Natalie Burris

Tornadoes, Ricky Gervais, and that mansion just over the hilltop

I came across this article in the LA Times about a Joplin tornado victim, M. Dean Wells, and was touched by the struggle of Wells' pastor to come to terms with a tragedy like this.  What do you say at a funeral of a man who died while selflessly letting people in a Home Depot as a massive tornado hit, only to be crushed by the concrete walls of the giant warehouse store?  

Wells' pastor admitted that he wrestled with portraying the tornado as an act of God.  Thankfully, he instead read from John 14:2: "In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you."  The pastor remarked: "I would think that in this week in which so many homes have been smashed to smithereens, there ought to be some good news in that — that God is preparing a place for us."

photo © 2010 Duncan Harris | more info (via: Wylio)

Last week, I was presented another image of this idea that we get a place in heaven, this time in the movie The Invention of Lying.  Ricky Gervais, atheist and comedian, wrote and starred in the film.  I wasn't too impressed, because it had the potential to be funnier, and I wish Gervais would have focused more on advertising and movies as a big farcical lie.  

Warning: spoilers below.

However, Gervais' character, Mark, offers a blistering critique of Christianity, from which I think Christians can learn a lesson. Mark lives in a world where no one is capable of lying or even fathoming the concept of a lie.  But, Mark has discovered lying, which means that everyone else considers what he says to be truth.  Therefore, Mark can manipulate his world.  When Mark's mother passes away, he tells her that, instead of nothingness, she will go to the best place she can ever imagine.  

Mark then ends up as an accidental modern-day Moses, basically concocting an ontology and theology that resembles Christianity.  But this belief system is a gross mischaracterization of what the Christian faith should be, because its focus is solely to end up in a mansion that "The Man in the Sky" has promised everyone individually.  

Mark and his friends end up hanging out by a pool, when Mark asks them if they're happier since they've learned about The Man in the Sky.  A friend, played by Jonah Hill, replies:

Well, because I was thinking that if I get eternal happiness when I die, that will be really great. Because it's eternal, you know, so you can't really beat that. So I'm just really happy that that's going to happen, so until then I think I'm just going to stick with the alcohol and my little apartment and just kind of hang out by myself and drink and watch TV.

Mark doesn't think this sounds like a happy life, but the friend responds, "Well no, it won't be that long because the more I drink, the faster I'll die, and I'm just waiting for that mansion."

Leave it to an atheist to highlight how a solely heaven-ward faith can end up being so useless and unable to speak to the pain we have here and now, on this earth.  Also, the promise of John 14:2, even taken outside the exaggerated context of The Invention of Lying, can end up meaningless in a society that already has anything it could ever want, materially.

It's a shame that it takes something like a massive tornado to rip us up from our foundations to remind us relatively wealthy and comfortable Americans that we have a place being prepared for us.  I wonder what meaning that John 14:2 takes on for our fellow Christians, here and in other parts of the world, who struggle daily to find shelter and food.  Maybe these material blessings are a curse at times.  

That's why I strive for a faith like Wells', who, understanding that this present life matters, took the time to visit nursing homes and was so selfless that it led to his death.  That's why I hope to avoid a faith like Mark's friend, who has no qualms with simply waiting for his mansion, beer and remote control in hand...

From "Why me" to "I will follow"

Beal, in The Rise and Fall of the Bible, provides a clear description of the problem of theodicy:

Imagine the problem as a triangle: on one corner you have the belief that God is just; on the next you have the belief that God is all-powerful; on the third, you have the observation that people suffer unjustly.

It's a logical problem.  You can't hold the three corners of the triangle together.  So any solution to the problem of theodicy inevitably lops off one of them. (p. 160)

Some of us cut off the God-is-all-powerful corner, while others cut off the God-is-just corner.  Still others claim that no suffering is unjust.  

Beal notes that the Bible (remember, it's a collection/library) does not resolve theodicy.  Instead, it argues, wrestles, and explores different responses to it.  The texts end up "affirming the question over any and every solution" (p. 160).  Again, the Bible is not univocal, and we cannot reduce it as such.

Psalms 13 and 88, and Pharoah's hardened heart, stand in tension with the idea that God is always just.  This should rightly horrify us, and we feel the need to turn away.  These stories and outpourings to God cause discomfort, and so we seek reassurance.  But Beal points out:

[T]he psalm itself, indeed the Bible itself, doesn't turn away with us.  It stays with the voice of pain.  Even as it lingers in the hollow silence after Jesus' own lonely cry from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" [...] The library of the Bible has spaces to let suffering speak and be heard. (p. 161)

This way of looking at those troublesome passages of Scripture, and the troublesome suffering we experience today, is intriguing, but it still begs the question.  I still want to know why God would supposedly harden Pharoah's heart and render plagues the way She allegedly did.  The notion that humans are pawns in a cosmic game is disconcerting.

photo © 2010 NOAA Photo Library | more info (via: Wylio)

Aside from my lingering concerns, though, the idea that the Bible doesn't seek to resolve the tension of theodicy is compelling.  Perhaps we shouldn't expect the Christian faith to resolve those tensions either.  In the same way that Beal criticizes the expectation that the Bible is an answer-book, I've realized that I'm expecting the Christian gospel to provide an answer to the theodicy problem.  

In demanding that my faith provide answers it perhaps was not designed to provide, and in turn rejecting this version of the faith, I do it a disservice.  Maybe what is repugnant to me is not the failure of Christianity to solve the theodicy issue once and for all, but at the heart of it, it's a failure of the expectations that I've imposed.

Will Willimon recently remarked on Bart Ehrman and theodicy in The Christian Century.  In the context of the recent tornados that pummeled the South, Willimon acknowledges the limits of explanation, but comments that an Ehrman-like rejection of Christianity is not the only option:

No one around me at those locations of terrible destruction asked, “Why me? Why God?” Most of them were too busy, drenched in sweat, and dust from the rubble to pause to engage in philosophical speculation. Their most persistent question was, “How can we do more to support and work for the victims?”

And that seems very Christian to me. Jesus was not a great philosopher who came with a set of noble precepts and brilliant ideals. Jesus never said, “Think about me.” Rather it was always, “Follow me!”

Jesus was among us as a victim of horrible injustice. He offered us few explications of suffering and injustice; he offered himself as fellow sufferer. As Hebrews says, Jesus not only came to us but suffered with us. He offered us not reasoned explanations but rather empathetic, life-giving presence with us. He gave us not a great way to think about tragedy but a way of acting in and through tragedy.

The mindset of the tornado survivors who turned around the "Why me" question strikes me as very powerful.  In my cerebral, analytical way, I have begged God, Scripture, and my faith community to please give me an answer in the face of global suffering and my very own personal nightmares.  

The very fact that I've had the luxury to stop and think about suffering, analyzing the why's every which way, is telling.  Just like those in the U.S. who have had their houses leveled, I doubt that those without clean water and enough food for their children around the world care which theodicy-triangle corner to lop off at the moment.  

Yes, I still definitely struggle with what Ehrman dubs "God's problem," and at this time I'm close to lopping off the God-is-all-powerful corner.  But Beal and Willimon have reminded me that Jesus calls us to follow him where we are.  Perhaps instead of spilling liters of ink and writing wordy blog posts on theodicy, we should subvert those questions.  We can't be expected to first solve all philosophical problems, or expect the gospel to solve them, before we begin to follow Jesus.

And you survive.

  

I usually don't listen to contemporary Christian music.  But one artist, Natalie Grant, came out with a song a few years ago, "Held," that breaks me every time I hear it.  

Who told us we’d be rescued? 
What has changed and 
Why should we be saved from nightmares? 
Were asking why this happens to us 
Who have died to live, it’s unfair 

[...]

This hand is bitterness 
We want to taste it and 
Let the hatred numb our sorrows 
The wise hand opens slowly 
To lilies of the valley and tomorrow 

Like many who have struggled with grief, I had a hard time keeping the faith (I still do).  A little over a year after losing my dad, a friend from youth group, a Marine, was killed in Iraq.  By this time, the fog and shock from grieving my dad's death had lifted, and those still-open wounds hurt to the touch.  I was also struggling, as a new pacifist, to deal with the confluence of the church's complicity, U.S. policy, war, and the loss of such an amazing young man all at the same time.  It was a dark time.  

photo © 2010 Robin Riat | more info (via: Wylio)

Each time a loved one would pass, it would just wreck me and bring everything to the surface again.  An especially low moment was Kenny's unexpected death.  A high school basketball coach, family friend, and fellow church member, his decline in a matter of weeks thanks to a brain tumor dealt a crushing blow to the bits and pieces of faith I had been trying to pick up.  I literally had thoughts like, "We live and we die and that's it.  And God is cruel if she even exists."

The losses that I've experienced after my dad's death have ended up serving as a gauge of my faith.  In the aftermath of Jan's passing a few weeks ago--an especially devastating loss--I noticed this time that I didn't spiral into bitterness and despair.  Yes, it's still painful and difficult, but somehow, this time, God was a healer, rather than the object of my anger.

Matthew Paul Turner shared a post yesterday, about how pointless it is to try to scientifically assert or disprove the existence of heaven or God:

When the topic at hand is “provable” only by faith, the less helpful and constructive, in my opinion, these types of conversations become.

Why? Because the reasons people believe and the reasons people are skeptical are personal and often complicated and are usually very difficult to explain. And when we’re debating big topics like God and heaven, it’s easy to become so caught up in our own story and belief and passions that we forget to consider the story and beliefs of the one we’re debating.

He continues, discussing his belief that Jesus rose from the grave:

It's a belief that, for some crazy reason, I can’t escape or leave behind or forget or “unbelieve”. And not because I’m afraid not to believe it. But because it does something to me.

But I have no proof that Jesus rose from the dead–nothing physical or scientific or measurable or anything that would impress somebody[.] 

I have no proof of the resurrection, but for some reason, the fact that Jan's funeral was on Holy Saturday caused something to click.  Honestly, I haven't felt God's presence since my dad died, and I feel like such a failure to admit that.  I've completely lost that emotional, comforting connection that many Christians claim to feel, and that I felt in the past.  

But for some crazy reason I still feel a longing to follow Jesus and to continue to hang out with these messy Christian folk.  Like Turner, it has done something to me.  Although I can't prove absolutely anything, and at times that darkness and bitterness creep up again, I can't unbelieve.  

I'm not sure why I'm still drawn to following Jesus, but I think part of it is the hope and transformation and community and renewal that Christ and his church offer.  Actually, I can't put it into words.  So, thankful that I've survived this round of doubt somewhat intact, I think I'll just allow myself to be held for now.

If hope is born of suffering 
If this is only the beginning 
Can we not wait, for one hour 
Watching for our savior 

This is what it means to be held 
How it feels, when the sacred is torn from your life 
And you survive 

This is what it is to be loved and to know 
That the promise was that when everything fell 
We’d be held  

The B-I-B-L-E

...yes that's the book for me.  Are we supposed to treat the Bible as a perfect, personal answer-book?

Although finals are not completely over, I've somehow been able to start reading some non-school related books.  I can't remember where I saw first this -- possibly Streak's Blog? -- but as soon as I heard about The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book by Timothy Beal, I knew I wanted to read it.  

Manuel and I have had a lot of conversations lately about theodicy and what happens to those who don't actually hear the Gospel or have Scripture translated in their language.  A lot of these questions can be drilled down to how one views the Bible itself, so I thought it would be interesting to learn more about the Bible's history.  I know I need to check out a Bart Ehrman book, as well, so hopefully I can include one of his books in my summer reading.

photo © 2010 Savio Sebastian | more info (via: Wylio)

I'm only a few chapters in, but I'm enjoying it so far.  Beal shares his personal story of his early relationship with the book, as a teenager.  He writes:

Like my peers, I believed that the Bible was God's Word written down for me, answering all my questions about who God is and what God wants for my life, from the mundane to the ultimate.  Or at least I knew that was what I needed to believe. (p. 12)

However, Beal quickly found that, when he actually read the Bible, he found conflicting information, and some characters who weren't exactly role models:

The most famous biblical characters, so often lifted up as models of faith, seemed just the opposite:  Abraham, who, unable to trust in God's promise, twice passes off his wife, Sarah, as his sister in order to save his own skin; Rebekah, who plays favorites among her two sons, helping the younger, Jacob, steal the birthright of the elder, Esau; King David, who repeatedly exploits those who love him, who takes whatever he wants, including women (married or not), who shows no remorse until he gets caught, and whose alienated son dies trying to kill him and take his throne; and Jael, Rahab, Ehud, and many other lesser-known biblical heroes and heroines who achieve greatness through trickery and betrayal.  Often, "biblical values" struck me as foreign, as if they had come from a radically unfamiliar time and place.  Which in fact they had.  But that made me anxious.  It worried me that I couldn't get beyond the Bible's strangeness to discover its purportedly timeless relevance. (p. 9)

I am so glad Beal brought up the strange-ness and not-so-moral cast of characters found in the Bible.  I grew up learning about Noah's ark and the supposed worldwide flood that God seemed to have used to wipe out anyone who wasn't on that boat.  It's disturbing, isn't it?  Once I realized how sinister that story is, if it is literally true, it would sort of bother me if I noticed something like a nursery decorated in a Noah's ark theme.  The pairs of animals are cute, but nearly the whole word was supposed to have drowned in that story!

The tale of Noah's ark is just one example of a "Bible story" from my years in Sunday School that I later re-examined.  That's why I'm excited to keep reading Beal's book, because I find it so interesting to study the Bible (both its contents and its actual history) away from a traditional setting.  Perhaps in some church settings, the inconsistencies, ambiguities, and complexities have not been legitimately wrestled with.  The result is that many folks, myself included, end up feeling disappointed or even lied to when they later take a closer look.  The idea of what the Bible says sounds great, but often Scripture itself seems to contradict our faith.

Pardon this imperfect analogy from a soon-to-be-attorney, but many U.S. Supreme Court cases discuss the notion of a "penumbra" of constitutional rights.  Certain rights, such as the right to privacy and freedom of association, are not specifically enumerated in the Constitution, but the Supreme Court has held that Americans do have those rights.  The landmark decision that explains the idea of penumbra is Griswold v. Connecticut, which struck down a prohibition on providing contraception to married couples.  Obviously the Constitution does not explicitly provide rights to married couples seeking contraception.  But many rights can be implied because they "emanate" from the Bill of Rights - hence the term "penumbra."

photo © 2007 Jim Champion | more info (via: Wylio)

 

There is nothing wrong with this theory, but when it comes to interpreting the Bible, I wonder if many Christians tend to extrapolate ideas that may cause problems.  Inerrancy is the first possibly human-created dilemma that comes to mind.  The idea that the Bible is infallible and should be our instruction-book (per 2 Timothy 3:16) becomes difficult when the text itself seems contradictory.

David Fitch shared his interview today with The Other Journal, and his thoughts on inerrancy:

TOJ: You claim that the evangelical belief in the “inerrant” Bible has not really been about the truth but about “being in control of the truth.” It appears that just as evangelicalism continues to fracture into different hermeneutical camps, large church personalities have effectively replaced denominations in defending doctrine. Over this next decade, how do you see the fight of inerrancy shaping up? 

DF: There’s a splintering of evangelicalism, and strangely, I would say that the majority of evangelicalism realizes that “inerrancy” is an apologetic strategy whose time is over. It is a strategy that in fact undermines Scripture by defining its authority via a reference point outside itself, by what is an “error” and who gets to define “error,” as opposed to what Scripture is in its relationship to the Incarnate Christ. Nonetheless, it wouldn’t surprise me if the New-Reformed movement among evangelicals makes inerrancy once again a shibboleth to determine who is a true evangelical. Once this happens, I think we’ll all be energized to expose the defensiveness in this move and move on to a true faithfulness.

All that is to say, I look forward to gaining a better understanding of the Bible's history via Beal's book, and possibly learning not to undermine such a culturally rich book.

 

Space to ask questions

“God's not mean...he's holy. If you cheapen that holiness no one wins and God isn't perfect...my heart is heavy again. #lovewins”  -Matt Chandler

I recently saw this tweet and it made me think about suffering, and why a place dedicated to eternal suffering would exist.  My honest reaction the past few years has been...God is mean.  Of course I would’ve never said that out loud.  I didn't feel comfortable or safe enough to admit I felt that way.  But, stifling that thought made me feel even more frustrated and discouraged.

I’ve been forced to deal directly with my belief that God is in control and works all things for the good of those who love him.  Previously I had never thought to question God's omnipotence, but the more I learned in college and just experienced life, I simply couldn't square genocide, war, hurricanes, unexpected deaths, etc., with a loving, all-powerful God.  It seemed sick.

I began to notice comments from well-meaning people.  Someone mentioned to my mom, just months after my dad's death, that her husband had also had a heart attack, but he survived.  The wife commented, “God was watching over us.”  So logically I wondered: was God not watching over our family?  Why spare this woman's husband, but not my dad?

A lot of people make comments like this, myself included.  If I just miss being in a car accident, my immediate reaction is to thank God.  But would I immediately thank God if I were to be horrendously injured in an accident?  Or on a broader scale, many like to think of the United States as blessed.  Look around at our wealth, tranquility, high standard of living...so God has been good to us.  The same cannot be said for the majority of the world, so what about them?

Martin Bashir's recent interview with Rob Bell demonstrated perfectly this false dilemma that our theology tends to create: either God is omnipotent but doesn't love Japanese people, or God loves Japanese people but does not have the power to stop an earthquake and tsunami.

These questions left me confused, and I didn't deal with it in a healthy way.  I'm not saying that this was the intent of Chandler's tweet (I try not to make assumptions based on 140 characters...), but it made me feel like admitting that God--or rather my perception of God--seems “mean” is a failure on my part as a Christian.  If I can't legitimately push those feelings away and hold on to the idea that God is holy and perfect no matter what happens, then surely I must be a heretic.  

When I started feeling confused and disgusted, perhaps if I would have had the space and comfort level to ask those hard questions out loud, would I be in a different place spiritually right now?  I wonder if the same holds true for many other present and former Christians?  Maybe most of us have major issues with the way that Bashir and others frame things, but keep it to ourselves for fear of “cheapening” God's holiness or--gasp--suggesting that God isn't perfect or all-powerful?

Sometimes I wonder whether making sure your theological ducks are all in a row and that God is precisely defined comes at the expense of addressing the real-live suffering and day-to-day junk that we all face.  What does it mean if you've had the time and luxury to read the books and get the schooling that enables you to supposedly perfect your view of God?  I've noticed that the targets of Jesus' criticism were those who had the most theological knowledge, and Jesus spent a good deal of his time on earth as a healer, alleviating the suffering of those around him.

I love studying theology and am definitely not anti-intellectual, so I'm not proposing we shouldn't think about these things.  Nor do I mean to disrespect those who have thoughtfully dealt with these issues and moved on to become atheists or agnostics.  I just think we've put correct propositional truth on a pedestal, at the expense of allowing real life speak to the way we think about God.  We've boxed ourselves in to a choice between a powerless, loving God or a powerful, cold-hearted God, so the space to seek a third (or fourth, or fifth...) way would be nice.  To be honest, I'm growing weary of being “forced” to think that God might be mean...

Photo credit

Theodicy

Last week I went with a friend to a twenty-something’s church service. Aside from some fun little tidbits of idolatry (one of those posters of “In God We Trust” superimposed over an American flag), the message that the speaker brought was actually a great call to Christians to address suffering in a compassionate, Christlike way. There was a mention, though, of something that has bothered me ever since.

photo © 2008 takomabibelot | more info (via: Wylio)

The speaker’s response to how an all-powerful, loving God can co-exist with an evil, pain-filled world (theodicy) was that God works under a different framework than we do. He then promptly moved on to continue his talk. I know that theodicy is an extremely difficult issue, so of course I wasn’t expecting him to solve thousands of years of theological brainbuster-ing in a 30-minute talk. I guess what bothers me is many Christians’ lack of willingness to press further toward a different response. I just can’t say, “It’s all a mystery and God has his reasons, his own standard,” and move on. I’m sorry, but that has to be a twisted standard and I’m not sure about following a god like that. Frankly, the problem of suffering is a serious challenge to my faith.

On Tuesday's “Fresh Air” on NPR, Bart Ehrman, chair of the religious studies department at UNC Chapel Hill, addressed theodicy. His religious credentials include degrees from Moody, Wheaton, and Princeton Theological Seminary. He was a member of Youth for Christ and a pastor. The question of suffering, however, eventually led him to become an agnostic. He includes a description of his emigration from Christianity in his new book, God’s Problem:

In an earlier book, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, I have indicated that my strong commitment to the Bible began to wane the more I studied it. I began to realize that rather than being an inerrant revelation from God, inspired in its very words (the view I had at Moody Bible Institute), the Bible was a very human book with all the marks of having come from human hands: discrepancies, contradictions, errors, and different perspectives of different authors living at different times in different countries and writing for different reasons to different audiences with different needs. But the problems of the Bible are not what led me to leave the faith. These problems simply showed me that my evangelical beliefs about the Bible could not hold up, in my opinion, to critical scrutiny. I continued to be a Christian—a completely committed Christian—for many years after I left the evangelical fold.

Eventually, though, I felt compelled to leave Christianity altogether. I did not go easily. On the contrary, I left kicking and screaming, wanting desperately to hold on to the faith I had known since childhood and had come to know intimately from my teenaged years onward. But I came to a point where I could no longer believe. It's a very long story, but the short version is this: I realized that I could no longer reconcile the claims of faith with the facts of life. In particular, I could no longer explain how there can be a good and all-powerful God actively involved with this world, given the state of things. For many people who inhabit this planet, life is a cesspool of misery and suffering. I came to a point where I simply could not believe that there is a good and kindly disposed Ruler who is in charge of it.

Usually “free will” is given as a response to theodicy, but for Ehrman, that is not enough. He wants to know why, every five seconds, a child dies of hunger. Nobody’s choosing to make this child die of starvation. And can natural disasters fall under the category of free will? Ehrman discusses classical explanations for theodicy: suffering is a punishment for our sins, it’s a test of faith, it’s redemptive (something good will come out of it). The interview also includes Ehrman’s explanation of the book of Job as a compilation of two different genres by two authors. 

A few quotes from the interview:

“If there is a God, he certainly is not the God of the Christian tradition who is all-powerful and over this world and intervening in this world periodically to help people. I think that if there is a God, God is so far beyond anything that we can imagine that we literally cannot imagine him.”

His thoughts on hell: “If there is a God in the world […], then surely God is not more cruel than any human being who’s ever lived. And there’s no human being who’s ever lived who’s subjected eternal torment on anyone else.” Ehrman believes hell was a doctrine invented by the early Christians mainly to convert people. 

His interview made me wonder if we have put so many strictures on who God is that we’ve created this problem ourselves. I wonder if our Western epistemological categories have twisted the meaning of all-powerful and all-knowing? Or maybe I need to visit the Sudanese congregation over in Wheaton, or spend more time with other Christians who are still so after much suffering...