“You will keep him in perfect peace, Whose mind is stayed on You, Because he trusts in You” (Isaiah 26:3 NKJV)

At the end of every life, unless clemency is death itself, God refuses some of the most desperate pleas for mercy—if they aren’t Christian desires. Is that disappointing? Sometimes it seems like Christians are on a slow-drip, extended-release, awareness that we aren’t desiring correctly. If we aren’t desiring correctly, then we won’t be disappointed in the right things.

First, some questions. I’ve seen a video of kids playing on a Thai beach in 2004 just moments before the wave took them. I see things like that and I want to shout, “Run for your lives!” But am I supposed to whisper “Let go and let God”? Did any of those kids pray the Lord’s prayer, asking that his will be done before being violently crushed by white water, their bodies carried out to sea like detritus? I’ve read about the survivors of the USS Indianapolis and about how hundreds of sailors screamed as sharks took them under over several days. Did any of them pray for deliverance? How often do people pray for mercy, only for to God permit the worst possible terrors and suffering instead? Should sinners spend those moments in repentance or is screaming in horror just as well? Should Christians go to their deaths serenely, “calm as Hindu cows”? Let me quickly remind the reader now that there were people suffering slavery and torture while Jesus walked some small part of the earth for a handful of years. Well are you disappointed yet?

Now, some answers. Best case scenario: the world is fallen, we are all sinners; we will suffer and then die. Worst case scenario: Our sin-driven cynicism will lead us to consider the goodness of creation to be nothing more than mere divertissement. If that is our attitude, then we will lie to ourselves about the impermanence of all things and conclude that, (1) since everything is bound to pass away, there must therefore not be any desire worth pursuing above the others; and (2) all regrets are equal.

This cynical frame of mind is behind the illogic of all evils, including abortion. The basic grounding assertion is that, really, we all know that nobody’s actually certain God exists. After all, nobody has interacted with Him. Christians must therefore convince themselves of Christianity. Likewise, and consequentially, they’ll argue that everyone knows an unborn baby isn’t just as much a human being as an adult walking around—Christians must convince themselves of that, too. If we’re honest, the cynic might wager, there’s this whole raft of beliefs we should all give up if we want to have fewer hang-ups or regrets in life: everything from gender roles, to abortion being wrong, to God’s existence.

When it comes to the biblical categories through which Christians experience the world in all its ups and downs, the cynic scoffs. He might look at a beautiful sunset and wonder: Why would anyone talk about sin or redemption when we have this? — as if a pretty sunset were enough to satisfy hunger pangs of sin-emptiness. Conversely, he might ask: How could I love and enjoy this sunset when there are people suffering so many tragedies at this very moment? Such questions born in the cynical mind betray misplaced desires and regrets. The truth is that we don’t know God in the sunset. Tragically, there are a lot of suicides in Hawaii which make that point for me. We know God by his Word and Sacraments through which we learn what is worthy of our desire (and perhaps our regret) as we grow in Christ.

To ask whether we ought to resist suffering if it is God’s will is to conflate punishment with chastening; moreover, it’s like trying to pull back the curtains to see the inner operations or logic of God’s Providence. It is infinitely preferable to recognize that Christians are alive and imperishable in Christ; our whole selves—inner and outer—remain hopeful that our outer-selves, our ‘clay jar’ selves, will be openly declared just and made new creations.

Sometimes, I admit, I’m tempted to say, “If Christianity were true, then I wouldn’t expect us to resort to euphemisms to clean-up real life events so that they fit into a systematic, Christian, theological mold. For example, ‘When it’s their time, God takes people home to him’ seems absurd on its face as a layman’s comment about a child dying a terribly painful death in a blazing fire or something—but it would be grudgingly accepted by any orthodox Christian theologian as technically correct (insensitivity notwithstanding).”

But this sort of criticism doesn’t take in the full scope of theology in order to see why this remark would ring true and not be insensitive at all. There’s a failure here to situate all of us in a fallen and suffering world that invariably ends in death. To bring into this conversation God’s providence in drawing his own to him through this suffering and death would only be considered glib or insensitive by those who are unaware of bigger picture of our situation here.

The greater context of God’s love through suffering as a goal or reason is one of those things that’s more important than what we judge according to our pragmatism. There is a depth of mystery, not a blankness, there. I have a related argument for those who despair of the possibility of intelligent aliens visiting us (esp. in the context of government officials coming forward lately with evidence of otherworldly technology). My reassurance for anyone worried about the theological issues related to this is that such creatures would be creatures; they would have to be either deeply wise or deeply evil if they had the same self-aware consciousness that we have and weren’t simply animals manipulating tools according to dumb instinct.

We won’t ever by our own spiritual growth in wisdom come to a total comprehension of suffering such that we wouldn’t feel its sting at all; we will, however, learn to reject the regret of the cynical and despairing flesh which expresses disappointment in God’s providence. Let’s turn with Martin Luther to the Word and change our tune to Christian pleas for deliverance, not mere respite. According to Luther, “we should think that, following the example of Paul, we ought to glory greatly in the cross which we have received because of Christ, not because of our own sins. When we consider the sufferings we receive only so far as we ourselves are involved in them, they become not only troubling but intolerable. But when the second person pronoun “Thy” is added to them, so that we can say (2 Cor. 1:5): “We share abundantly in Thy sufferings, O Christ,” and, as the Psalm says (44:22), “For Thy sake we are slain all day long,” then our sufferings become not only easy but actually sweet, in accordance with the saying (Matt. 11:30): “My burden is light, and My yoke is easy” (https://wolfmueller.co/christian-suffering-lectures/).

Finally, it can be difficult for some of us to believe that sin is the reason why there’s death and suffering in the world. Maybe that’s because sin being what’s wrong with the world is an incomplete explanation; what it leaves out is this, that sin is against the Creator. We easily forget the holiness of God. The good news is that faith receives the reconciliation.

There is a lot of handwringing about things falling apart. But as a reminder the big falling event is not right now. We’ve forgotten that the world was already fallen; we’re terrified now to encounter it in this state. The big rising event has begun already as well.

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Other helpful work on this subject.

David Bentley Hart:

“each man, solicitous as he was of God’s perfect righteousness, clearly seemed to wish to believe that there is a divine plan in all the seeming randomness of nature’s violence that accounts for every instance of suffering, privation, and loss in a sort of total sum. This is an understandable impulse. That there is a transcendent providence that will bring God’s good ends out of the darkness of history—in spite of every evil—no Christian can fail to affirm. But providence (as even Voltaire seems to have understood) is not simply a “total sum” or “infinite equation” that leaves nothing behind. I will touch upon this more fully below; here, though, it seems worth noting that there is a point at which an explanation becomes so comprehensive that it ceases to explain anything at all, because it has become a mere tautology. In the case of a pure determinism, this is always so. To assert that every finite contingency is solely and unambiguously the effect of a single will working all things—without any deeper mystery of created freedom—is to assert nothing but that the world is what it is, for any meaningful distinction between the will of God and the simple totality of cosmic eventuality has collapsed. If all that occurs, in the minutest detail and in the entirety of its design, is only the expression of one infinite volition that makes no real room within its transcendent determinations for other, secondary, subsidiary but free agencies (and so for some element of chance and absurdity), then the world is both arbitrary and necessary, both meaningful in every part and meaningless in its totality, an expression of pure power and nothing else. Even if the purpose of such a world is to prepare creatures to know the majesty and justice of its God, that majesty and justice are, in a very real sense, fictions of his will, impressed upon creatures by means both good and evil, merciful and cruel, radiant and monstrous—some are created for eternal bliss and others for eternal torment, and all for the sake of the divine drama of perfect and irresistible might. Such a God, at the end of the day, is nothing but will, and so nothing but an infinite brute event; and the only adoration that such a God can evoke is an almost perfect coincidence of faith and nihilism. Quite apart from what I take to be the scriptural and philosophical incoherence of this concept of God, it provides an excellent moral case for atheism—or, for that matter, Gnosticism (but this too I will address below). Equally problematic, in some ways, if far more spiritually sane, is the view that all suffering and death should be seen as the precisely apportioned and condign recompense for human sin, balancing all accounts and contributing to a final harmony of all things. It is a pleasing vision of things, in some ways, though quite horrifying in others; it is also a vision so pointlessly complex as to verge upon banality. If it gives us comfort to believe that the death of an infant from disease and the death of a serial murderer late in life from a heart attack, congenital madness and innate genius, the long fortunate life of one of nature’s Romans and the brief miserable life of a born pauper are all determined by a precise calculation of what each and every one of us deserves, then it is a comfort sustained by absurdity. If nothing else, one might ask, what of all the particular instances of animal suffering (which no conscience should find it easy to ignore as unimportant)? And, anyway, Christ forbade his disciples, in Luke 13: 1-5, to believe that there is a secret due proportion between misfortune and culpability: neither those whose blood Pilate mingled with the sacrifices nor those eighteen upon whom the Tower of Siloam fell met their fates on account of some special degree of iniquity on their parts. And he also made it quite clear, in Matthew 20: 1-16, that there is no distinction among the rewards reserved for the righteous corresponding to the diversity of their merits: those who labor all the day and those who labor but an hour receive the same wages. One may of course assert that original sin makes all of us guilty, and so nothing that happens to us can, strictly speaking, be in excess of what we deserve; but, then, this means that the diversity of our fates cannot be said to correspond to the diversity of our desserts, and that salvation, far from “balancing accounts,” is utterly gratuitous. Here also it is probably wise to acknowledge the historical limitation placed upon what one can say on this matter. I, for instance, can write only as a representative of Eastern Orthodoxy, and while most of the larger theological differences that are often said to exist between the Eastern and Western Churches are more illusory than real, on the issue of original sin there is at least one difference upon which most scholars are in agreement. While all Christians must believe that we are born in sin—subject to death, corrupted in body and soul, suffering derangements of will and desire, our minds darkened, unable to save ourselves—it is only in Western tradition that the additional idea of an inherited guilt became a conspicuous feature of the concept of original sin, and it is an idea that Orthodoxy has on many occasions explicitly rejected (which is not to say that it is Orthodox teaching that any of us—slaves as we are to the rule of death in all our members—can ever fail to become guilty of transgression when we attain any level of rational autonomy). As to why there should be this difference, various answers have been offered: a notoriously misleading Latin translation of Romans 5: 12, for instance, or a more general “mistranslation” of various of the New Testament’s central terms, or even the influence of the Roman jurisprudential genius upon the evolution of Latin theology; some argue that, whereas the Eastern tendency has typically been to read certain New Testament metaphors for sin and salvation almost strictly in terms of civil law concerning slavery—the “debt” of the bondsman who is enslaved in the house of death, but who is “redeemed” from slavery by the “ransom” required for manumission—the Western tendency has been to read those same metaphors in terms of criminal law as well, with its concern for forensic culpability and retribution. While this disparity in emphasis makes little difference, of course, for how the two traditions understand the disposition of “mature souls,” it can lead to quite radically divergent conclusions regarding infants. It was as natural, for instance, for Gregory of Nyssa to conclude that infants who died without baptism were all saved (their deaths being their baptism, as it were, since Hades has been overthrown) or for Theodoret of Cyrus to deny that the baptism of infants served for the remission of sins as it was for Augustine, Prosper of Aquitaine, and Fulgentius Ruspensis to believe that unbaptized infants were destined for eternal perdition. (None of these views, as it happens, is established doctrine in either Church.) Needless to say, I believe the Orthodox view to be the more scriptural (which spares me the effort of professing a belief I find repugnant). But there is no need for a retreat to confessional redoubts on this issue. If, by the time of Thomas Aquinas, the eternal destiny of unbaptized infants had come to be understood not as everlasting torment but as a state of perfect natural beatitude, this is obviously because Roman Catholic thought did not simply equate inherited guilt with personal fault. In neither tradition, at any rate, is it possible intelligibly to assert that the death of a small child is in some unambiguous sense an expression of divine justice. Christ, after all, assured us that “little children” are the natural citizens of the Kingdom of God (Matt. 19: 14; Mark 10: 14; Luke 18: 16), and so surely it must be the case that at the deepest level the suffering of children is contrary to the law of the Kingdom, and to the pleasure of its King. In any event, insofar as I could follow the intent of my interlocutors, I felt varying degrees of sympathy for their positions (though, of course, the Catholic views were somewhat more agreeable to an Orthodox palate than were certain of the others). What struck me most forcibly, however, was that in their apparent need to produce an apologia for God that precluded the possibility of any absurd or pointless remainder in the order of creation and redemption, most of them had seemed to allow certain vital aspects of the language of the New Testament to become all but entirely invisible. Little was said about the sheer exorbitance of grace, the “free gift” of salvation (as Paul calls it in Romans 5), that “unjust” mercy that distributes the same rewards to all who have labored, no matter the length of their service, or God’s gracious and magnanimous indifference to our “just desserts.” And almost nothing was said regarding—and this can scarcely be emphasized enough—the triumphalism of the gospel or the Johannine and Pauline imagery of spiritual and cosmic warfare; no obvious notice was taken of the strange absence of any metaphysical optimism in the New Testament, or of the refusal of any final reconciliation with death—indeed, the mockery of its power. Yes, certainly, there is nothing, not even suffering or death, that cannot be providentially turned toward God’s good ends. But the New Testament also teaches us that, in another and ultimate sense, suffering and death—considered in themselves—have no true meaning or purpose at all; and this is in a very real sense the most liberating and joyous wisdom that the gospel imparts.”

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F.-X. Putallaz #15 : Dieu et la cause du péché (mal moral) (I, 49 ; I-II, 79) (Roman Catholic) : This is speculation from within a system of thought I don’t always find useful (Thomism), but it’s useful in that it at least demonstrates the plausibility of goodness from God though there’s evil from us. Sometimes we simply need to know that it’s possible that something is true (in this case, that God is in control, that He is good, and that we still sin).

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David Bentley Hart:

“ The Christian vision of the world, however, is not some rational deduction from empirical experience, but is a moral and spiritual aptitude—or, rather, a moral and spiritual labor. The Christian eye sees (or should see) a deeper truth in the world than mere “nature,” and it is a truth that gives rise not to optimism but to joy.”

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“ evil can have no proper role to play in God’s determination of himself or purpose for his creatures, even if by economy God can bring good from evil; it can in no way supply any imagined deficiency in God’s or creation’s goodness; it has no “contribution” to make. Being infinitely sufficient in himself, God has no need of a passage through sin and death to manifest his glory in his creatures, or to join them perfectly to himself, or to elevate their minds to the highest possible vision of the riches of his nature. This is why it is misleading even to say, as did that scholar mentioned above, that the drama of fall and redemption will make the final state of things more glorious than it might otherwise have been. There is precedent for such a view in Catholic tradition, admittedly—even Aquinas seems perhaps to grant that it might be so—but the idea is incoherent. It would entail the conclusion either that there are certain ends that God can accomplish in his creatures only by way of evil (which grants evil substance and makes God its cause) or that God chooses to reward transgression with greater blessings as a demonstration of his sovereignty (which means that he is unjust or that his righteousness is divided against itself or that his original prohibition of sin was a kind of lie; and perhaps also means that evil is something real that he confronts and to which he reacts like a finite subject). No less metaphysically confused—though immeasurably more disconcerting—is the suggestion of that junior professor that God requires suffering and death to reveal certain of his attributes, which is false for much the same reasons. (And, surely, one should really say that it is precisely sin, suffering, and death that blind us to God’s true nature.)”

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“ The cross of Christ is not, after all, simply an eternal validation of pain and death, but their overthrow. If all the tribulations of this world were to be written off as calculably necessary contributions to redemption—part of the great “balance” of things—then Christ’s sacrifice would not be a unique saving act so much as the metaphysical ground for a universe of “sacrifice,” wherein suffering and death are part of the sublime and inevitable fabric of finitude; and divine providence would be indistinguishable from fate. We would find ourselves standing again upon the Kuru plain…”

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“ if it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers.”

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“if indeed there were a God whose true nature—whose justice or sovereignty—were revealed in the death of a child or the dereliction of a soul or a predestined hell, then it would be no great transgression to think of him as a kind of malevolent or contemptible demiurge, and to hate him, and to deny him worship, and to seek a better God than he. But Christ has overthrown all those principalities that rule without justice and in defiance of charity, and has cast out the god of this world; and so we are free (even now, in this mortal body) from slavery to arbitrary power, from fear of hell’s dominion, and from any superstitious subservience to fate. And this is the holy liberty—the gospel—that lies hidden but active in the depths of Ivan’s rebellion.”