Suffering and evil: anything to do with us?

Answering the "problem of evil/suffering" charge made against the God who is love is often seen by Christians as a great difficulty.

How do we explain how the God who people understand to be 'all-powerful' (omnipotent), "all-loving" (omnibenevolent), and "all-knowing" (omniscient) can also allow we his creatures in his image to experience suffering and to do evil.

For a start, lets get rid of the philosophical terms, and stick with the Bible, the 'all' descriptions seem to place evaluative criteria over God, instead of seeking to understand the God who is: Yahweh. We end up with the 'god of the philosophers' instead of the living God.

So, there's a disjunct between what we would like, or think our experience indicates and the world as we would like it to be, or how we think God has or 'should have' arranged things...mainly for our comfort, it would seem. 

But why?

First, God created us for (a) meaningful fellowship with him, see Genesis 3:8a; and to take charge of the creation (Genesis 1:26ff...and I'm still puzzled about ruling over the fish!!). See also Psalm 115:16,

Then we, in Adam, rejected fellowship with God and sought to live in opposition to him; with that our stewardship crumbled.

Rather than destroy all, because God still had the objective of fellowship with us, he provided the resolution of this adversity in Christ: we can be in Christ renewed and restored to fellowship with God, and adopted into his family! But that's in the future, nevertheless, despite adversity in life, we are now in Christ, and our suffering is in that context.

Nevertheless, God in Christ meets us in that suffering: he meets us where we are and calls us to him. Our only sensible response is to believe him and turn to him in repentance. 

The basic answer to the 'problem' is Luke 13: repent! Sounds glib, but the reason for suffering is like the reason for a fire alarm in a high-rise: get out while you can. Without suffering the consequence of a world disconnected from its creator we would not know our plight.

Furthermore, one of the 'functions' of suffering (and evil) may be to tell us/show us who we actually are, inescapably! Someone said, it may have been Frankel, that the Nazi guards at death camps were ordinary people, just like us! (Or it might have been Solzhenitsyn, and different guards.) We should all remember, 'but for the grace of God go I' To put another complexion on that saying.

We are people full of pride, selfishness, greed...(Sermon on the Mount makes this clear, I think) who can't even manage their home: natural 'disasters' and are in the grip of death.

When we complain about suffering and evil, we seem to think it's nothing to do with us...but it is!

 

God has dealt with it...we just don't like the result and prefer to wonder why we have to experience the result of our meaningful choices when they are choices in repudiation of who God is. To live as though we are with God, while we are agin him, would deceive us that there are no cosmic effect of our choices; but our choices are truly meaningful, cosmically. 

Dust or Delight?

When we meet an atheist, or an aggressive agnostic (someone who doesn't claim that there is no god, but who claims they merely don't believe in god, seeking thereby to escape the obligation to defend their claim), it is easy to default to their world-view, which they insist is the true default. We are then left to defend when it is really their obligation.

There is no 'default' world-view.

They might claim that we 'worship' a 'sky-daddy'.

What has rarely occurred to them is that they worship a 'cosmic dust-bunny'. They, if materialist/naturalists, which most Western moderns are, hold that dust particles is the final reality. If they are more sophisticated they might say that either space or energy is the final reality, but similar questions apply. 

The trouble with this position, is that it brings nothing with it. As J. P. Moreland has put it:

Intellectually responsible naturalists cannot merely deny God’s existence. Additionally, they must provide an account of what ideas naturalists ought to hold regarding epistemological commitments, a broad creation story (the Grand Story) about how all entities have come-to-be, and a resulting ontology such that all entities can be located in the Grand Story as certified by naturalist epistemological commitments. 

Moreland, J. P.. 2023. A Critical Assessment of Shafer-Landau’s Ethical Non-Naturalism.

Religions 14: 546.

https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14040546

What does a 'minister' do?

A congregation  decides to employ a paid staff person. Let's call him or her 'the minister', even though we all always 'minister'.

Unfortunately in most congregations this role is regarded as a 'leadership' role, and not a service one.  

In a fully functional congregation however,  it is a service role to assist the elders as a sort of coach and skills builder for them and with them for the congregation at large.

Most are not, so we get a Hebrews 5:12 situation in too many congregations.

The minister is like the 'head' coach of a team. Not a player, but the one who equips, encourages, coaches and, of course, trains.

The main role would be the monthly equipping seminar/gathering. The "Equip-meet".

One way this could work, is every month, except perhaps December and January, and moved to avoid a clash with Easter an Equip-meet is held.

This might be a Saturday afternoon and evening, with a simple meal.

It could cover Bible topics, a book study overview, apologetics, church history, or other special themes, or specific skills like explaining your faith to typical questions, and so on. It would be programmed to allow people to come and go: perhaps there would be three separable sessions: early afternoon, after coffee, then after dinner...with discussion trailing off into the later evening perhaps.

Its format would be content segments (talks based on or springing from an article or book chapter that had been read beforehand), table-group or open discussion, or Q and A, and opportunities for participants to talk about what they have learnt. When people can put their lesson into their own language, they truly learn.

At other times this minister might help with teaching segments in youth ministry, coach and guide the people who do youth and children's ministry or are learning to do the 'teaching' segments. Hesh (he/she) might also help equip those with pastoral gifts to support newly weds, those with young children, those is difficult circumstances, and those who are becoming frail and dependent, etc.

He or she might also help coach those up and coming teachers/prophets to contribute in the gatherings and work with the elders to conduct coaching sessions with that group, also with supportive discussions so the elders can minister to the 'minister' and discuss the general health and organization of the congregation.

Next time your church wants to hire a minister...discuss this with them.