tony soprano and the problem of evil
I always find Tony Soprano’s response to the suffering of his friends strangely moving. The shrug of the shoulders. The look of apology and helplessness. “What are you gonna do?” he mumbles. It says something profound about how there’s really nothing to say. An awareness that there are no easy answers, and any attempt to say something comforting is going to sound trite and useless. It seems like we could learn a lot from the big guy. Our first response to the heartache of others needs to be to just be there, with them and for them. Nothing to say. “What are you gonna do?”
But I don’t think that’s the whole story. We don’t have any easy-cheesy answers or explanations in the face of suffering, but I think we do have something to say that counts as some kind of good news. Actually I always thought there were two basic things that we can say, after the shrug and the silence and the just-being-there. Two things that are simple but good and true.
One is this – that this is not the way things were meant to be. This was not part of the original good plan for God’s world. This is another ugly scar on his beautiful creation. And he weeps over it. He suffers with us. He sits with us in silence. There is nothing to say, but he is there with us.
The other is this – that God is not helpless in the face of all this ugliness and suffering. He is able to bring some kind of good and beauty out of it. He is able to wipe away tears and make things new. It’s not an easy answer or a quick fix, but its a real hope.
But recently I’ve heard ideas being floated around in the big crazy Christian world that seem to want to question both of these things. On the one hand, I hear people say that every last thing that happens in our world was planned in advance by God, part of his script, designed to bring him glory. The implication is that this is exactly the way things were always meant to be, and God is the author of evil and suffering.
On the other hand, it is suggested that maybe God is taken by surprise by suffering as much as the rest of us. He is a character within the great drama of life just like the rest of us. He’s the most powerful character of course, and doing his best to make things turn out well. But the end of the story hasn’t been written yet. We’ll just have to do our best, you and me and God together.
Both of these ideas upset me at a pretty deep level. They seem to rob us of the two things I thought were simple and good and true in the face of the worst life can throw at us. The second idea has been pretty widely identified as “dodgy” in the circles of the sound and the sorted. And on this occasion I’m not sure I disagree.
It’s just that I think the first idea alarms me more. In the second idea, at least the most powerful being in the universe is still unmistakably good, even if in the end he might be as helpless as the rest of us. But in the first view, it just isn’t clear to me that God is good in any meaningful sense. As someone has said, it seems that the only way you can tell the difference between God and the devil is by waiting to see who wins.
So I say no. I’m going to hold onto these two things. That things are not as they should be and God weeps with us over the brokenness of his world. And that God is not helpless in the face of evil, but is working to restore beauty and bring about a good end to the story. Today is Good Friday and we look to a cross on a hill that says both things in a way that words just can’t. And it’s simple and good and true.
The Dead Poet says:
April 11th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
Hey Jayber, thank you for this wonderfully succinct and insightful post on the problem of evil. I love the picture of God not remaining distant or aloof in the midst of his marred creation but of a God who is with us, weeping as we weep and suffering with us. I guess that he figured it was worth the risk to allow evil and suffering to occur in this world so that his love would be this agent of redemption and regeneration in this world. Cheers, bud.
Vox O'Malley says:
April 12th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
Amen.
Teragram says:
April 13th, 2007 at 2:44 pm
This is a complicated issue that we’re not going to solve this side of heaven, but here’s my two cents.
I don’t believe God is “taken by surprise by suffering as much as the rest of us” (that would be inconsistent with the portrayal of Him in the Bible, in my opinion), He is sovereign and _outside time_. His only direct experience of linear time is Jesus’ lifetime. This is a source of a lot of confusion for us poor humans who can’t possibly comprehend what His point of view is like.
So what does it mean to say “this is not the way things were meant to be”? That’s almost (if not actually) saying “God wanted things to turn out better for you, but despite His best efforts, things went wrong”. That’s not the God I serve.
I don’t buy into the “suck it up, it’s part of the plan” argument either though. I don’t think we’re meant to be grateful for cancer and earthquakes and all the other evils you could name. God doesn’t allow them to exist for their own sake, but He *does* allow them to exist, and He does so tearfully.
The only conclusion I can draw is this: God is eternal and sovereign, He knows more than I ever can. Things are the way they are because He allows them to be so, and whatever His reasons are, they are Good.
zoomodox says:
April 16th, 2007 at 7:33 pm
I agree with Teragram. This is usually good practice by the way for she is smart. If she had been around in the 1920s she would have invested in minerals and survived the Wall St. Crash with nary a dent in her huge finances. She didn’t live then though, which is good because we can know her. And instead of being a globe-trotting mining tycoon she is a hippy-ish nerdlinger living in Maynooth.
But I understand the early Christian tendency to declare heresy anathema best when we think about Openess Theology. We have to be able to say God was free to stop the Stephen’s Day tsunami, for example, if we are to have him as God at all.
That he didn’t presents us with a considerable problem that should not be smoothed over with some 5 point systematic response, whether it is named after a flower or not. My inclination is the problem is caused by our under-estimating the dramatic and mind-boggling implications of us being free, truly free.
That’s as far as I’ve got really.
jaybercrow says:
April 18th, 2007 at 4:41 am
Thanks for all the thoughtful comments.
I agree with Teragram too.
I agree with you both that there’s mystery here that’s way beyond what we can hope to understand, and that we should avoid neat systematic explanations.
We all definitely agree that shrinking God to make him less powerful and transcendent is not a good way to resolve the mystery.
Teragram has highlighted some downright shoddy carelessness in my language. I think if I change one word and say “This is not the way things ARE meant to be” she might let me away with it…? I was trying to convey the sense that we have fallen away from some kind of original goodness, so that we live between a good beginning and a good end. And that feeling we have that things are warped and out of sync and “not as they should be” is right.
And I think we agree that having a strong view of God’s power and kingship doesn’t necessitate believing that he is the direct cause of all that happens, including sin and suffering. As you both imply, he allows these things to happen for reasons we can’t fathom, though if I had to hazard a guess I would do it in the same “freedom” ballpark as Zoomie.
It seems to come down to what we mean when we say we believe God is “in control” of the universe. Does it mean that he plans every detail that happens, or that he has a plan to bring all things to a good ending? I’m going to post some comments from Freddie Buechner in which he suggests that it’s more helpful to think of God as the director of the play, rather than as the puppeteer. That kind of sums up my feelings. Let me know what you think of it.
Natalee says:
June 24th, 2007 at 3:11 am
Jayber.
I can’t add much except a thanks to you all for thinking of these things and discussing them. It’s refreshing and good. I too have been plagued with the whole evil thing. And although this is in no way an answer, it’s given me some peace: Chloe, my one year old, cannot understand things that make perfect and complete sense to me. Like cooking or reading or conversation. Yet she will one day. And along that same line, perhaps we will spend eternity finding that things make more and more sense and are more and more beautiful and cohesive and tangible. And that maybe one day, the matter of evil will be as easy to understand as reading will one day be easy for Chloe?? I don’t know. It helps me sleep at night.