Hughbiquitous

Suffering shouldn’t surprise me anymore, but it still does.

Word came this morning that a great guy at church has cancer. Bad cancer.

Earlier this month, my wife’s best friend lost her dad to pancreatic cancer. There was a devastating earthquake in Haiti. Going back to Thanksgiving, there was a young family driving home when a highway accident claimed a 3-year-old girl’s life and her mother’s ability to walk. There’s @mattchandler74 and his brain cancer. There’s little Kate McRae. I could go on, but I don’t want to.

As a thoughtful Christian, I have to be able to make sense of that most difficult of questions: how do you reconcile the reality of suffering and evil with the existence of an all-good, all-powerful God? At the risk of sounding academic and sterile, I’m going to address that the only way I know how: by breaking it down. I see two questions there.

The first is philosophical: are those two ideas even compatible? The short answer is yes. First, on God’s existence in the first place: If there is no God, there can be no such thing as real suffering and real evil; they are just ideas we’ve created that have no grounding in objective reality (see yesterday’s post, Ideas Have Consequences, for more on that).

Second, if God is all-good, does his tolerance of suffering and evil prove that he is not all-powerful? Conversely, if he is all-powerful, does his tolerance of suffering and evil prove that he is not all-good? The Christian worldview supplies defeaters to both objections. The Bible’s storyline tells us about a God who created a good universe with good people who used their freedom to rebel against him: the fact that he didn’t wipe out the rebels straight away speaks to his mercy and patience; the fact that he came in the flesh to atone for man’s rebellion by living a perfect life, dying for the crimes of others, and ultimately rising from the dead speaks to his grace and power; and the advance warning that he is going to return to set everything straight one day speaks to his justice. Whether you like that story or not, it takes away the opportunity to say that suffering and evil logically disproves God’s simultaneous goodness and power.

That’s the philosophical answer. But what do you say to the existential question? As the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell famously asked, “what are you going to say as you kneel next to a dying child?”

Bringing logic to bear on that situation is, for most people, simply a case study in using the wrong tool for the job. Instead, comfort comes from understanding that God is familiar with suffering through first-hand experience of the real thing.

Jesus was not just a man; he was God. And he was not just God; he was a man. This is the most mind-boggling mystery of the Christian faith to me. Everything that is true about mankind is true about Jesus. And everything that is true about God is true about Jesus. But in his humanity, he didn’t “cheat” by playing his “God card” whenever things got tough. People suffered and died all around him. He lost people close to him. And eventually, when it was his turn to suffer and die, he didn’t rage against it as though something disruptive to the whole universe were happening.

The best explanation I’ve ever heard about these questions comes from D. A. Carson in his two messages titled On Being Prepared for Suffering and Evil (part 1, part 2). He begins with these words:

If you live long enough, you will suffer. (And these two talks go downhill from there.) The only alternative is not to live long enough. If you live long enough, you will face bereavement, severe illness, loss, disappointment; you, or your children, or your children’s children, will face loss, death, war… suffering.

When Jesus came in the flesh, he knew those sobering facts better than we do, and he signed up for it all the same. There’s something about the fellowship of sufferings that speaks louder and more powerfully than any moral dilemma or logical challenge can do. So to answer Russell’s challenge, all I can offer in answer to the existential question is “Jesus understands.”

Thankfully, for now, despite all the tragedy that’s come to my attention, I do not find myself kneeling at the side of a dying child. For now, my job is to settle the questions that make “Jesus understands” worth anything as an answer: was he really who he claimed to be? Is he really the only way to get right with God? Does he offer something that no one else does? Do I need what he offers? Is this hope real, or just therapeutic wishful thinking? Is sin real, or just a useful fiction to make sense of all this? And maybe the ultimate question: is sin a big enough problem that it’s worth enduring all this evil and suffering to rescue as many people as possible from it?

Cruel Logic by Brian Godawa (To End All Wars):

Count me in! Check out the trailer…

If you’re like me, your reading list is too long. As a result, you never get started making a dent in it. Today, I got started.

About a year ago I started working through a book called Breakthrough Rapid Reading. (It’s the best speed-reading book I’ve found.) Not long after, work got crazy, and I dropped it and never came back. But this morning, I grabbed it and brought it in with me to work. I came in, sat down, and started going at it. No fancy hand movements, just “reading” as fast as I could.

I finished the whole book — over 200 pages — in under an hour. Don’t misunderstand, I didn’t come close to doing a good job of reading it properly. But here’s the catch: now I know what’s in it. I can go back and re-read it, speeding up and slowing down as necessary. It’s better to read something really fast twice (or more!) than read it once slowly.

Here are some of the things I picked up:

1. The importance of drills: Practice reading every day. Stretch yourself. Read at rates beyond your current ability, even though it means your comprehension will suffer. It’s OK — it’s only practice. You won’t read like that when it’s “for real.”

2. Know why you’re reading: You might just be “reading” something to decide if it’s worth reading again. Some books and articles aren’t worth your time. Also, you might have only a passing interest in the material, so a quick reading might be sufficient. If you’re going to spend a lot of time really tearing into something, make sure it’s worth the time and effort.

3. Recall and record what you’ve read immediately after putting the book down. Post a quick summary on your blog, for example. This stamps it on your mind and gives you a tool for returning to the material later.

4. Relax. This is supposed to be fun. It’s not about getting the technique right. It’s about enriching your life. The end is more important than the means.

I think I have a fairly strong command of the English language, but I cannot come up with an adequate adjective to describe the colossally embarrassing and inappropriate quality of Pat Robertson’s comments today.

I don’t know why I still get exercised when Pat Robertson says something like this. By now I should know enough to treat it like a flatulent outburst: you have to stop long enough to recognize the fact that, yes, something unpleasant just took place, but then politely go about your business and pretend that nothing happened.

One of my mentors-at-a-distance, Greg Koukl, often observes that the content of the gospel is offensive all by itself, but that offense must be preserved if one is to be faithful. So if you’re going to offend someone in the name of Jesus Christ, take a cue from Brit Hume and cause an uproar over the reality of forgiveness (which implies the offensive reality of guilt):

Why is the Gospel—the “Good News”—so offensive? I think it’s because the Gospel is only good news once you understand the bad news. For most folks, the bad news—that we stand before God guilty and justly condemned—is on par with the repellent ramblings of a washed-up televangelist. The difference is that the news of our guilt is credible. Fortunately, the good news of the Gospel is just as credible and powerful in its announcement of forgiveness and hope.

It can even redeem Pat Robertson.

Posterous has a good thing going on, but not good enough. I’m moving this show back to WordPress, but I’m not hosting it myself anymore…