PHILIP YANCEYPhilip Yancey is aChristianity Todayeditor at large.

The author of where Is God When It Hurts? Responds to a best seller.

About two years ago, a strange little book edged up on the New York Times best-seller chart, settling in between Jane Fonda in leotards and Garfield the cat in line drawings. The book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (Schocken, 1981), shocked everyone in the industry. When was the last time a book on a profound human question, much less a book about God, had ranked up there with the guidebooks on thinning thighs and mastering Pac-Man? Now, two years later, half a million hardback copies have been sold and the paperback sales are expected to total in the millions.

The book, with its splendid title and articulate rabbi author (Harold Kushner), has confused many Christians. The largest Christian book distributor sent out a warning notice to its bookstore clients, admitting that demand from readers virtually forced them to carry the book but acknowledging that Kushner’s answers “do not present an orthodox Christian theology of suffering.” Some Reformed denominations published cautiously negative reviews, and at least one evangelical leader, Charles Colson, went public with a blast against the book. Yet, throngs of average Christian consumers have found the rabbi’s book comforting; his answers to the problem of pain sound good and feel good.

Because I have written a book on the problem of pain (Where Is God When It Hurts?) and sometimes speak on the topic, I often get questions about Rabbi Kushner’s approach. What do I think? Is he a heretic or a prophet?

Compassion And Perception

First, I must congratulate Kushner on a wonderful writing job. Whatever else he is doing, he should stop it and get back to the typewriter. He tackles complex issues with a gracious style that makes them accessible to large numbers of readers. This book especially, coming out of his own family’s experience with a horrible illness, shows human warmth and compassion. It deserves best-seller status. But a book that exists mainly to answer a theological question cannot be judged on its clever title, empathetic tone, or literary style. The central question is, are his conclusions biblical and true?

Frankly, I cannot join with those who categorically condemn the content. Kushner has presented some true and needed correctives for people who suffer or who stand with others who suffer. Let’s face it, too often evangelicals have offered guilt (“You must have done something to deserve this”) and frustration (“You must not be praying hard enough”) to sufferers. Thousands of years later, we keep falling back on the same rationalistic explanations for suffering that were voiced eloquently by Job’s three friends—and repudiated in a withering attack by God.

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Rabbi Kushner offers a superb analysis of the false guilt we can bog down in. His rejection of the idea that suffering is a common, specific punishment by God squares with Jesus’ comments in John 9 and Luke 13 and with the underlying message of the entire Book of Job. A person in pain need not compound his or her suffering by such torturous questions as “What have I done wrong?”

In addition, Kushner offers stimulating insights on the role of natural law in this universe, the meaning of the fall of humanity, and the nature of free will. I wish all theology books were written with such clarity and brightness. Indeed, the book stands as a good model for Christian writers, who seldom have been able to present theological concerns to such a broad audience.

Some Reservations

Despite my deep admiration for what Kushner has accomplished, however, I cannot endorse his ultimate conclusions. Essentially, he concludes that suffering exists on this planet because “even God has a hard time keeping chaos in check,” and God is “a God of justice and not of power.” In other words, God is as frustrated, even outraged, by the pain on this planet as anyone, but he lacks the power to do anything about it. After perceptively uncovering the flaws in other explanations of pain and evil, Kushner stumbles when he must provide his own solution to the age-old riddle.

Kushner wisely devotes an entire chapter to Job, a book of the Bible that could conveniently be subtitled “When the Worst Things Happen to One of the Best People.” The Bible’s fullest treatment of the problem of pain confronts the issues of undeserved suffering in their most absolute terms, even at the risk of approaching caricature. No one deserved suffering less than Job; no one suffered more.

Somehow, though, Kushner and I come up with opposite conclusions looking at the same evidence. To me, Job’s predicament gives God the perfect platform from which to launch an explanation of his less-than-omnipotence. Surely Job would have welcomed a speech that implies, like Kushner: “Job, I’m truly sorry about what’s happening. You know, of course, I had nothing to do with the way things have turned out. I wish I could help, Job, but I really can’t.” Such a speech, though hardly relieving Job’s physical ailments, would have restored his faith in a loving, faithful God.

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God’S Answer To Job

The speech Job got instead is one of the most extraordinary passages in the Bible, the longest single speech of God recorded. It has dazzling poetry, a wild celebration of nature, and a combination of exuberance and explosive force. The speech is so eloquent, we can easily miss its central message. Nowhere in the Bible is God’s power described more impressively. God never once apologizes to Job for his lack of power; rather he composes verbal fugues about ostriches, wild oxen, snowstorms, and constellations to illustrate it. Frederick Buechner summarizes the argument this way, “God doesn’t explain. He explodes. He asks Job who he thinks he is anyway. He says that to try to explain the kind of things Job wants explained would be like trying to explain Einstein to a little-neck clam.… God doesn’t reveal his grand design. He reveals himself.”

Job’s response is as amazing as God’s speech. In spite of the fact that God never answers question one about Job’s own predicament, just hearing that blast flattens him. Perhaps Job, like Buechner’s little-neck clam, doesn’t understand any more about the theory of relativity, but he has seen enough to convince himself there really is an Einstein out there, one worthy of worship.

A response such as this causes me to question Kushner’s final conclusion. If God is less-than-powerful, why does he choose the worst possible situation, when his power is most called into question, to claim omnicompetence?

To me, the puzzling question of God’s involvement in the world is seen much better in terms of God’s self-imposed limitations. He acts, and does not act, not because of weakness but because of self-restraint designed to promote certain other possibilities, such as freely given human love. And I know of no better example of God’s self-imposed limitation than the Incarnation, an event that Kushner, a rabbi, understandably does not discuss.

The Book of Job reveals the more abstract, theoretical side of God and pain. (Looking back, we may have trouble understanding why Job felt so satisfied with a seemingly evasive answer; but, then, we didn’t hear God speak out of a whirlwind, either.) Thankfully, the Bible also reveals God’s up-close and personal response to human suffering. God himself, the God who boasted of his power in creating the wild things of earth, subjected himself to natural laws, including pain, when he visited our planet.

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Christ On Pain

How did God-on-earth respond to pain? Surprisingly, Christ reacted much as we react. When he met a person in pain, he was deeply moved with compassion (from the Latin words cum and pati, “to suffer with”). When his friend died, he wept. Very often (and every time he was directly asked) he healed the pain. Obviously, God is not a God who enjoys seeing us suffer.

When he faced pain personally, Christ also responded like most of us. He recoiled from it, asking three times if there was any other way. When there was no other way, he experienced the sense of alienation that all of us feel to some degree at such moments. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he cried out. It was the only prayer Jesus uttered that did not begin with the familiar term “Abba,” or “Father.”

No other religion—not Judaism, not Hinduism, not Buddhism or Islam—offers this unique contribution of an all-powerful God who willingly takes on the pain of his creation.

I am glad the Bible describes both sides of God’s response—the perspective from heaven, in Job’s case, and the perspective from the cross—for those of us who try to figure out why God permits suffering. We need both dimensions. The gospel writers stress that Jesus’ suffering was not a question of impotence; he could have called on a legion of angels. Somehow he had to go through it for fallen creation to be redeemed. Suffering was the cost to God of forgiveness.

Often, when I contemplate the paradoxes inherent in the problem of pain and God’s involvement in our world, I find myself going back to one passage of the Bible that falls halfway between the Book of Job and the first account of Jesus’ life on earth. In a remarkable blend of prophecy and poetry, Isaiah 53 summons up an image of a suffering servant who bears our diseases, carries our pains, and is wounded for our rebellions. Jewish interpreters often apply the suffering servant to themselves as a race. Christians, following the New Testament, apply it to Christ. Could this be the reason, asks Japanese theologian Kazoh Kitamori, that Judaism has attracted so few converts? No race has suffered more than the Jews. But human pain, no matter how great, remains meaningless and barren unless it can become a symbol of God’s empathy.

Not Causation, But Redemption

After spending several years reading about and thinking about this messy problem of pain, I have concluded that the key word is not causation—the first question that occurs to one who suffers—but rather redemption. Senseless pain offers us little. But redemptive suffering, whether that absorbed by Christ in the reconciliation of the world or that ultimately accepted by such persons as Job and Jeremiah and Paul, can ignite the world. God took the Great Pain of his own Son’s death and used it to blot up into himself all the minor pains of our confinement on earth. It doesn’t seem like impotence to me.

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