It's not God's fault.

In my last blog about Stephen Fry I said this:

“I think that in the bible, and in Jesus, God presents himself not as a kind of ultimate dictator who watches approvingly over every agony, but as a God who to a very serious extent has allowed the world to be not what he wants it to be, and feels the pain of that. There are loads of reasons for him doing that, and it would make this blog way too long to go through them, but the most important thing is that in Jesus we see God himself not as the perpetrator but becoming the victim with us. And for us.”

Unsurprisingly, a couple of people have mentioned that they would, to be honest, like me to give some of those reasons, and I see their point! So here goes. I didn’t try and fit it in the original blog because, as you will see, there’s quite a lot to say – I think mainly because our culture has developed in quite a different direction to the Bible on a couple of significant values involved. So you’ll have to bear with me!

As is reasonably famous, the biblical storyline from the beginning of Genesis is this: God creates the world good, no death, no pain, just goodness, finishing with humans, man and woman, created in the image of God and very good – no brokenness no hatred no rebellion no pride no bitterness no envy no shame no guilt no fear, very good. But God gives them instruction not to eat of one particular tree – amidst a whole garden of great fruits – and warns them that if they do they will die. They don’t trust him, they eat that fruit, and as a result, everything gets broken. Their relationship with God, their relationship with each other, their relationship with the world, their relationship with themselves, and even the world itself gets broken. But God promises Eve that one day one of her descendants will crush the head of the serpent that brought this utterly destructive whisper of distrust into the world.

Now just to clarify, I don’t think this was written as a science textbook – either for the Israelites who got it originally, or for us. How it interacts with what we know about the science of the thing is an entirely different question, and isn’t the issue here, because I think that the thing the Bible is obviously concerned about here is not the chronology, but the causation. Why is the world as it is? What made it this way? Those are the questions the story is seeking to answer, and those are exactly the questions we’re wanting to look at – so that’s a nice coincidence.

So let me point out some of the key things that this incredibly rich narrative is designed to say to us about the causation behind the current state of creation.

1)   God creates good things. God is very clearly not directly responsible for anything that is bad coming into being: from shame, to loneliness, to earthquakes. But I imagine that most people will have noticed the slight slipperiness of that word ‘directly’ (I put it in italics just in case). Of course if God knows what he’s doing, and he clearly does, then he knows what will come of his decisions – how can the outcome be something other than what he wants?

2)   The vital thing is that men and women are created “in the image of God”. That means, reflecting some of the qualities of God not shared by the rest of creation. I think there are probably a fair few of these qualities, but a huge one is freedom. It’s very clear in the story: God creates them and then gives them an instruction – ‘please do this, but don’t do this because it will harm you.’ It would be nonsense to say that to a tree. A tree is not free to do as it chooses, whereas these people are created with the ability to choose. And the initial choice presented to them is simple – as C.S. Lewis points out in his Preface to Paradise Lost, it’s not some crazy magic apple (in fact the bible doesn’t even say it’s an apple!) – the fruit is not at all the point, the point is will they trust God? Will they trust that he wants the best for them? That obeying him is the right and best and brightest thing to do? Have you ever had a situation where you’re trying to find something out, and someone says, ‘You don’t want to know’, and really means it? And there’s that wrestle because you’re really curious and you do want to find out but this person is telling you that the knowledge just won’t be good for you. And the question is, do you trust them? Do you think they love you, have your best interests at heart, and are wise enough to be making the right call? It’s that sort of thing here. They have a choice about whether or not to trust God, and they choose not to.

3)   Well then, why did God give them the choice in the first place? Why not just create people who would do the right thing? I think that the simplest answer to this question is about the nature of love. As good ol’ Newton Faulkner says, love is a verb. Love is fundamentally connected with freedom. Picture a lover, getting ready to propose.  Surrounded by some impressive romantic thing, he gets down on one knee, opens up the ring box, and then, breathless, looking into his lovers’ eyes he says,

“You will marry me.”

That would be all wrong. Obviously. Because you have to ask. You can’t just tell someone to love you and commit to you and give themselves to you, you have to go through the terrifying, gut-wrenching process of offering yourself to them and giving them the power to reject you. Giving them the freedom to love you or not love you. The dignity to make the choice. And I think God has given us that dignity.

4)   But is love really that important? Does God really think that us having the capacity to trust or not trust, to love or not love, is worth bringing all of the suffering and death and pain into the world? Basically the Bible’s answer is yes, love is ridiculously important to God. In fact it says that God is love. And even if that seems weird and wrong to us, I think surely we have to accept that if there is a God – who created us – if we disagree about priorities and what’s best for the world, the chances are that he is right.

5)   Even accepting that, why does humanity’s freedom, and our decision not to love God have such devastating consequences? It does seem that there might be a way to create a world in which we were free but there still wasn’t all this suffering. But for a couple of reasons, I’m not sure it is quite possible. I remember reading about a doctor who spent his life in India treating leprosy patients. He said that pain was one of the greatest gifts that humans possess. He believed this because one of the effects of leprosy is the loss of sensation in limbs – including pain – and he’d seen countless men and women burn themselves horrifically, lose their hands, destroy their feet, simply because there was no pain to tell them when something was wrong. In fact, the doctors had devised alert systems, that could flash a little red light or make a sound when the person was doing something that damaged them – but it didn’t work. A warning, it turned out, just wasn’t enough deterrent to stop people picking up the hot pan or walking over the sharp ground.

Pain is how we know that something is wrong, and the reason that we try to do something about it. Imagine a world where there was no pain – how much desire would we have to change that world? So if we have rejected God, and that means something is wrong, the world is not as it should be, and we are not as we should be, and things need to change – then we need pain. It would be cruel of God to numb us to the reality of the wrongness we are living in the midst of. It would be cruel of him not to make it clear to us that we need to find a solution, we need to do something about it. Ultimately that we need him.*

6)   One last problem. Doesn’t the Bible say that we are all inherently sinful in some way? In fact – surely it must do because otherwise how come of every person that has ever lived no one has managed to decide to always love God and trust him and do everything right? And if in some way we’re born sinful, then can it really be our fault? Surely its God fault that we do things wrong and all of this argument is pointless. This is probably the question I find the most difficult, and I think it’s because I’m so thoroughly brought up in the post-Enlightenment Western mind set of individualism: the idea that I am responsible only for the things that I did myself, and did entirely of my own accord. The Bible doesn’t seem to share this mind set – along with a huge range of other cultures in the world now and throughout history – it seems to say instead that people are parts of a community, and that in part what we do is influenced by that community, but we are still responsible for those things, and in fact we are also partly responsible for the actions of our community as a whole. We stand and fall together, put simply.

I think one place where maybe we can see that this is actually a more full picture of the reality is the issue of racism. Imagine a white male born in the 1940s in Birmingham, Alabama. Imagine that the family and the community he grew up in considered white people to be better than black people, and both did and encouraged cruel and inhuman things to blacks. This man grows up and is, of course, shaped by this community. He thinks many of these thoughts himself, and does many of these wrong things. But now imagine that this man reaches the age of 40, and somehow, perhaps through an unintended friendship, or a powerful conversation, or an eye-opening experience of some kind, or just through his own reflection over time, he realises that he has been wrong. He realises that black people are equal in character, rights and dignity to white people, and he has lived a life which has deeply and repeatedly wronged them in thought and word and deed. So he talks to someone – perhaps this unexpected black friend – and he starts to say sorry. He tells him he is sorry for the many things he’s said and done to this man and to others that were wrong, that were hurtful and offensive and unjust. He tells him not only that but he is sorry for the way that his people – his community, his ancestors – have wronged the black community throughout history. He is sorry for the injustice that has been done by a group of people of which he is a part. Now my question is this, is he right to be sorry? Is he right to feel responsible for the things he’s done? Or would it be better for him to say to himself, ‘Actually, I only thought and did wrong things because my community influenced me. I’m not responsible for my own actions, or the actions of the rest of my people’? Maybe you disagree with me, but I think surely not. Surely he’s right to be sorry for what he and his people have done even if it was not all him from start to finish.

And I think that we are responsible for what we’ve done wrong in pretty much the same way. We’ve hurt people, we’ve hurt the God who so desperately loves us, we’ve done things which break the world we’ve been given and break the hearts of people who are deeply loved. And we are part of a whole human community which has done these things since the very beginning and whose combined wrongs and cruelties are hard to imagine. So each of us are responsible for our actions, as part of the actions of our whole human community.

7)   But there is, of course, hope. From the beginning God has been promising that the sin and pain and death that bleeds out of our decision to not love him and not trust him, will be defeated. That there will be a way to a world without tears, without loneliness, without shame. But as we’ve seen, he can’t populate such a world with free people as we are now. Because if you put free people like we are at the moment into a perfect, painless world, it would not be that way for long. So in order for God to redeem and restore the brokenness of the world, he has to first redeem and restore the rebellion of the hearts of the people who will fill that world. He needs to deal with our untrust, our unlove, our rejection of our Father, so that he can deal decisively with this cracked and groaning world. And he’s doing that in Jesus. As I talked about in this video,  and as the brilliant person who made this other video explains, in Jesus God came to us, reached out to us, took on the suffering that we caused and deserve, and made it possible for us to come back to him. Made it possible for us to love him again and for nothing to ever get between us. And if we have chosen to love him, if we have willingly said yes to his incredible, painful, proposal, then we can look forward to a wedding day where the consequences of our old rejection have been melted down and poured away, when all that was good and beautiful about this world and us in it has been recast into a glorious new mould, and we live in the unimaginably intense love of God, world without end.

I realise that I haven’t got close to answering every possible question – I’m told that this has been a significant enquiry of philosophy for the last 2300 years or so – but I hope that some of this has made some sense. There’s also a huge amount that could and really should be said about the ways in which we and God can bring incredible, beautiful things out of the most horrible suffering – both now in ways that we can make sense of, and in eternity in ways that we can’t quite. And it might be worth suggesting that the classic problem of suffering focuses on God being ‘all loving’ and ‘all powerful’, but if we have a God who is also ‘all knowing’, and we’re not, we have to admit the possibility that he has good reasons for things being the way they are that we can’t see. But this blog is way too long already so I’ll just leave those there as tasters, and warmly invite any questions or follow ups that you might have! I would love to hear from anyone – whether I know you yet or not – and try to answer any specific questions, or recommend books or other people that might do it in more depth and with more research and thought than I can! And if you’ve now got to the end of this massive post and you’re not really sure what the point of this argument is (because I’ve almost forgotten), have a look at the blog just below about Stephen Fry, or this blog about what difference God makes when we’re hurting, or this one about what God can do through suffering. Right, I’ll be quiet now.

Love,

Mike


* A couple of people have pointed out that I don't really talk very much in this blog about things like disease and natural disasters, that have no direct correlation to humans doing wrong things. So I just want to clarify that a little bit. There's a bit in one of the accounts of his life where Jesus and his disciples see a man who was born blind. The disciples ask Jesus whose sin this man is being punished for with his blindness - as in, was it his parents who did something bad so God made their son blind, or did God know this man was going to be a bad person, so made him blind as punishment in advance? And Jesus says, 'No.' He says, neither. He makes it very clear that the disease and natural disasters we see and suffer in this world are not caused by someone's wrongdoing on a direct, micro level. It's not, Person A does bad thing and then Person A gets punished for it with suffering, or Person A does bad thing and then Person B feels the effects of it. The Bible describes this cause and effect as happening on a macro level - a deep, big level - such that human rebellion in general, necessitates suffering in general, including the brokenness of the natural world. 

Why Stephen Fry Is Right, and I Love God.

Stephen Fry recently said some really powerful things in an interview about what he would say to God if he met him – he talks about suffering and injustice, especially for children, he refers to the East African Loa Loa eye-worm which eats children’s eyes and blinds them, and he imagines himself asking God, “How dare you?” He says, “It’s not right. It’s utterly, utterly evil.”

And I think that he’s right. I think that the reason that the video has been so widely shared and has provoked such a huge response of support and agreement is that everyone knows deep down, and feels really strongly, that it’s not right. It’s not right. Bone cancer in children is not right. It is utterly, utterly evil. So part of what I want to say is that I completely agree with that.

There’s just a couple of things I want to share about how I feel about it as a Christian; as someone who believes in Jesus and believes that he is God – the creator of the world revealing himself as a human being. Two things.

One is that it made me think of something I heard a man say recently, when he was talking about how he became a Christian. He was brought up atheist, but when he was in his twenties his father died suddenly aged 52. And he said something like this:

“It really made me look up and think about the world for the first time. And I thought, there’s really two ways the world might be – either it’s all just a product of matter plus time plus chance, you know, the sort of normal, no-God universe; or there’s a God who created it all. And I felt like the way I was feeling about my dad, the sorrow of it, didn’t seem to make sense in the no-God universe, if we were all just stuff.”

He was saying that his sense of grief about his father seemed to him like something that did not fit in a universe that was purely the product of time and chance and evolutionary process. And as I watch Stephen Fry speaking it seems to me like he’s really expressing a deep feeling that we all have – this profound sense of injustice, that the world is not as it should be – and that strangely, that feeling doesn’t quite fit in a world where there is no God. I think we are heartbroken and outraged by suffering because it is actually wrong. It is not right. We know, deep within us, that there is good and there is evil, and that the Loa Loa worm, and Auschwitz, are evil. And I just want to suggest, as gently as I can, that it seems to me, we have that feeling because good and evil are real things. There is a way that the world should be and a way it shouldn’t be, and if everything is just matter plus time plus chance, then that doesn’t really make sense. If that’s all it is, then this is just the way things are. There can be no ‘ought’. But if there is a God, and there is right and wrong, there is what ‘ought’ to be; then it makes sense that our hearts would hate pain, and wrong, and injustice, and suffering.

And the second thing I want to say is that I don’t believe in the God that Stephen Fry hates. If I met the God he describes, I hope I’d have the courage to say what he says too. But I think that God isn’t like that. I think God isn’t like that because he died on a cross. A guy called Pete Greig puts it much better than I could:

“The Nobel Laureate writer Elie Wiesel recollects a terrible moment in Auschwitz when he saw a child hung from the gallows. For more than half an hour the boy writhed, his body not yet heavy enough to finish the job quickly. Forced to watch this atrocity one observer cried:

‘Where is God? Where is God now?’ But another person pointed to the child’s corpse and wept: ‘There he is, hanging on the gallows’.

This is the tragedy at the heart of Christian faith: the belief that God suffered with us, like us and for us. That God is not distant, malignant or dispassionate. The cross, if it means anything at all, means that he identifies with us in our suffering, and that he is not yet fully in control. Evil things happen which God does not want or intend. When a woman is raped, this is not the will of God. When a child is sold into slavery, God is not the perpetrator but the victim.”

Stephen Fry talks about how he would prefer the Greek gods, because they admit to being human and capricious, whereas the Christian God presents himself as all-seeing and all-wise and so on. I see what he means, but I think that in the bible, and in Jesus, God presents himself not as a kind of ultimate dictator who watches approvingly over every agony, but as a God who to a very serious extent has allowed the world to be not what he wants it to be, and feels the pain of that. There are loads of reasons for him doing that, and it would make this blog way too long to go through them, but the most important thing is that in Jesus we see God himself not as the perpetrator but becoming the victim with us. And for us.

When Jesus saw his friend Mary after her brother had died, he wept. God weeps. And after I’d watched the video I started to imagine, what if Stephen Fry really did get to say that to God, to stand before Jesus and say those words? And I am sure that if he did, when he’d said his piece and he looked up, he would see tears in Jesus’ eyes. And he would see the wounds in Jesus’ hands. I think this is why for so many people who are oppressed, whose lives have been devastated by suffering, Jesus makes sense.

And I also think he makes sense to people because he isn’t just sympathetic but then powerless to help. He is the true source of hope. He came back from the dead, and he tells us that we are right that injustice and suffering and pain are wrong, that they are not the way things should be, and he says to us – Look. I was dead, but now I am alive, and it will not be this way forever. Evil will not prevail forever, cancer will not exist forever and one day death itself will die. There will be no more tears.

Walter Wink once said, ‘Against some images of God, the revolt of atheism is an act of pure religion.’ So what I’m saying is, Stephen Fry is so, so right. We are right to hate evil, and injustice, and pain. But I don’t believe he’s right about what God is like. If God were like he thinks he is, I would hate him too; but I think God is revealed in Jesus, who wept, and died, and rose, and so I love him.




You can watch the original interview here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-suvkwNYSQo#t=35