Should Single Christians Be Lonely? Part II

In part One “Should Single Christians Be Lonely?” I attempted to understand the issue of loneliness within the narrative of redemptive history. In this blog I want to explore the question, "Why did God ever place these desires in me in the first place if he knew that they could never be met?"

This question is one I have asked and heard in a variety of contexts. It is the question that haunts those who find their desires for children or health or the well being of loved ones unmet. It is a question that some have asked when they discover feelings for the same sex (see http://www.christianlesbians.com/). It is echoed by the serpent who implies that God has put Adam in a pickle. At its heart, it is a version of THE question, "Just what in the world is God doing?!" Philosophers refer to this as the age-old question of the problem of evil, "If God is a God of benevolence and omnipotence why do we have this world?" Of course this version of the question gets right to the existential grit, "Why is my world not as it should be?" And we are asking it in a very personal way to a personal God, “Just what is God's intention behind the whole mess?” “Why would God go about creating a world that he knew would fall?” “Why go about creating creatures with instincts that they will not be able to act on?”

At this point it would be easy to simply put forward the brightest answers from leading Christian philosophers, hope that is satisfying and wish us all on our merry way. I could drag out super philosopher Alvin Plantinga's "possible world ontology" defense and show how though God is omnipotent, he could not just call into existence any possible world he pleased. [This is due to the fact that humans are free to make choices based upon experiences, whether or not humans perform good or evil is ultimately up to the human, not God. That although there are many possible worlds that contain moral good without moral evil, this world does not have to be the best of all possible worlds. And that due to the freedom of action ascribed to humans, God could not create any one of a multitude of worlds. See (http://www.answers.com/topic/alvin-plantinga). ]

But I dare not go there; for this is not just the problem of evil but the problem of evil in my life! This evil smacks me in the face. It is not reducible to a philosophical problem that we can shrink down to a manageable size. The problem involves my entire self- my drives, my emotions, my heart and soul – not just my reason. As valuable as Christian philosophers are in addressing these questions on an academic level, they themselves confirm that there is no easy answer. In fact, Scripture itself does not give an easy answer. In the words of N.T. Wright,

"We cannot say, with that dreadful hymn, that “all our pain is good.” That induces a moral chaos worse than that offered by Job’s comforters. Nor can we say that evil is good after all because it provides a context for moral effort and even heroism, as though we could get God off the hook by making the world a theatre where God sets up little plays to give his characters a chance to show how virtuous they really are. That is trivializing to the point of blasphemy."

So where do we go? Recently I have found quite comforting the idea that the problem by definition is not meant to be answered. In fact, to give an answer to the problem of evil is to trivialize evil. It is to speak as an outsider on something we can’t get outside of. It is to reify; to speak of something which evades language. This seems to make sense of my own experience. After all, no matter what someone says at the end of the day there is still more that should be said. This answer attempts to be realistic about the mysterious nature of evil itself. It also seems true to what we find in scripture. As Genesis 3-11 records, evil spreads in a way that is largely invisible, unpredictable and irretractable. It has the ability to jump across generations and continents; surfacing in ways we can’t predict in places we least expect. The end result always the same- evil’s sum is always greater than its parts.

And possibly a more important reason is found in what Christianity see's as God's response. God responds to the world's dillemma with, (drum roll please), a cross. Contrary to the trend to glorify the cross as an appalling spectacle beyond belief, Paul saw the cross as quite unpretentious (1 Corinthians 1:22; Philippians 2:8). After all, crosses were not a unique form of capital punishment in the Roman Empire. Jesus died alongside other common criminals. And yet, the cross is somehow the very vortex by which God does a judo move on cosmic evil. It is the centerpoint of history which launches new creation. It is the death of death itself. The undoing of all violence by violence. How exactly it does this is NOT spelled out in the Bible. For at the heart of the cross is mystery (1 Cor. 1:22) . If the solution to evil is a mystery...why should we expect the problem to be antying less? Isn't trivializing evil implicitly trivializing the cross which is the answer to evil?

So where do we go from here? What comfort do we have? At the end of the day what we don’t have is God coming to us with simple answers. Instead we have a God that tells us that in the face of our mystery there is an equal and opposite mystery. In the words of Dorothy Sayers:

“For whatever reason God chose to make an as he is – limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death – He had the honesty and courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in povety and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.” – Dorothy Sayers, Creed or chaos? , 1949, p. 4

In this case, misery has strange company indeed.