by many who have examined
the problem of evil and suffering and have determined as a result that there is
no God. His argument goes like this:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is
impotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?
Indeed, we might parse this argument out into four truth
claims that, taken together, have often left philosophers and theologians with
the equivalent of an impossible chess match, where moving any piece leads to a
stalemate:
- There is a God
- God is all-powerful.
- God is good and loving.
- There is innocent suffering.
Hume argued, for example, that claims 2-4 are incongruent,
therefore number 1 must be false. A whole parade of atheists have followed him,
all the way up to Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens in our own
time (Hitchens wrote “God is Not Great”—a title that fits Humes’ logical
problem, while Dawkins wrote the bestseller, “The God Delusion.”)
Believers like us certainly object, but parsing out the
problem is still not easy. Many have tried to solve the theodicy problem by
taking out one of the truth claims. Rabbi Harold Kushner, for example, wrote
the mega-bestselling book, When Bad
Things Happen to Good People in 1981, which brought the theodicy problem to
the popular imagination. Kushner wrote the book in response to the death of his
son. Kushner could not believe, as many of us do not believe, that God would
visit such suffering on anyone, so the solution he found was that while God is
loving and just, God is simply not powerful enough to banish all evil and
suffering. Rather, there is another force called Fate that does these things to
us—this is a view that is difficult to defend biblically and theologically.
Indeed, the idea of “good” and “bad” people creates its own
set of issues. Some people would eliminate claim #4-that there is such a thing
as innocent suffering. We’re all sinners, and we all got it coming. But it’s
hard to imagine a roomful of kindergartners building up enough sinfulness to
deserve a horrific death at the hands of a madman and see that as the punishing
hand of God. Such a God would be capricious and loathsome—certainly not the God
we see revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. Take out piece number 4 and you might as
well take out number 3 as well!
No, somehow all of these claims are true even if they are in
tension with one another. How do we reconcile them? More importantly, how do we
deal with the specter of tragedy in our world and in our lives and do so with
faith? These are the questions that we want to look at in this series, but we
do so knowing that there’s no magic five-point plan, no easy explanation that
we can use as a platitude. Neither are we trying to mount a legal defense for
God against the atheists. What we want to do in this series is to simply offer
you some new ways of thinking about and framing the questions in a way that
holds true to our understanding of Scripture and our understanding of God.
I wanted to do this series because I know that many of us
need to talk about these questions—indeed, I have thought about them a long
time myself. Ever since my mom died, when I was just 14, I have thought about
these questions. She got cancer, and we prayed. I was taught that if you
prayed, God would answer your prayer. I prayed with confidence that she would
be healed. She wasn’t, and she died at home on a day when my sisters and I were
at school. It was a shock, a surprise. Why, God, did she not get better? Did I
not have enough faith? I remember hearing people trying to do theodicy at the
funeral home. “It was God’s will,” said one person. What kind of God wills the
death of a woman as devout as my mom? “God needed her in heaven,” said another.
You mean the all-powerful God can’t make his own peanut butter and jelly
sandwiches cut into hearts for his lunch? “She’s in a better place,” said
someone else. Better than home with us, better than being with the kids she
adopted and loved with her whole heart? “Everything happens for a reason,” said
a few of the visitors standing around the casket. What possible reason could
there be for her to lie in agonizing pain and die, leaving her beloved children
without a mother?
I never found those answers satisfying, and when I grew up
and went to seminary, I realized that many of them were simply distorted
caricatures of the way God works and the way he deals with evil and suffering.
While we don’t know all the answers, I do believe that we can begin to move
toward a better and more helpful way of framing the problem of theodicy—a way
that moves past the platitudes and on to a more hopeful view of God and his
purposes.
Next week we will look at what is perhaps the most
recognized theodicy text in the Bible, the story of Job. Job’s friends muse
about his suffering and their wrong answers can help us frame where a lot of
theology goes wrong when it comes to theodicy.
Then we’ll look at another text that provides an alternative
way of understanding the problem: Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds.
There is much here that can teach us about the presence of God and the presence
of evil in the world.
We’ll then turn to the cross as God’s ultimate answer to the
problem of evil—the paradoxical understanding of Christian faith in a God who
suffers and dies. What does that mean for our own suffering?
Of course, we also believe that Jesus rose from the dead. In
week 5 we’ll look at what that means for suffering and evil in the present and
how we can begin to live with a different imagination.
Lastly, we’ll talk about how we walk in faith in the midst
of suffering. In the end, we can’t fully think our way through it. We have to
walk in it and through it.
So, I want to encourage you to dig in here over the next six
weeks. We’re offering several classes that will provide an opportunity to learn
and discuss these big questions. I invite you to join one of them, to pick up
one of the books that we’re using, to start diving into the daily devotional.
But most importantly, I invite you to take a journey into the pain you may be
feeling in your own life because of tragedy and loss. I don’t believe God
causes our pain, but I do believe that God meets us there, and it is there that
we can begin walk with him, even when we don’t know all the answers.
This week will no doubt bring us another Lisbon. What shall
we say when we experience it? Let’s talk about it together.
Source:
Long, Thomas G. What Shall We Say? Evil, Suffering and the Crisis of Faith. Eerdman’s: 2011. (This book was tremendously helpful in framing this introduction to the series. I highly recommend it to anyone, especially pastors, who want to go deeper into understanding theodicy.
