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Yesterday, while enjoying some quiet time between morning worship and the New Year’s Eve festivities, I found another reason why Faith & Theology is a daily stop. Following is the original post (as referenced here) and a selection (unapologetically biased, and truncated) of the 64 comments (don’t miss the final two comments!):

Tyler Williams points to an article entitled “Don’t Waste Your Cancer” by the popular Reformed writer John Piper. Piper, who is himself currently battling cancer, tries to emphasise God’s sovereignty by describing cancer as a “gift” and “blessing” which is “designed for you by God.” But as Tyler points out, language like this is offensive: it is offensive to a Christian understanding of God, and it is offensive to the real experience of human suffering.

In contrast to John Piper, here’s what Karl Barth had to say: “[Sickness] is opposed to [God’s] good will as the Creator and has existence and power only under his mighty No. To capitulate before it, to allow it to take its course, can never be obedience but only disobedience towards God. In harmony with the will of God, what man ought to will in face of this whole realm … and therefore in face of sickness, can only be final resistance” (CD III/4, pp. 367-68).

Cancer is related to God’s will only as that which God rejects and negates—it is an expression of the threatening power of chaos which God has set himself against. Those suffering with cancer may therefore be comforted not by trying to convince themselves that all this is somehow God’s bitter “gift,” but by recalling that, in the death and resurrection of Jesus, God has forever said No to darkness and death, and Yes to light and life. God’s “sovereignty” is not an abstract principle of determinism, but it is the fatherly Lordship of God’s grace, as revealed once and for all in Jesus Christ.

Selected Comments:
Exiled Preacher…
I’m sure that Piper would agree that suffering and sickness are a result of the fall rather than a direct creation or gift of God. But at the same time, God in his sovereignty does assign suffering and sickness to his people. We should see God’s loving providence at work when we fall ill or suffer. Piper’s attitude to his cancer (for which he is receiving medical treatment) is similar to that of the Psalmist: “It is good for me that I have been afflicted,that I may learn Your statutes”. “I know, O LORD, that Your judgments are right, and that in faithfulness you have afflicted me”. (Ps 119:71 & 75.) God may not be the immediate cause of suffering and sickness, but as believers we may be called to “suffer according to the will of God.” (1 Peter 4:19.) It could be argued that Piper is endevouring to fulfill the injunction of James 1:2, “My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials”. Of course, it is ultimately true that sickness and death shall have no dominion over believers when our mortal bodies put on immortality at the resurrection.

joshua…
exiled preacher, one needs to distinguish between God’s capacity to work good through suffering and God’s willing of evil. The psalmist, Peter and Paul certainly want to encourage christlike embrace of suffering, but that is wholly different than claiming God is causing or worse gifting it to humans.

Q.A. Jones …
It’s interesting to note that all those who have expressed disagreement with Piper have not done so with Scripture. But, those who have supported Him have done so with Scripture. It is important that our understanding of God is not influenced by faulty human logic/philosophy (camouflaged as good theology) and not pure exegesis of Scripture (i.e., Biblical Theology; not the discipline of – but the description of proper theological positioning). Scripture read plainly (as normal language) speaks clearly to the sovereignty of God in all things – which speaks of Gods rulership, control, and ordination of all things – whether we understand it or want to accept it.

Ben Myers…
as Tyler points out, the question can’t be resolved simply by piling up proof-texts.

In any case, I’m not sure it’s helpful to think of the Bible as a repository of proof-texts. Instead, the biblical writings are historical documents which bear witness to the saving act of Israel’s God in Jesus of Nazareth. God has revealed his own nature and being in Jesus — so we should look at Jesus (through the biblical witnesses) to discover who God is, and what God’s “sovereignty” is all about. This “looking at Jesus” is the important thing, and this involves an interpretation of the whole biblical witness; whether or not we quote any specific words and phrases from the Bible is of no importance.

Steven Harris…
God has not given us a book of proof-texts to simply reassemble into doctrine like some kind of theological jigsaw. …God’s stated plan for creation is to make it anew, and to create a world where there is no more death or suffering, a process he has begun by raising Jesus from the dead. We make a nonsense of this if we believe that God is the author of evil and death, and it means that ultimately we have no hope.

kim fabricius…
That cancer might be a gift, a blessing, divinedly designed – I find this whole line of thinking morally repugnant. It may have a prima facie plausibility in a case like Piper’s, but it quickly shipwrecks on the vast and unfathomable sea of horrendous human suffering. Theologically, it’s a short step from a cancer ward to the death camps.

Rush Rhees once asked, angrily: “What is the value of suffering like that in King Lear?
What was the value of the degradation that belonged to the sufferings in the concentration camps? When, for instance, a man is going to pieces morally and knows it. ‘Joyful acceptance’???. . . If I could put my questions more strongly, I should do so. For I think that religious apologists have generally been irresponsible and frivolous in writing about this mater. They have deceived both themselves and others by such phrases as ‘suffering for Christ’, ‘joyful sacrifice’, etc.

Of course there are inspiring examples of endurance in the face of unimaginable suffering. The Holocaust survivor Primo Levi comes to mind. But imagine Levi (who, as a result of his experiences, eventually took his own life) speaking of Auschwitz as “divinely designed”, or as a heaven-sent opportunity to grow in faith or to bear our wriness, or whatever. Who in their right mind would say such things?

That sufferings might be explained – let alone explained away; that suffering might be for something, e.g. our character development; that one might even dare some kind of cost-benefit analysis to square the moral circle – God keep us from well-intended theodicists!

Joshua quoted from his parallel post (he is referring to Moltmann’s The Crucified God)…
Moltmann reads Jesus’ godforsaken cry on the cross of “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” as the key to understanding the cross (both for salvation and God’s character). On the cross, God in Jesus profoundly experiences the pain and suffering of the world and the rejection and abandonment of God. On the cross God rejects God, thereby God comes to suffer with and for us taking our suffering into God’s own self or being. God’s love (and providence) is defined by suffering and pathos, not omnipotence, etc.

Bryan L…
I’m confused why permit automatically equates to ordain. I think the only thing we can say about God permitting something is that he permitted creatures, human and spiritual, to have freedom and that it is genuine freedom that he allows to exist even when those free being don’t use it the way he would like them to. The world is far more complex than people just getting a disease or not, like the flip of a coin. Cancer is the result of a many factors that we can’t see like radiation and environment and diet and many other unknowns. These factors are often the result of thousands of years of free being using their freedom that God permitted them to have in ways he doesn’t approve of but still allows to happen. And these actions unfortunately sometimes culminate in people getting cancer.

kim fabricius…
“This judgement and counter-judgement is exactly what we have seen in the reasonings that constitute theodicies: ‘That looks pretty rough, why did God allow that?’ – ‘Well, he did it for such-and-such reasons.’ -’Alright, but did he have to go to such lengths?’ – ‘I understand your concern, but he wanted to achieve these ends, and unfortunately, there’s no other way to get there.’ And so on. God is part of a community of criticism and counter-criticism. It is almost as though an end-of-term report were being compiled on God’s performance.”
— D.Z. Phillips

The whole misconceived enterprise of theodicy founders on the mistaken notion that God has a personal psychology and a moral agency like ours, only bigger and better, and that we can establish standards of judgement with which all can agree and which make everybody happy – God included! And the same goes for the endless discussions of God’s causative vs. permissive will, divine predestination vs. human freedom, etc., etc., as if all were engaged in a competition for theological space.

“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” (Job 38:2)
“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding” (Job 38:4).

“Well, Lord, we might not have been there, but we’ve got a pretty good idea what it must have been like. After all, we’ve got the Bible. And what do you mean ‘words without knowledge’? Hey, we’ve all got theological degrees – and haven’t you heard of ‘hermeneutics’?”

Whenever I enter a discussion like this, I feel like one of Job’s “friends”. Doesn’t anyone feel the same?

kim fabricius…
Of course I am “slanting the discussion”, QAJ – some lateral thinking (if you like) to subvert the mug’s game of theodicy with its futile attempts to square the circle of divine power on the one hand and the divine love on the other. (I don’t mean to make any “personal” attacks, it’s just that the whole enterprise strikes me as Pythonesque!)

I’m trying to look at the actual religious contexts in which these terms – divine power and love – are used, and above all to look to the paradigm case of Christ crucified (there’s my BIG biblical text), dogmatically tracked. And what I’d suggest is that that at the cross we discover that God does not have two separate and competing attributes, power and love; rather God is love and his only power is the power of love. In God love goes all the way down. His nature (it’s been well put) is the grammar of his will.

As Rowan Williams observes: “God’s action has been held, in orthodox Christian thought, to be identical with God’s being – that is, what God does is nothing other than God’s being actively real.”

And if Goglotha is anything to go by, I’d also suggest that in the face of horrendous evils love silently suffers. The very grammar of God entails that Love has no power to guanante its success, nor can love intervene amidst suffering and evil without denying its nature.

I think that his is what our great theologians of the cross like Luther and Moltmann are really getting at.

Alistair, from a parallel post (Election, etc. – The Sovereignty of God)…
It is imperative that we feel a great tension between the way that things are and the way that God would have them to be. Anything that relaxes this tension can be dangerous.

kim fabricius…
Christ did what the Father WANTED him to do. His death was a premeditate INTENDED murder
— Q. A. Jones

For all your assiduous proof-testing, I can’t buy it, not least because the biblical understanding of divine intent, purpose and providence is not as straightforward as you make out, it is much more textured and nuanced, while your soteriology of the Father’s paedocide I find theologically repugnant.

Herbert McCabe gets the gist of it for me (taking up your parent metaphor):

“Well, the, did the Father want Jesus to be crucified? And, if so, why? The answer as I see it is again: No. The mission of Jesus from the Father is not the mission to be crucified; what the Father wished is that Jesus should be human. Any minimally intelligent people who are proposing to become parents know that their children will have lives of suffering and disappointment and perhaps tragedy, but this is not what they wish for them; what they want is that they should be alive, be human. And this is what Jesus sees as a command laid on him by his Father in heaven; the obedience of Jesus to his Father is to be totally, completely human; the fact that to be human means to be crucified is not something that the Father has directly planned but what we have arranged. We have made a world in which there is no way of being human that does not involve suffering.”

A fortiori when that human being is a human being of pure love: for when sinful human beings confront pure love, there can be only one result: they kill it.

Premeditated intentional murder? No, Jesus died because he was the Man – within God’s providence, but not an act of the divine will.

OneortheOther…
Kim Fabricius: I am curious as to whether Herbert McCabe (and those who share his interpretation) are familiar with the following passages:

    Isaiah 53:10 “Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush Him; He has put Him to grief…”

    Acts 2:23 “[T]his Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.”

    Acts 4:27-28 “[F]or truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.”

kim fabricius…
Yes, Oneoranother, I think we may safely assume that Father Herbert McCabe OP, one of the outstanding Catholic theologians of the second half of last century, knew the verses to which you refer. It’s just that when McCabe sat down with the scriptures, he listened to a symphony, not to a collection of notes.

That there are statements in the Bible about God’s direct causation in human suffering – well, duh! But they are part of a rich fabric of scriptural reflection and development (and regression) that weaves together several strands of thinking: God as the fons omnium bonorum (Calvin); God as the providential guide and director of cosmic affairs; the intrusion of the surd – human sin – sheer negation, the impossible possibility that God denies even as he “permits”, and that can be known only as it is forgiven and defeated – by God; and, of course, the mixed blessing human responsibility.

So, e.g., on Isaiah 53:10 . . .
Here is certainly a hands-on God engineering an unpleasant event. However, there is clear reference to human agency in the Song as well, nor may we deny that evil is having its hour (cf. Luke 22:53). Finally, that God’s efficient causality must be seen in the overarching context of his teleological causality might also give us pause before making tabloid theological headlines about divine premeditated murder.

Finally (with Brevard Childs), I am sure that in wrestling with texts like Isaiah 53, we need to maintain a creative tension between respecting its place in the self-understanding of Isrel and reading it through the prism of cross and resurrection.

kim fabricius…
Let me ask another question: Did God will Auschwitz? I do not see how anyone in his right mind could answer “Yes”. This is certainly moral outrage talking – but I think a theologically appropriate moral outrage. To will Auschwitz would be to will evil. God, however, cannot will evil. If you want to call this a divine restriction, I would counter that this is a divine self-restriction. God is free, yes, from the constraints of freedom (Barth). Again, God’s nature is the grammar of God’s will, not the reverse. So too to speak of the crucifixion as divinely willed premeditated murder is, for me, quite simply a theological solecism. Nor does a calculus of providential cost-effectiveness (e.g. on balance, Auschwitz will finally be seen to have been worth the suffering) do anything but leave me as cold as Dante’s inferno.

I can see how people – particularly those within the Reformed tradition (I am one of them!)- may make the claim that everything that happens happens according to God’s will. I can also appreciate the move taken by those who anxiously anticipate where the logic of such a position may take them (i.e. to God as the author of evil): viz. to introduce various distinctions about the divine volition (e.g. active/permissive will). Me, I am content to say that while not everything that happens is determined by God’s will, everything that happens is indeed embraced by his purposes of goodness and love. “Thy will be done!”

By the way, our conversation confirms, for me, that theodicies inevitably break down within the (implicit) moral framework in which the discussion takes place: either God is a monster, the author of terrible evils, or human suffering, in being explained, is explained away and the world’s woes are unacceptably trivialised. In her groundbreaking Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, Marilyn McCord Adams, with some deft lateral thinking of her own, tries to negotiate a way between Scylla and Charybdis. Not altogether successfully, however, in my view.

Ken…
Why is it repugnant to think that God might actually will the death or injury of someone whom he knows will benefit or will benefit others by the experience? Is this not what he does through Jesus Christ, a question I note you sidestepped by returning to the issue of Auschwitz?

kim fabricius…
I sense from Ken’s cost-benefit analysis of suffering a John Hick-like “vale of soul making” theodicy – the outward-bound school of theology (as it’s been called). I can’t go there.

As for a final divine reckoning putting everything to rights, well, yes – but a lot more needs to be said – and, pace Westminster – perhaps unsaid about the Last Things, particularly when it comes to eternal damnation (I’m pretty Barthian on this one).

And that God wills some suffering but not all suffering, well, certainly insofar as suffering entails any evil, or is entailed by any evil, I would say not only that God does not will any suffering, but also that God cannot will any suffering. God inflicts no suffering, God suffers all suffering.

Ben Myers…
Just a comment on all this discussion of God’s “will”. I think part of the problem here is that the very word/concept of “willing” is basically unsuitable. The concept itself does not belong to the inner grammar of the biblical narrative, so that when we start raising questions about God’s “will” in relation to suffering and the death of Jesus, we find that we have created questions which it is impossible to answer properly.

In Robert Pirsig’s famous novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), the Japanese word “Mu” is used as a response to questions which cannot be answered with either a Yes or a No; instead of responding with a Yes or a No, the only response to some questions is: “un-ask the question” (Mu).

I think that’s the way I would also respond to some of the questions that have been raised here: the answer is neither Yes nor No — the only proper response is to “un-ask the question”, and to find new questions that are better suited to the biblical narrative itself.

In both exegesis and theology, no tool is more important than the well-formulated question. And one of the central tasks of theological thinking is to try to let our questions be shaped by the biblical narrative itself, so that in turn these questions can really be answered.

kim fabricius…
And I am sorry that what you hear me say is simply unsubstantiated assertion driven by moral outrage. I don’t think that’s fair, but of course it’s not for me to decide. You want to do theology with the Bible. Of course! So do Ben and I. But not only with the Bible – the Bible “neat” as it were – and certainly not with the Bible as a a sourcebook.

Serendipitously, I have just been reading Gerhard Sauter’s judicious reflections on dogmatics Gateway to Dogmatics: Reasoning Theologically for the Life of the Church (2003). Sauter says (p. 218):

“The meaning of sola scriptura changes fundamentally if everything the church claims as valid has to be derived from biblical texts. In cases like this the Bible becomes a ‘source’; but it is a source in an entirely different sense from the sola scriptura of the Reformation . . . a supply of truths on which one may fall back as needed, or an information desk that can be resorted to. If claim is laid to the Bible in this way, then it becomes a formal principle, an ecclesiastically sealed document of its own self-assertion, rather than the primary proclamation in which God addresses us.

“No sentence in the Bible is actually a final court of appeal in and by itself, as if it were a matter of ‘this is the way it is, just as it says.’ Only in one place in the Bible is there an explicit appeal to the principle ‘it is written’ – in the story of the temptation of Jesus (Matt. 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-13).”

You don’t have to cite scripture to be scriptural – as even a cursory glance at the great Christian poets should convince you.

Your way of doing theology strikes me like Nietzsche’s way of doing philosophy – relentlessly, impatiently, “with a hammer”. But to a hammer everything looks like a nail.