Whither Grumpy Christians...And the Better Option with Pain and Suffering

So I usually have a grumpy day or two after camp--I crash hard after getting over-amped on all that extrovert time combined with the general severe sleep-deprivation. Today, I was grumpy. I would hope that this isn't a permanent posture, but you'd have to check with my wife and kids on that.

But the reality is that there are grumpy Christians. There's grumpy people everywhere, but the real mystery is that there are Christians who are grumpy.

The Scriptures promise that all things must work together for our good. In fact, 1 Peter 4 invites us to rejoice when we suffer because we are participating in the sufferings of Christ so that we might more fully rejoice when he returns again (see vs. 13).

So whither grumpy Christians--what gives?

Grumpiness is generally the fruit of trials or pain that has not been fully dealt with. And it would seem that somewhere in the process of those trials, we have a very small but very important decision to make: what will we do with it?

It seems that there are two ways for us to deal with pain--either we can stew on it or we can submit it to Christ. The former is far easier and what I typically want to do with my grumps. It's more or less what I did for most of my day today.

The latter, however, holds the one true promise of genuine redemption of our pain. All of us will suffer to some degree or another (more on that at a later date). That suffering holds the key to our joy and character or the undermining of them both.

To put it in Peter's terms, we can choose to join our suffering with Christ's suffering and in doing so we find joy in the promise that this suffering must bless us. Or we can choose to suffer apart from Christ--leaving us to deal with it alone and bearing the fruit of that alone-ness: anger, malice, self-pity, self-loathing, uncertainty, fear, resentment, just to name a few.

What might it look like for us to choose to bring our suffering and pain to the cross and have it bear the fruit of joy rather than cling to it with a great deal of covetousness to no apparent gain for our souls? When we step back and look at it clear-eyed, why would we ever choose the way of death?

I hope some day to come back from my two week stint at camp and be able to avoid the now-inevitable grumpy day. But even more so, I am praying that I might learn how to join any and all my pain and trials to the sufferings of Christ...and so look forward to the day when all my experiences will serve to bring me (and those around me) joy.

Getting Squirrelly with Suffering: "Left Behind, " The Protestant Work Ethic, and Helpful Catholic Correctives

So my friend and former student Tim, never missing an opportunity to point out the ways that a healthy dose of Catholicism might set me straight, commented on yesterday's post about suffering:

"I think modern Christianity seems to think the two are antithetical--if you're suffering then you aren't joyful. The traditional/catholic perspective--and the one indicated by Scripture--seems to me to be that unless we share in Christ's suffering, then we will not share in his joy either."

I think Tim, as he often is, is right on. In much of American Protestant/evangelical Christianity, suffering is something to be avoided or managed...or worse is a sign that God's angry with you.

This taps into something I've been mulling over. Scripture has in some ways informed the general Western view of suffering as bad or something to be managed or avoided as opposed to the Eastern view of suffering which understands suffering as something to be embraced as a part of normal life.

Much of what has captured the West's imagination post the Reformation (and informed the Protestant work ethic) is the concept of end-times and our possible participation in bringing about God's kingdom on earth.

Some of this has been shaped (at least in the U.S.) by a century or so of a very questionable end-times theology fueled by dispensationalism which has (thankfully) mostly gone out of favor, but is still behind much pop-evangelicalism. The "Left Behind" series is yet another (but hopefully among the last) unfortunate product of what I believe to be a mistaken view of what the end will look like.

One of the views of end-times thinking was that as God's people worked to bring about his kingdom things would inevitably get better and better until it reached a point of nearly-fully-redeemed-ness. Then Jesus would come back and we would all live happily ever after.

And so, for the love of everything good and holy, Christians got to work. They believed that in Jesus' power all (or nearly all) things could and would be fixed before he came. This notion of "fixing" things has marked much of the West's cultural influence and has born good fruit (vaccinations, for example) and bad fruit (colonialism and genocide, just to name a couple).

But the natural outworking of this is to see suffering in a specific light. That is, suffering is a problem to be eradicated so that Jesus would return.

And even as dispensationalism (and that specific end-times theory) falls out of favor and even as Christianity as a whole recedes a bit from the western consciousness, this core value of "fixing things" continues to live on as one of our favorite self-identifying characteristics.

This, of course, robs us of a true Biblical understanding of Christianity. As my friend Tim has proposed, the point is not that suffering is to be avoided or even managed but it is to be embraced as a part of our participation with Christ.

This can get squirrelly. Suffering in and of itself is evil and will one day be done away with once and for all. We do not celebrate suffering. We celebrate Jesus who is Lord over suffering and who invites us to share in his suffering that we along with him might know fullness of joy and victory.

When we are doing that, we can walk in the goodness of participating in the redemption of a broken world while at the same time walk in suffering as a participant in Christ, with Christ, for the joy set before us.

Scripture on Suffering

Scripture seems to address suffering in two ways: 1. it takes suffering very seriously. 2. it refuses to take suffering more seriously than the promises of joy offered us in Christ.

Answering Ehrman's Unanswered Objections 2: Suffering, Free Will, and the After-Life

Dr. Ehrman's second un-answered objection last Wednesday went something like this.

Christians mostly claim that suffering is the result of free will, choices that humans make to inflict pain on one another--precisely the line of reasoning Dinesh D'Souza took. But most Christians believe that they won't be robots in the after life--that there will be some degree of free will in the after life while at the same time holding that there won't be any suffering.

So why is it necessary for suffering to be true in the here in order for us to have free will while it's not necessary for suffering and free will to be coterminous in the afterlife?

In the Christian story, there were only three people ever who had genuine "free will:" Adam, Eve, and Jesus. The rest of us are all handicapped to some degree by the sin nature, passed onto us by the failure of Adam and Eve.

Jesus, on the other hand, lives in a completely different way. He only does "what I see my Father doing."

Every moment of every day, Jesus does what all of us should and would do if we had any clear sense about us: he submits his will to his Fathers will. This is what Christians mean when we say that he was sinless. He never went against the will of his Father.

To borrow from George MacDonald, the will, like the self, has been given to us that we might have something to offer back to our Father. We're like a child given money from our mother to purchase her birthday present. We have been given what we call "self" and "our will" in order that we might give it back to our Father as a present that he genuinely takes delight in.

Only Jesus has ever done this perfectly in this life. But as he is, so shall we be one day. One day, his Spirit will be fully at work in our hearts. We will have the full renovation of our hearts, the promised heart of flesh in place of the heart of stone.

And so in the new heavens and the new earth, we will do what Jesus did--in his infinite freedom he infinitely and freely and gladly submitted his will to his Father's will. We, too, one day, will offer back to our Father the gift he has given us with gladness and joy.

Put another way, we will finally live fully fulfilled lives. We will finally be free of our suicidal tendencies.

In the end, as C.S. Lewis says (riffing off of George MacDonald, as he is often wont to do), there will be two kinds of people. Those who say to God "thy will be done" and those to whom God says "thy will be done."

Hell will be populated by those bent on self-rule forever and ever.

And the new heaven and new earth will be this never-ending, never ceasing joyful community of resurrected bodies who are forever offering up "their wills" to the fully good One. And in return they will receive ever-increasing joy. It shall be a glorious reversal of the Great and Terrible Exchange that went down many thousand years ago in the Garden of Eden.

And no one will ever regret the giving over of our borrowed wills...not for one second.

Answering Ehrman's Objections Part 1: Is God an Interventionist?

Last Wednesday UNC's most famous agnostic Dr. Bart Ehrman posed two very important questions that did not get addressed during his debate with Dinesh D'Souza on the question of the Christian God and suffering.

First, when Ehrman took inventory of the suffering around the world, it seemed that God did not act. The God of the Bible, it seemed, DID act--to free the Israelites from the Egyptians, for example. So how could it be that the God of the Bible existed when so much pain exists and so many prayers for rescue go un-answered?

Ehrman's answer: he doesn't. If there is a God, he/she/it is far off and un-involved in this world.

And secondly, if the answer the problem of suffering is human choice (the classic "free will" defense offered by Christians and by D'Souza that night) is it not possible that God could have created a world where free will existed while suffering does not? In heaven, for example, Christians seem to believe that somehow freedom will exist while suffering will not. Is it necessary to have suffering to have free will?

Here's my shots at answering the first of these really good, really thoughtful objections posed by Dr. Ehrman.

The first question: God intervenes in the Bible, but there's no evidence of such intervention today, ergo there is no God like that. This seems to me to take the extraordinary works of God and mistake them for normative workings of God.

The OT story of the Israelites being freed from Egypt? That happens after 430 years. That's right: 430 years. That's thousands of prayers later, God acts. If you took a snapshot at any given moment, it certainly did not appear that God was particularly interventionist.

The Bible is indeed full of miraculous and wonderful saving, very interventionist, acts of God. And those are recorded precisely because they were miraculous, they were outside the normal workings of physics and nature and politics and military.

But these are recorded in order that the character of God might be made known, not to establish a normal operating procedure for how God will behave in every circumstance. God does act, in his timing, in his way. And when he does act, there is no force or army or kingdom or natural cause that can stand against him. That's what we learn from his interventions in the Scriptures.

And in regard to today--who knows how much suffering actually is relieved by God's working?

There are literally millions of testimonies, stories, all over the world of this same God working to do miraculous things to save people from all sorts of suffering. Not every time. But sometimes. Certainly some of those stories are bogus, and most are simply un-prove-able...just like in the Bible.

But to the woman or man of faith, with eyes to see and ears to hear, the stories bear a striking family resemblance, the flair and flavor of the same Artist at work.

This doesn't answer the question of why God chooses to intervene sometimes and not at other times. But let's not paint the false picture of a God who moves at the slightest whim of people in the Scriptures who has suddenly disappeared today.