A Suffering Cosmos, A Suffering God

The Observation

Real suffering exists in the world. Professor Bob Mesle often asks his students, "is there an act, event or reality that you would prevent from existing if you could?" The answer to that question is can be named as a source of suffering.

The Question and Presuppositions

How can a person of faith reconcile the following two statements?

1. Real suffering exists in the cosmos;
2. God is (1) omnibenevolent, (2) omnipotent, (3) omniscient (of past and future events), and (4) omnipresent.

To solve this question, many will give more emphasis to a quality of the divine. Typically this is born out of one's experience of God or tradition.

Causes of Suffering

• Suffering caused by natural events
• Suffering caused by moral evil

Terence Fretheim's 10 Theological Claims (based on the flood story in The Book of Genesis)

1. Creation is interrelated and God has chosen to be caught up in this web of relationships.
2. God chooses to use agents capable of violence. God does not perfect agents before working in and through them. a) God works through agents of storm and flood; b) creaturely violence has disastrous natural consequences; c) a fundamental goodness continues in a post-sin creation.
3. Affectability of God: God is deeply and personally moved by what happens in the flood story.
4. God regrets that God created humankind in the first place. (Also, God has temporality--a past, present, future.)
5. God did not know that humans would take this turn. There is a future that cannot be known, because it does not yet exist.
6. The post-flood regretful response by God witnesses to divine vulnerability and human resistance.
7. Judgmental direction changes. God changes God's mind. It does not change the character, being, or purposes of God.
8. God grieves over what happens in the world. God's heart is filled with pain. Grief is the God-ward side of judgment and wrath looks like. Judgment accompanied by weeping is not the same as judgment without tears.
9. Pain will be an ongoing reality for God. God decides to continue to live with resisting creatures. Suffering is God's chief way of being powerful in the world.
10. Divine self-limitation. God limits the divine options for dealing with morally and naturally caused suffering in the world. Self-limitation is guaranteed because God's faithfulness is a certainty. God gives up control, opening the world to all sorts of violence? How might we articulate God's association with painful natural events in a post-flood world?

Terence Fretheim on Natural Sources of Suffering

Luther Seminary 2009 Convocation: Part 1 (flv format) and Part 2 (flv format).

Questions

• Professor Bob Mesle states that suffering exists with or outside of love, but one is not the same as the other. How can you reach out to love others?
• Some suffering is preventable. How can you work to prevent suffering?
• Suffering can be met with a threefold process of identification, being in community with victims (partly by listening to their stories), and loving people through the suffering. How might do this for the people in your community?
• What is missing from this hurried initial consideration of theodicy?

An Introductory Bibliography

• Cobb, John, Jr. "Theodicy"
• Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy. Stephen T. Davis, editor. Westminster John Knox Press, 2001.
• Fretheim, Terence E. God and World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation. Abingdon Press, 2005.
• Griffin, David Ray. God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy. NY: UP of America, 1991.
• Hall, Douglas John. God and Human Suffering: An Exercise in the Theology of the Cross. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986.
• Hartshorne, Charles. Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes. State University of New York Press, 1984.
• “Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes”. Living the Questions.
• Kushner, Rabbi Harold. Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. Anchor, 2004.
• Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt. God, Christ, Church. The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1992.
• Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhVXFiHe4LQ
• Williams, Daniel Day. "Suffering and Being in Empirical Theology," The Future of Empirical Theology. ed. Bernard Meland. University of Chicago Press, 1969.
• ”Quarks and Creation”. Being.
• “Out of Tragedy, Questions about God”, Religion & Ethics Newsweekly.
• “Suffering and Meaning with Professor Bob Mesle (Part I and Part II)”. Homebrewed Christianity.
• “Theodicy”. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (Comic).