Mercy Not Sacrifice
My title is intended to troll my Calvinist friend Derek and distract him from working on his German homework. In case you haven’t been privy to the latest evangelical drama that people like me think is the only thing happening in the universe, the Gospel Coalition last week released a video with John Piper, Matt Chandler, and David Platt talking about how God ordains suffering, and the Internet went wild. Our podcast Crackers and Grape Juice just did an episode responding to the video in which I found myself in the strange position of (at least partly) defending the Gospel Coalition to my friend Jason Micheli who was having none of it, while Teer Hardy refereed.
I half-agreed with most of what the Gospel Coalition guys said. Every experience I’ve had of suffering has brought me closer to God (though my suffering has been mild compared to others’). My ulcerative colitis gave me the physical sense of desperation that flung me into a deeper intimacy with God I might not otherwise have enjoyed. For about three years, every time I went on a walk anywhere, I faced the real possibility that I would shit my pants before I got home. It honestly made my walking a lot more prayerful. I remember dozens of times when I had to waddle hundreds of yards squeezing my abdominal muscles as hard as I could and whispering “Please God” over and over again. I didn’t always make it, but when I did, it was such a glorious victory. The goalposts change drastically when you’re dealing with a chronic illness. Every time I made it to the toilet, it was like winning the marathon.
Similarly, my experience with depression and anxiety completely shaped my spirituality. I know what it’s like not to trust my own thoughts. It was the original source of my desperation in prayer. One of the greatest examples of answered prayer I’ve ever experienced was when I was living in a dilapidated artist colony in Toledo, Ohio in an explosively toxic relationship with a very wounded, beautiful girl. I had just discovered the concept of breath prayer. So each night, I would light a candle and say, “Lord, please clear a space for yourself in my heart” whenever I exhaled. When I say that God “answered” my prayer, I don’t have any proof other than what happens every time I pray today and feel the intimacy of God’s presence.
So I think I get it when Matt Chandler talks about rejoicing even when he was vomiting on the floor with an aggressive brain tumor in his skull, when John Piper describes the strange gratitude he felt upon learning of his mother’s death, and when David Platt talks about the warmth in his heart that he feels looking at his children after years of struggling to get pregnant. There are many strange ways in which God can bless us through suffering. I imagine it would be much more difficult to throw yourself into God’s arms if you lived entirely without suffering. My (perhaps overly evangelical) hunch is that the first step of AA applies to all of us. When our lives become “unmanageable,” then God can break through to us. Maybe there are people who can slide gracefully into trust and surrender without hitting bottom. I couldn’t.
And still, it doesn’t seem right to say that God gave me colitis or depression in order to make me pray more desperately. This is a question of good storytelling, not technical ontology. Yes, God is the source of all being, so in a sense, God is the ultimate cause of everything (which is the indisputable truth to which Calvinists retreat when their bolder claims are protested). It’s also true that God intervenes miraculously in our lives. Last Thursday morning, a youth pastor emailed me that one of his youth was coming to Tulane next year and gave me his cell phone number. I texted the young man and it turned he had just arrived in town for orientation. Half an hour later, I was eating lunch with him and his parents. I can’t call that a random coincidence.
I’m willing to say as a general statement that God is always reaching out to every one of us to share his love. That concept of prevenient grace is a cornerstone of my theology. Sometimes connections are made; sometimes they aren’t. What I’m not willing to say is that every tragedy must be attributed to God’s perfect plan. We should absolutely seek God’s providence in all of our life circumstances. We should cling to the truth that God is good and God will win the final victory when all the death and decay in the universe are entirely defeated. But this is different than saying every tragedy must be explained.
Referring to a sermon series that his church did on Ruth, David Platt said that God “uses sorrowful tragedy to set the stage for surprising triumph.” I agree that God can bring surprising triumph out of sorrowful tragedy. It’s powerful whenever anyone can use Ruth’s story as a source of empowerment and hope for overcoming their own tragedies. What’s not okay is to guilt people who are lamenting their life’s tragedies without seeing any redemptive value for not trusting harder. The Holy Spirit can use the Bible to help me renarrate my suffering and turn it into a cross. But Christian leaders should be very meek about extracting universal formulas out of the particularity of scriptural narrative.
One of the most sobering things my friend Jason said as a terminal cancer patient is that the most loving and Christian response we can make to his cancer is to be angry about it. And that made me think about the relationship between God’s wrath and God’s love. The reason God’s wrath is loving is because it’s derived in hatred for the oppression and suffering of those whom God loves. That’s the connection that gets lost whenever Calvinists try to claim that God ordains human suffering rather than raging against it. They compartmentalize God’s wrath and make it only against our sin as though sin is not part of a whole ecosystem of suffering. God’s wrath is against all the death and decay in the universe of which our sin is a major part. That’s what makes it loving. Whether or not it’s true on some technical level to claim all the death and decay in the universe as part of “God’s plan,” it’s horrible storytelling.
Another question is whether it’s really Christian for us to accept the broken world like it is as the perfect expression of God’s will. To say that God is completely in control of everything means giving a divine mandate to the people who are in control of everything. Blanket claims about God’s sovereignty worked very well for kings in the age of feudalism (or hedge fund managers in the age of capitalism). They don’t work so well for labor organizers who are legitimately fighting against injustice that God hates. The more that you say that God “ordains” the brokenness of our world today, the more you’re undermining the hope of God’s new creation. Why is there a need for a new heaven and a new earth if God ordains everything about our present age? Again, it doesn’t matter whether you can parse out different technical meanings of “ordain.” It’s just bad storytelling.
Towards the end of our podcast, Jason said that “Christians should rage against explanation” when it comes to other peoples’ suffering, whether we’re calling it God’s plan or demons that need to be cast out. Too often, our concerns about God’s sovereignty are really concerns about the sovereignty of our own explanation. The Tower of Babel offers an instructive metaphor. To what degree is our theology a tower we are building to conquer heaven? If God does in fact care about his sovereignty, then he’s not going to take kindly to theologians putting him in a box, whatever that box looks like. That’s why I would say that if God does “ordain” suffering, he does so to destroy our explanations so that we can enter more deeply into his embrace. If God ordains suffering, it’s to save us from being dogmatic Calvinists (or Arminians or Thomists or Barthians or whatever else). Whatever the truth is, puffing myself up with answers is a means of resisting the surrender by which I become God’s child.
Our podcast really was a great conversation that I’ve only begun to capture here, so if you haven’t subscribed yet, do so on itunes or at spreaker. Also, be sure to check out our Crackers and Grape Juice pub theology event at Virginia Annual Conference in Roanoke next Thursday.
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