Suffering & Evil: It’s Time to re-Think Classical Doctrine
Theo Essay, Dec, 2020 | What Do You Believe About God’s Relationship to Suffering and Evil?
Casey Goodson Jr. was walking into his house when Columbus Ohio police officers shot him three times in the back. Casey was holding a sandwich. He had just gotten off work. His crime was “looking” like another suspect. He died on the scene. Wisel’s response to being asked “Where is God now?” after watching the body of a young boy swing from a ceiling feels fitting for this larger question of God’s relationship to suffering and evil. “Here he is...He is hanging here on this gallows…” (Migliore, 125). To answer the question of suffering and evil, we must look to what we’ve been told and then carefully survey the active moments around us. Only with this tension of past and present, do I think we really get a place to discern what kind of relationship God actively participates in.
Classical doctrine of providence erases the marginalized community’s experience with its problematic offering of God permitting unjust events like Casey’s death this week (Migliore, 126). I wonder if doctrines of atonement which amplify suffering have benefited from such positions as the suffering of the world “teaches us humility to receive adversity from God’s hand even though we cannot understand the reason” (Migliore, 127). Such theological views of God, especially that of divine punishment (Migliore, 128), directly correlate to Black death. “Well if he had his hood off…” “If he had not looked the part…” “If he had not run…” This version of God in relationship to suffering and evil – this God which uses (his) power to wield punishment and humble us with adversity is a white God of capitalism and patriarchy that I cannot agree to. In fact, such hate speech that comes from “God willed it” ideology leads me and others to protest and hope for progress. This is where I find God in relationship with suffering and evil – in the streets with the people and their pain.
When Black Lives Matter took the streets this summer that was protest and a quarrel with human creatures and God (Migliore, 132). The countless amounts of people in the streets were there to protest silence and inaction and where was God…in the triage centers made of neighbors and nurses… on top of the CNN sign in downtown Atlanta as a Black Lives Matter flag waved furiously before protestors…in Seattle when a black man ran to a car where a white man was trying to run over protestors and so he was shot instead of the crowd being bulldozed over. Because of these protests there was progress and process of changing laws and telling the truth of black death.
In Genesis, God protests in a unique way. First God desires to send a flood and so it was, but after this flood God shifts the plan: “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth...as long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease” (Genesis 9:21-22, NRSV). God moves from protesting humankind’s heart to a more persuasive than coercive position in relationship. God promises the seasons and puts God’s heart on the line for potentially more grief (Genesis 6:6, NRSV). God is responsible for evil indirectly and hopeful for good to emerge in the world and thus sharing in our suffering (Migliore, 166).
Who brings us this kind of relationship of God – one that is co-agent and co-sufferer – one that shows us the way of the flesh that can be for neighbor? Jesus’ life and “resurrection lived into by the Holy Spirit, empowers us to work within the tight spaces” of the world’s trauma of suffering to “bring life from death” (Carter, Journal). God’s relationship to suffering and evil is co-sufferer, co-griever, co-neighbor, co-partner in rebuilding, co-hope for human creatures to choose good. When we see God in relationship this way, our answer to where is God can be less in isolation and wonderment of where God is in the first place.