Every couple of weeks, I have some nights when I can’t fall asleep. Usually it means something is upsetting me. I had a couple of nights last week when I tossed and turned till after midnight. Off and on since March, I have had an ebook out of the library by Tim Keller – Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering. It’s a good thing to read in the dark. I read it in fits and starts, so I am only in Chapter 3 after all these months of the virus. I find it surprisingly comforting on sleepless nights.
One sleepless night at about 1 AM, Keller was commenting on the challenge to our faith from “the problem of evil and suffering,” citing Charles Taylor. Keller writes:
“Awareness of the problem of God’s relationship to evil is at least as old as the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who posed it three hundred years before Christ. But Taylor rightly points out that despite the discussions of philosophers, the argument from evil never had anything like the popular appeal and broad attraction until some time after the Enlightenment. Things changed when Western thought came to see God as more remote, and to see the world as ultimately completely understandable through reason. These intellectual trends were reinforced by technological changes that eventually led to the development of the expanded, self-sufficient “buffered self.” Human beings became far more confident in their own powers of reason and perception. . . Modern discussions of the problem of suffering start with an abstract God – a God who, for the sake of argument, is all-powerful and all good, but who is not glorious, majestic, infinitely wise, beginningless, and the creator and sustainer of all things. No wonder, then that modern people are far more prone than their ancestors to conclude that, if they can see no good reason for a particular instance of suffering, God could not have any justifiable reasons for it either. If evil does not make sense to us, well, then evil simply does not make sense.” (86-87)
“Deism came in among the elites of the eighteenth century. The idea of Deism is that God created the world for our benefit and now it operates on its own, without his constant or direct involvement. This world works like a clock and can be understood scientifically, without any need for divine revelation. In this understanding of things, God exists but becomes someone or something more distant, not someone we can know. Our main responsibility is not to love, worship, and obey him, seeking his forgiveness when we fail to do so. Instead, human beings’ main purpose is to use our reason and free will to support human flourishing. In short, the older Christian idea that we exist for God’s glory receded and was replaced by the belief that God exists to nurture and sustain us.” (54)
I may have lost you in that long quote. My short version of that is: sometime in the 18th century, Christians became more confident of their own reason and intelligence to understand and control the world, and less sure that God was involved. His job became making us happy and healthy. This shift in beliefs is well documented. Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton wrote about it in their 2005 book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. In 2010, Kenda Creasy Dean wrote another book, again about teenagers called Almost Christian. Her title suggests that those who hold these modified beliefs aren’t actually Christian. A recent blog post by Benjamin Sledge entitled “Let’s Stop Pretending Christianity is Even “Christian” Anymore” goes further. It’s hard for me to tell what Sledge himself believes, but he indicts many of today’s Christians for both unorthodox doctrine and un-Christian practice. It isn’t my purpose today to discern who is Christian and who is not. My purpose is to point out the problems of these shifted beliefs.
Keller goes on to say that if we hold this reduced view of God, we are more vulnerable to a crisis of faith in the face of evil and suffering. The combination of trusting our own knowledge and judgment more as enlightened people and still retaining a belief in God is problematic for us whenever it appears that God isn’t doing His job of keeping us happy and healthy. This leads to increased doubt of God’s existence, love, power and/or His goodness. Because of our inflated idea of who we are and our deflated idea of who He is, all suffering becomes a potential crisis of faith.
I have observed many crises of faith in the students I disciple over my years of ministry. Generally speaking, the students I have known have had a great confidence in their own intelligence, and their own goodness, and as a result many of them find God’s apparent inaction to protect humans the cause of a crisis in their faith. They also begin to doubt His goodness because the commandments of his Word do not match the “progressive” and “enlightened” teachings of tolerance and equity in our society. They feel that if we continue to uphold his commandments as timeless, then God’s character appears cruel and our compassion as ministers is also in question. But even the idea of living to please God is no longer a given for all who call themselves Christians. One student, who identified herself as Christian, articulated straightforwardly that the idea of living one’s life in obedience to God was oppressive.
As the Pandemic wends on, I have noted phases in how I respond to this trial. At first, I was excited about the opportunities to minister in unexpected ways and I was looking for the stimulus to grow in courageous faith. About now, I feel more tired and fearful. This isn’t a sprint. It is a distance race, of unknown duration. Because of different levels of confidence in our governing authorities and different health concerns, we are less unified in our practices and precautions. Virtual church on Sunday mornings makes me feel like a spectator to a relationship with God, rather than someone who is IN a relationship with God. I have been wondering how much of this I can take. I have found it shaking my confidence in all I believe.
Is God asking too much of us with sorrow upon sorrow these last five months? The Pandemic, the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and others, the riots, the economic woes and rising unemployment, the resurgence of the pandemic, Hurricane Isaias, the Derecho, the wildfires, and all the sufferings which are specific to us as individuals? What is He doing? How are we to resist calming ourselves with distraction, self-medication, venting, whatever is our drug of choice?
Reading Keller’s book all alone at 1:00 AM, in the dark, I had a strong sense of God speaking to me. I could see I am infected with modern thinking – downsizing God and upsizing me. Because of this thinking I worry that I cannot fix the things that have gone wrong, nor can our government, nor any human institution. I can’t fix them, but that is not my job. I can’t even stabilize my own life. One day, I have courage. The next day, I do not. This is all impossible, apart from Him. In the middle of the night, He reminded me to rest in Him, without demanding to know or understand beyond the next step. As one of my favorite contemporary songs says, “He will hold me fast. For my Savior loves me so. Christ will hold me fast.”
If Tim Keller and Charles Taylor are right, as long as we have an inflated view of ourselves and a deflated view of Him (and his Scriptures), we are vulnerable and prone to crises of faith as each wave of adversity slams into us. At the risk of being trite and ending with “Sunday School answers,” (the title of my post comes from a song I sang to my children) I am exhorting myself to take Him at His Word, to teach it carefully to the next generation, and to draw near to Him, “because He who promised is faithful”(Hebrews 10:23) and He will hold us fast.