Between Presence and Explanation: Thinking through Suffering with Thomas Long

In a concluding “Coda” to his new fine book on suffering from a pastoral and homiletic perspective, What Shall We Say? Evil, Suffering, and the Crisis of Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), Thomas G. Long restates his purpose throughout: “to think through what preachers can say, what teachers can teach, about the question of theodicy” (152), that is, about the problem of evil and suffering for those who believe in a God powerful enough to stop it and good enough to want to. Long, professor of preaching and coordinator of the Initiative on Religious Practices and Practical Theology at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, highlights in particular what preachers can and must say to the more “intellectually alert” (xiii) Christians in their pews who seek not only pastoral presence in the face of suffering, but also a response to their crisis of meaning: Why does God allow suffering? Why doesn’t God do something about it? How must I understand God’s goodness and power if babies die, genocides are undertaken, and tsunamis ravage coastlines? The book thus attempts “to stand with preachers, who will stand with their parishioners, in thinking through how faith in a loving God holds together with the facts of life in a suffering world” (xiii).

Although he singles out preachers as his intended audience, I hope the actual audience will be much broader. As a teacher of Christian theology, and one who regularly teaches “the problem of suffering,” I am keenly aware of both the need to think clearly about this “crisis of faith” and the difficulty of doing so without framing the issues in categories foreign to the Christian tradition. Long, who knows that theodicy is a latecomer to Christian quarters, begins his lineage with defenses of God in the wake of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. He also knows that theodicy proper—as a philosophical defense of certain conceptions of God—can clash in presumption and tone from deeper strands of the Christian tradition. Others will suggest that theodicy is wholly foreign to the Christian faith and, if admitted, akin to a Trojan horse. In fact, two groups of scholars largely talk past one another. Theodicists defend the rationality of belief in God against atheist dismissal on the grounds of innocent suffering. ¹ Other “postliberal” or “anti-foundationalist” theologians argue that such apologetics amount to abstract philosophical theism at best, and the defense of a deistic God at worst, and so should not be of interest to Christians. ² Long’s book is unique—and invaluable—for facing head on all the “road hazards” (41–56) detected by the second group while still insisting that the crisis of belief marked by “the problem of suffering” is not a philosophical construction. ³ According to Long, “we are all the heirs of Lisbon”:

What was once the outrageous thought of some philosophers of the eighteenth century and then became the daring skepticism of the educated elite in the nineteenth century has now become the common dilemma of the average person, including many of the people in our churches—namely, that belief in a loving and powerful God is deeply challenged by the irrationality and inexplicability of innocent suffering. (17)

Long thus takes the theodicy problem into the pulpit chiefly because he sees it already in the pews.

Indeed, while Long’s book can be read as a careful navigation between the Scylla of the theodicists’ rationalizations and the Charybdis of the anti-theodicists’ dismissals in the name of Christian purity, he sails closer to the former than the latter. Any silent ministry of presence without the proclamation of intellectually sustainable answers capitulates to a “ministry of the manageable” (32). And so, with the “road hazards” properly spotted in Chapter 3, Long critically draws upon various theodicists in Chapter 4—whom he calls “fellow pilgrims”—before naming what preachers should say about suffering in the final chapter. Happily—at least for those who want the anti-theodicists to have their full due ⁴ —Long inserts a crucial interlude on the Book of Job before his final chapter. While God’s appearance to Job from the whirlwind entails one sort of (quite maddening) response to suffering, the only airtight explanations as to why Job suffers are proffered by Job’s uncomforting friends, whom God rejects at the end of the drama and whose “various non-answers” Long rightly caricatures (102). The interlude thus sets us up for a final “answer” that must be different than a reified theory. The final chapter does not disappoint.

Before examining that chapter and raising some questions about Long’s pivotal moves, I want to underscore the importance of framing and structuring the book as he does. I experience both of the dangers sketched above acutely in the classroom. For example, the number of students in my introductory classes that use their final papers to address the problem of evil in traditional, analytic terms is always disproportionally high. Why is it that they do not become as interested in, say, Augustinian understandings of sin or Christus Victor interpretations of atonement? My guess is that the unadorned conceptual clarity of theodicy’s categories (God is omnipotent, God is omnibenevolent, suffering exists) seduces them into believing that this is where real thinking happens—that here they can make a public argument that is purged of unfounded opinion. (In this regard, the real value of postliberal critiques of theodicy and Enlightenment assumptions more generally is to show that they are also historically contingent and “narrative-dependent.” The Enlightenment’s account about the end of all ungrounded stories is but another story).

A fewer number of students—usually upper-level, some of them heading to seminary—too easily dismiss anything that smacks of theory after pitting it against pragmatic or pastoral responses. Have they really come to terms with postliberalism’s critique, ready to embody the Christian narrative with a second naïveté? Or do they anxiously glimpse in the problem of evil the real crisis that it is and so fix their eyes on a more manageable ministry? If my students are split, I admit that I fare no better, often introducing the philosophical categories only to unteach them. Once the prodding of Hume has led to surer Christian footing, will we be able to kick the ladder away from the house?

Again, the great benefit of What Shall We Say? is its ability to bind these counter-pressures into the book’s structure. The cumulative effect of Long’s first two chapters is to show that the competing proclivities toward theoretical explanation and pastoral presence alone lie not only between different kinds of students or between more intellectually engaged parishioners and those who never cry “Why?” The tension cuts through each modern subject. To be Lisbon’s heirs does not, therefore, mean that we have adopted skepticism or foundational apologetics wholesale. It means that we live in a disenchanted world—fueled in part by our own critical questioning—and yet remain nostalgic for, and so often choose to adopt, a faith that we don’t quite hold true. This is how Charles Taylor describes our situation in his magisterial A Secular Age (Harvard University, 2007), which Long draws on at key moments (11–12, 28–29). If we are faced with an “ironist’s faith,” ⁵ faith that is owned but not owned—or more paradoxically, a faith that is disowned precisely insofar as we choose to adopt it, making it our choice, and so rob it of its encompassing and enchanting powers—then Long only understates the case when he sees in this phenomenon the primary challenge to our preachers (29).

It is here that I want to raise some interconnected concerns. I note that what Long takes away from Taylor’s account of secularism does not do justice to Taylor’s or Long’s most compelling insights. Take the following representative passage:

We preach today not to the cherubim and the seraphim but to people many of whom belong to the secular world at least as firmly as they belong to the church, people who have one foot in the faith, perhaps, but who firmly plant the other foot in a world of science and reason. If we ask them to believe in the gospel, the gospel must, in some way, “make sense” to them. This does not mean whittling down the gospel to fit the categories of modern, rationalistic science. To the contrary, it means, at times, challenging those very categories, attempting to expand the possibilities of what can “make sense” to people and what can be received by them as true … But when [the critical Christian] says, in effect, “Hey you claim that God is loving and that God is powerful, but when a little girl walking home with a handful of flowers for her mother is hit and killed by a drunk driver and God couldn’t stop it from happening, you have some explaining to do,” he not only speaks for many, but he is right to say it. (27)

Notice here (1) that Long characterizes the contemporary Christian as having at best one foot in the Church—the other is planted firmly in the secular world where critical questions about faith are raised, (2) that those questions are thus rightly raised, and preachers should be ready to answer, even though (3) what will count as an adequate response may entail “challenging [the] very categories” of the question. Long’s primary counter to the anti-theodicists is to insist that preachers must take secular culture’s questions seriously. But I wonder whether questions in this form—“How can I believe in God’s goodness and power in light of meaningless suffering?”—echo so resoundingly throughout the secular world that preachers and teachers need only bend their ears. Many of even my most “intellectually alert” students do not know of the theodicy problem until I introduce it as such. I imagine that those in the pews are not wholly different. Are we teachers and preachers giving name to untold doubts or creating new dilemmas?

I am not here suggesting that pastors should protect parishioners from crises of faith by refusing to talk about them. I am suggesting that the gulf between the Church and our so called secular world is even wider than Long imagines and that one payoff to this otherwise dire circumstance is that church leaders get to frame the “problem” of suffering in their own terms. Paradoxically, I also take faith and secularity to be more mutually implicating than Long suggests. It is not only that we are half-secular and half-churched, but that our very faith has become the foremost product of our dis-embedded, “secular” choices. Indeed, today the most “authentic” forms of faith for many are those that they adopt for themselves and that “work” for them. In my view, this comprises the biggest danger of thinking through faith in theodicy’s analytic terms: the God we get would be a human conception, one that would work for us, a hypothesis that “answers” our own critical questioning.

Any faith that is forged through theodicy thereby risks emaciation. The real beauty of Long’s book is that it ends up giving just the opposite: a full-bodied God and an un-apologetic theology. I have noted the importance of the interlude on Job already. There, Long delicately reads Job as meeting a God whose justice remains incommensurate with human schemes of moral order (106–10). If the whirlwind issues a “theodicy,” it is not that suffering is finally compensated for by some countervailing good, but that suffering is utterly absorbed within a God beyond all human crafting. ⁶

The concluding chapter, “Walking through the Valley of the Shadow,” likewise contrasts all too human conceptions of compensation and talk of a final balance with the New Testament’s promise that suffering and death will be utterly absorbed into and so destroyed by God. Long characterizes the chapter as practice in solvitur ambulando—as solving by walking, as an already-practiced faith that also seeks understanding. He is properly modest about the task: “We will say what we see as we walk, and we will try to be honest about what we cannot see” (119).

Long then walks us through Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds (Matt 13:24–30), which brings together a number of responses to the problem of suffering: (1) that lament or a “theodicy of protest” is a faithful response to suffering, (2) that suffering comes not from God but from “the enemy” who somehow arises within God’s good creation, (3) that God cannot fix the problem unilaterally without ceasing to be the God we know through Jesus’ cruciform power, and yet (4) we can trust that the “love of God, seemingly so weak on the cross, ends up victorious and ultimately destroys the power of evil” (145). It seems to me that these findings—individually, and especially when taken together—provide not more-or-less adequate explanations for suffering, but rather rules of faith or road markers between which any appropriate response must be offered. And so, as important as what Long says is what he knows he cannot say. We do not know how raw lament before God is preserved, even as we move toward more “intellectual” understandings (130)—only that it should be. We do not know how an enemy slips in to sow weeds among the wheat—only that “something happened” to introduce evil into God’s good creation (136). We do not know how the non-coercive power of weakness that is revealed in the cross and at the heart of God will someday utterly wipe out evil and yet remain what it is (145)—only that this is God’s particular power and that it really is powerful, despite every appearance.

By giving us markers, rules, ways of walking our way into a response to human suffering, Long leads us further into mysteries rather than resolving conceptual problems. The biggest mystery is that of God’s own character, of who God is, especially in light of who we, in pain, think we want God to be. Long proves himself to be the best kind of theologian in this regard, beckoning us to face a God whom we can come to know in faith but never define through our schemas. This important book on theodicy will lead preachers and teachers to say much more than they think they can, but never more than they should.