Music and Theology, Part 5

Working through the themes of this series on music and theology I listened to a lot of Switchfoot songs, and I noticed a persistent theme that surprised me: Over and over -- in the context of worship songs, love songs to God -- I found the recurring theme of longing, pain, and the struggle of seeing injustice in the world.

The big $20 word for this is theodicy, which comes from the Greek words theos (God) + dikē (judgment). So theodicy literally means justifying God. Most of the time when theologians do theodicy, they do exactly that, they attempt to justify evil, explaining why there needs to be evil, why bad things happen to good people.

Some attempts to do this are better than others, but what I want to draw our attention to here is, if you listen to a Switchfoot song, they do not attempt to explain the problem of evil at all. Perhaps even more surprising is that these laments are almost always set in the context of a love song. There is a line in a song that captures this paradox: Every lament is a love song.

This makes for both a surprising approach to theodicy, and also for an surprising text for a worship song. Yet it is certainly not new. The Psalms are just packed with this kind of thing -- worship intertwined with lament, crying out against injustice and suffering. It's a theme we find all over our Bibles, yet almost never do we hear worship songs like this, nor do we hear theologians approaching such questions from the perspective of a lover.

Imagine singing this song next Sunday,

I am the thorn stuck in your side,
I am the one that you left behind,
I am the dried up doubting eyes
Looking for the well that won’t run dry

Running hard for the other side
The world that I’ve always been denied
Running hard for the infinite
With the tears of the saints and hypocrites

I can hear you breathing,
I can hear you leading
More than just a feeling
More than just a feeling
I can feel you reaching
Pushing through the ceiling
'til the final healing
I'm looking for you

I am restless, I am restless
I am restless, looking for you
I am restless,
I run like the ocean
to find your shore
I'm looking for you

It is at once shocking in its familiarity, and yet so familiar. It sounds like the Psalms. But not a pious but hollow attempt to copy the Psalms, but a raw and honest voicing of the same pain and love that the Psalms spring from. The title song from the album Vice Verses addresses the issue of suffering and injustice even more directly,

Where is God in the city life?
Where is God in the city light?
Where is God in the earthquake?
Where is God in the genocide?

Where are you in my broken heart?
Everything seems to fall apart
Everything feels rusted over
Tell me that you're there

Where is God in the genocide? Tell me that you're there. There is no attempt to explain suffering in this song, only a cry out to God. As well-intentioned as attempts to explain suffering by theologians may be, the focus on explaining suffering and evil -- on justifying God -- communicates that all we need is to find the right explanation, and our struggle would be solved.

But consider how we all struggle with the death of a loved one. We all know the explanation. We understand that death is natural, that we all die. Yet that does not mean we do not grieve the death of someone we love. We know the explanation, and we still hurt just the same, we still experience loss.

We need to grieve. That's why we can never explain away the question of theodicy. Because when we do that, when we stop struggling, grieving, aching, hurting, questioning, protesting in the face of suffering, we stop being fully human.

Good theology does not mean we are immune to grief, immune to pain. What it hopefully can do is help us give a thoughtful and deep voice to that grief and pain. People often say they want to "get over" or "get past" something hurtful. It even sounds noble, like it's connected to forgiving. But we don't get over loss or hurt, we get through it. A focus on finding an explanation to suffering and evil implies that this will provide us with a way to bypass the struggle and grief. What we need instead are the means to help us walk through what the Psalm 23 calls "the valley of the shadow of death." Theology that does not get that, focusing instead on explanations, does not get the human condition and what we need to live well in the reality of our broken world.

Every lament is a love song. This context of love and worship running through all these songs is so vital. They are not simply asking "why!?" into a theoretical vacuum, but asking the pained question of "why!?" addressed to the one we love, to the one we worship. That is the context that theology must spring from. If we are going to do theodicy as theologians, it should not take the form of a detached intellectual discourse, it needs to be expressed as worship, worship that comes ripping out of our souls

Feels like we're just waiting, waiting
While our hearts are just breaking, breaking
Feels like we've been fighting against the tide

Until I die I'll sing these songs
On the shores of Babylon
Still looking for a home
In a world where I belong

On the final day I die
I want to hold my head up high
I want to tell You that I tried
To live it like a song

The reason theologians try to explain suffering is that they want to give us a reason to hold on, to believe, to maintain faith in the face of suffering and injustice. But faith is not sustained by our reason, faith is sustained by God. When we can learn to be vulnerable and honest, but do that lament in the context of a love song, we can find a way to hold on. We feel the pain, we feel the doubt, but we still believe, we still hold on to love, to the one who is love.

Let the wars begin, let my strength wear thin
Let my fingers crack, let my world fall apart
Train the monkeys on my back to fight

Let it start tonight. When my world explodes,
When my stars touch the ground,
Falling down like broken satellites

Let your love be strong
I don't care what goes down
Let your love be strong
enough to weather through the thunder cloud

Fury and thunder clap
like stealing the fire from your skies
All of that I am hanging on
All of my world resting on
Your love

The Theology of the Cross as an Answer to the Problem of Evil

The Old Testament can be read as one long debate about the problem of evil and unjust suffering. It begins by declaring in the law that God will keep his people from suffering if they only follow and obey. If anyone is suffering, it declares, this is because they have sinned and been unfaithful. Then along comes books like the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Job where this law is questioned. They complain that they are suffering unjustly. These books call God to task, saying "I am suffering, yet I have been faithful. What's going on?! Why are you letting this happen? This is wrong!"

In short, the question "Why would an all-powerful and good God allow evil?" did not originate with atheism, rather it originated way before that in the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures. It is a part of our sacred texts. If we understand the Psalms as examples of prayers and worship, then asking that kind of heart-wrenching question filled with desperation and pain and anger is... an act of worship. It is a part of the liturgy of prayer. Selah.

Now that kind of protest-as-worship is quite different from the common religious response to the question of "Why would an all-powerful and good God allow evil?" (which is known as the question of "theodicy"). Here the focus is typically on maintaining the all-powerful side of things at the expense of love and goodness. Explanations will be given as to why what seems to be horrific and devastatingly bad is in fact good and loving. It's all part of a bigger plan, you see. These arguments attempt to tell us how it is somehow "loving" to allow this horrible thing in order to preserve the idea that God is in control.

It's easy to understand why the stress is placed on keeping the all-powerful part. We want desperately to believe that things are under control. We need to believe that. But consider the history of the Israelites: They were enslaved by Egypt. God liberated them, and they had a moment in the sun, but then they were put under the thumb of Assyria, and then Babylon, then Persia, then Greece, and finally under Rome. Basically they were passed as the spoils of war from one conquering nation to the next for generations upon generations. This is a people who know suffering.

The prophets told them that this was because of their unfaithfulness, and if they would just repent then all this suffering would stop. So they did repent, and the temple was rebuilt. But they were still under enemy rule (at the time of the rebuilding of the second temple they were under Persian rule if you're keeping score here).

So consider that history and put yourself in the shoes of a Jewish first century follower of Jesus the Messiah (in Greek: "the Christ"). The idea was that the messiah would be a warrior-king like David. The hope was that the messiah would come and restore Israel to power, and the unjust suffering of Gentile oppression of so many long years would finally stop.

Now, put yourself at the cross. The one that you had hoped would end all the injustice you and your family and your people have suffered for so long is being shamed and tortured and killed before your eyes. Jesus is dying, and all your hopes in God to make things right and good are dying with him on that cross. 

The reaction of the disciples was to run and hide. Jürgen Moltmann has said, “Christians who do not have the feeling that they must flee the crucified Christ have probably not yet understood him in a sufficiently radical way.”

Along those same lines, let me say this: Most Christians do not understand the implications of the cross.  Most Christians still hold to what Luther called a "theology of glory." Luther declares, "A theology of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theology of the cross calls the thing what it actually is." That's exactly what we experience with typical apologetic responses to the problem of evil. We are told that what seems to be evil is actually good, and we just need to trust God's wisdom here. 

A theology of the cross does not do that. A theology of the cross begins by facing the reality of human suffering head-on. It speaks to those who are in a place of suffering and begins by saying "this suffering you are experiencing is painful and bad. It is not good. It is not deserved. It seeks to offer support and love and compassion, but no matter how much love and goodness may come after this, it does not change the fact that this bad thing really is bad.

Jesus shows us how God enters into our world of suffering and becomes a victim of unjust suffering. That is the crucified God, and that understanding of God completely changes how we understand who God is. It kills the understanding of a God of power and control. Because of this, Moltmann says “Only a Christian can be a good atheist.” What he means is that to call the crucified God "Lord" is to declare that the God of power, the God of Caesar, the God of empire, and indeed the God of Christiandom... is not. 

That God of power is an idol. It is an attractive idol to be sure. Of course we want to believe that God is in control, and that bad things can't happen to us if we are good. But as much as I wish it were not the case, bad things do happen to good people.

What's more, when we go to those who are suffering, seeking to show love and help, this can hurt us. Working with the poor and oppressed may sound romantic, but that's not reality. The fact is, it hurts to share in the grief and pain of another. The word compassion means literally "co-pain" and there's a lot of truth in that. We know a guy who volunteered to help victims following a natural disaster. Years later he is still dealing with the trauma that resulted from what he experienced there. He insists he would do it all over again, but the trauma he now carries from it is still real. He carries those scars, scars born of compassion.

The answer to the problem of evil that we see in the God revealed on the cross is one that calls us to join with those who suffer. That's hard, and carries a cost. It does not come offering explanations, but offering our lives, our selves. It is an image of God who carries scars, and who asks us to love like that, too.

It's been said that the greatest act of courage is found in losing everything worth living for, and deciding nevertheless to live. The reason that I hold to the theology of the cross is because it can face the hard reality of our broken and unjust world and still allow me to hold on to trust and hope and, most of all, hold on to love. We as humans need to hold on to love. 

Jesus, on the night before his death, ate a last meal with his disciples. He told them he was going away, but stressed that they were not being abandoned. He told them they would suffer too, "in this world you will have trouble, but take heart, for I have overcome the world" (John 16:33). That is the tension we need to live in: Suffering happens, especially when we love greatly, but somehow we need to hold on to our trust in goodness and love despite it. That is the courageous balancing act of trusting in love in our broken world, trusting in the crucified God. 

Most of all Jesus asked his friends to promise him that when he was gone they would love each other as he had loved them. The way we can truly answer the problem of evil in our world is by learning how to do that. So when you encounter suffering, don't explain, don't justify. But as Paul says, remain in these three things--trust, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love.

A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel

My buddy Brad Jersak has a new book out, A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel that I'm really excited about. As the title suggests, the book’s premise is understanding God in the light of Jesus. That may sound at first glace to be a really basic premise, but in fact it is quite radical. I say this for two reasons,

First, while there is a clear renunciation of humans killing in the name of God in the New Testament (in contrast with the Old Testament where this is presented as a means to bring about God’s purposes and specifically commanded), the New Testament does—at least in some places—still maintain the idea that God can and will use violence in acts of judgment. We see this in places like the story of Ananias and Sapphira, and of course with the entire idea of hell understood as “conscious eternal torment” for the unrepentant.

So to understand God as Christlike means stretching ourselves even beyond where some New Testament authors were able to go. We can argue that in so doing we are moving further in the direction they point us in (I would certainly), but still that requires some courage to more forward towards that new territory—even when we do so believing we are doing it as an act of faithfulness. I personally think it is something we desperately need to do, which is why Brad’s book is so important and needed.

Second, it is radical to understand God as Christlike because this undoes the way we think of God in terms of power and force and strength. If we really get this, we will understand that this applies even to people who don’t believe in God at all (meaning it is not just something that matters to religious folks but to everyone) because it has to do with what we value, how we understand power, how we understand success. Brad understands this deeply and works out in A More Christlike God what it means to re-think who God is in the context of the weakness of the cross. This is, again, a scary and brave thing to do, because it means facing our own helplessness and weakness.

Because of this, A More Christlike God is not a book about detached theology, but a book that cuts to the heart (which is what good theology is supposed to do). Ultimately it is a book that deals with the question of theodicy—if God is loving and all-powerful, why is there so much evil and hurt in our world? Most attempts to deal with this question end up being apologetics that seek to explain the problem away. It’s because of free will... it’s a mystery... it’s for your good... and so on.

That’s not the approach Brad takes because he has spent too much time as a pastor among people who are hurting—parents reeling from the death of a child, people who have survived abuse or rape—in short, among people encountering profound and devastating trauma and loss. There in the face of that kind of pain our best intellectual explanations just ring hollow. What we need instead is a way to face our real pain—to face the reality of suffering in our world—and at the same time be able to open our hearts in hope and trust and love.

This is where Brad takes us. Written with the wisdom of a pastor’s heart, familiar with the reality of people’s real trauma and grief, Brad lovingly helps us to face the pain and darkness of our suffering head-on by showing us a theodicy of the cross that faces the problem of human suffering with brutal honesty, showing us that it is precisely there in that place of brokenness that we encounter God in Christ.

This is a conversation we desperately need to have, and you really could not find a better guide to walk you through this than Brad. So go get yourself a copy of A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel.

Exegesis #7 - Reading through the eyes of Jesus

In the past I have dealt with violence in the Old Testament and the problem it poses for reading the Bible as God's word. How can we love and trust a God that would command genocide? How can be believe a book that claims he does? Does not the Old Testament present a sub-Christian and appalling vision of morality characterized by an ethic of violent domination and hatred of enemies?

Anyone who does not ask these questions has never really read the Old Testament. One Christian bishop who asked these kinds of questions early in the history of the church was Marcion. Marcion found that the God of the OT seemed immoral and brutal and had nothing to do with the the God revealed in Jesus Christ. Marcion has since gotten a bad rap, being often dismissed as a heretic, but he has a point. Unlike many people today who simply dismiss him, the church father Origen, who disagrees with Marcion' proposal of ditching the OT, nevertheless recognizes the validity of his point. Origen complins that both "heretics" like Marion as well as more "simple minded" Christians hold a view of God based on the OT which
"would not be entertained regarding the most unjust and cruel of men" (De Principiis 4.5). If we look today, find the same is true: both fundamentalists as well as atheists read the OT and see in it a monstrous picture of God.

So what is the alternative? How did Origen read the OT? More importantly, how did Jesus read the OT in which he saw his loving Abba Father who he says "loves his enemies" (Mt 5:34-48)? I'd like to propose a way for us to read the OT. It's very simple actually - we simply need to read the OT in the light of Jesus. Let me give an example of what that might look like:

Jesus applies the story of Passover to his own death, and from this we can gain a lot of insight into how he understood the cross. But the same time the cross is very different from the Exodus. The Exodus is about God's people being liberated out of bondage, but it comes about through violence and force, and is waged not against evil itself, but other human beings. So the way Jesus understands the Exodus means its reversal at the same time as it means its fulfillment. The same can be said for pretty much every story in the OT. Take David and Goliath where we have your basic "little guy overcomes the big bad bully" story. In the end it still promotes overcoming enemies through violent force though. Reading this in the light of the NT we might ask how the little guy David might have applied love of enemies and Paul's principle of "overcoming evil with good."

In other words, we cannot simply read the OT as Christians and assume that it gives us a true picture of God. In the OT we see at best a "dim Christ," but God's true nature is only fully revealed in Christ. To read the OT right, we need to read it through the interpretive lens of the NT, we need to lay every story at the foot of the cross and ask how it is transformed, redeemed, and reversed by the cross. This is precisely how we see Jesus reading the OT himself. He says he has come "fulfill the law" but in doing so he reverses it, turning the ethic of genocide and war of "hate your enemies" into "love your enemies". While in the OT we see the prophet Elijah call down fire from heaven to consume his enemies (2 Ki 1:10), Jesus rejects this outright. When his disciples ask him "Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them, as Elijah did?" (Lk 9:54) Jesus rebukes them "You do not know what kind of spirit you are of; for the Son of Man did not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them." (Lk 9:55-56 NASB). Let me underline what Jesus says here: what kind of spirit you are of. There are really only two options here. Either we read the OT with the spirit of Christ, or we read it with another spirit, and as a result see in the OT a God of violence and hate.

This is admittedly a radical way to read the OT, but I submit to you that this is exactly how Jesus read his Bible. It is also how Paul and the other Apostles read it, and how Origen and the early church read it. So it is a deeply orthodox New Testament way to read our Bibles faithfully. It is also a life-giving way of reading Scripture that does not turn a blind eye to the abuse of power and violence propegated in the name of religion, but exposes it and redeems it in Jesus name. I think it is time that we recovered this way of reading.

on theodicy, suffering, and remembering

I can't read these two quotes without crying. I offer them both as a prayer.

These are the words of Elie Weisel, a survivor of the Holocaust, from his book Night,

Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.

Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith for ever.

Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.

Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.

Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live
as long as God Himself.

Never.

And from Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov,

Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: 'Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.' When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can't accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures.

You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child's torturer, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' but I don't want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether.

It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to 'dear, kind God'! It's not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care for avenging them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured? And what becomes of harmony, if there is hell?

I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don't want more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. I don't want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she will, let her forgive the torturer for the immeasurable suffering of her mother's heart. But the sufferings of her tortured child she has no right to forgive; she dare not forgive the torturer, even if the child were to forgive him! And if that is so, if they dare not forgive, what becomes of harmony? Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive?

I don't want harmony. From love for humanity I don't want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it.

And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.