Long Story Short

Editor's note: We're going to go a little deep here, and while this might be familiar ground for some, it's not very comfortable ground. I don't have any nice pictures or fun gifs for today, so, if you'd like, you can read this heart-warming post I wrote instead, which features Chris Pratt dancing at the end. 

I remember this guy asking, back in high school, if God could make a rock so big that God couldn't move it. He didn't ask it as a question in class or anything, just as one of those smartass little tricks that we learn when we first question who God is, sitting in an overfull classrooms with a 70's color palette and no windows. And it is a neat trick. Logically, it's impossible for God to create a rock that God can't move because God would be making something that proved that God wasn't omnipotent. But if God can't make that rock, then God's not omnipotent. Either way, there's no way God could be all-powerful.

It's not a question that bothers me anymore. It's so many angels dancing on the head of a pin. It's nonsensical and not useful and, though I'm no philosopher, I'm fairly certain it isn't properly framed. I'm not concerned about the status of God's omnipotence.

Or maybe I am. I remember asking, in college, if God could make a universe with growth and progress but without suffering. If God can do anything God wants, I asked, God, in God's infinite wisdom, could have come up with a better universe than this. One where humans get all the benefits of maturing without all the growing pains. My friend who I was talking to, sitting with me on the quad on a sunny afternoon fading to evening, was convinced that that's not how it works, that this universe was the only way God could have created intelligent humans with free will, which are, after all, the point of creation. God can do anything, but God's still constrained by the laws of nature. My answer at that point in my history (and to an extent, my answer now) is that if that's the case, God shouldn't have bothered.

And that, my friends, is how you stumble into theodicies or ways of dealing with the problem of evil. But no need to stumble into it if you're a theology student- you get to have classes on it! Basically, the problem of evil goes like this: if God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving, why is there evil in the world? Shouldn't God, as an all-powerful being, be able to prevent it? And if God, as an all-knowing being, knows what's going to happen, wouldn't God head off evil at the pass? And if God's good, why would God allow suffering¹ to exist?

You can say that God allows suffering because that's how we as people grow. If God intervened to stop every difficulty, if everything were easy and we had no problems, then we wouldn't be much more than children, not challenged to engage more deeply with the world. And I'll allow that in our current state, we do seem to need some prodding. But not this much prodding. Not this much pain. There's no reason twenty children need to die when a gunman enters a school. Surely nineteen would have sufficed. Once.

You can say that God did the best that God could. This is the best of all possible universes, as they say. God set it up as good, declared it very good, working within the laws of nature. Even as it breaks, God can't intervene too often because why would you set up the rules if you're just going to break them? So either God's power is limited or God limits God's power in order to let the universe work itself out. And while I like the idea that God would let us determine our own fates, how on earth does God sit by when God knows that all this pain could be fixed with a wave of the divine hand?² 

And besides, if you're going to lay all the pain in the world at the feet of humanity, whose sin brought brokenness into the world and whose inaction allows it to continue, I would submit that maybe God shouldn't have made the world so damn breakable in the first place. Why make a china shop and hand it over to the care of a bull? A lost, scared, confused little bull, just looking for some meaning in the glasswork and figurines that it can't help but knock over at every turn.

There's a bigger question here of how and how much God acts in the universe. Does God act within the laws of nature, sustaining everything and letting it work itself out for the most part? Did God set up the universe and step away, only interacting with it in supernatural ways when God sees fit? Is God something spiritual and undetectable, directing human souls but unable to move mountains? Or maybe God could move the mountains, but God chooses not to, knowingly limiting God's abilities because...

Because why?

Maybe we can't know. You know, maybe life is like the last chapters of Job, where we are reminded that God knows greater things and we should step back in humility and say, "Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know,"³  and forget Job lost everything he had in light of the fact that God gave him everything back and more and he lived to a ripe old age.

Theodicies aren't questions for people in pain. This is not something you discuss with someone who's grieving. There's a much better way to respond than, "Everything happens for a reason, even if we don't know what that reason is." And despite how angry the problem of suffering makes me, it's also not something I think the church as a whole needs to be worried about. At least, not right now. Why does God do what God does or does not do? As far as I'm concerned, or the answer that I have to settle on is, that's up to God.

What we can do, without ever answering any of these questions, is love each other. Without knowing anything for sure about the origin of the cosmos or the existence and character of God, we can feed the hungry and heal the sick and take care of the poor and the orphan and the widow. We can visit those who are in prison and give shelter and clothes to those who need it. Those of us with voices can speak out for those of us who don't. I know that today, regardless of the courses of the stars above and below me and outside of my personal knowledge of any kind of salvation, I can be kind to the stranger, supportive to my friends and attentive to my family, the lowest bars I have for decreasing sadness in the world.

Maybe God's out there somewhere, making and unmaking boulders to try to prove a point and that's where he's been this whole time. Maybe God is down here, sustaining the saints who run homeless shelters and manage food banks and teach middle schoolers.

Given, the choice, I know which God I want to believe in.

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1 To simplify my thoughts, I replace "evil" with "suffering," specifically, human suffering. I figure we can take human suffering as a test case and expand the definitions as necessary later. Also, I am so sorry in advance for appealing to school shootings in the next paragraph to make a point, but someone recently asked me how the suffering in the world outweighs the good and while I don't know if it does it does, if there's an actual way to measure suffering or goodness, I do know that there are definable pains someone needs to answer for, especially, in my mind, the people or entities that could have done something to stop those definable pains.
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2  Jesus is the Christian answer to this problem. Jesus and the New Creation. God's not sitting idly by- God has a plan in motion for the redemption of humanity and all of creation and all the pain that we bring upon ourselves or brought upon ourselves in the Fall and it involves sending God's Son to die on the cross and bringing the world to justice and mercy on the Judgement Day. God doesn't save with a hand-waving trick and God plays a long game. 
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3  Job 42:3. I've even got a Bible gateway link for you, if you didn't want to google. 
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