An Act of (Active) Love

Something I’ve learned over a decade and a half of pastoral ministry, is that people interpret and cope with their suffering in very different and very personal ways. Some cannot tolerate the idea that God could play any causal role whatsoever in their pain. God is their co-sufferer, labouring to bring goodness out evil, redemption out of brokenness. God is the salve, not the source. Others, take refuge in a highly specific and highly personal conception of God’s role in orchestrating the events of this world. Their torments come directly from the hand of a meticulously sovereign God whose will, while sometimes inscrutable, is always done. And then there are others—most of us, I suspect—who find ourselves somewhere between these two poles.

In my earlier days, I would have gravitated much more toward the former view than the latter. The idea that God could play a causal role in human suffering seemed to radically diminish God’s goodness, which I was desperate to preserve. If presented with a choice between a theology that prioritized God’s goodness or one that emphasized God’s power, I would choose goodness every time. The idea that God presided serenely over history’s horrors, or even the more mundane trials and tribulations of our own lives was more than I could take. I would take an impotent God over a God whose potency caused so much pain.

And now? Well, it’s complicated. I am still quite keen to conceptualize God’s role in suffering in ways that centre divine characteristics like love, grace, compassion, mercy, co-suffering. Christianity is nothing if not a following of the God who suffers alongside his creatures and his creation. I have, however, lost interest in the project of rationally explaining how God’s goodness and God’s power fit together when it comes to his role in the suffering of the world. There is a mystery here, and I’ve learned that it’s one that we must live with.

And I’m less destabilized or offended by the idea that God could play an active, causal role in human suffering than I used to be. Zena Hitz puts it memorably in her recent book, A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life:

Theologians are fond of the distinction between God’s “permissive” will and his “active will,” and saying that God never actively wills evil. Yet willed permission is still an exercise of will, and one must ask how that permission is meant as an act of love for us personally. Otherwise, Christian life will only ever be lukewarm, a pious hobby lived in relative luxury, where one thanks oneself under the guise of thanking God. Only with the practice of abandonment and its freedom can Christianity fulfill its promise of consolation in the face of the worst suffering or its deepest, most luminous and sparkling promise, the promise of happiness.

Quite a quote that one. It hit me between the eyes when I read it this week. It takes courage and deep conviction to ask the question of how the suffering God permits in our lives is meant as an act of love. But I am increasingly thinking that this is the question we must ask if our faith is not to amount to little more than a “lukewarm, pious hobby” (ouch!) where our talking about God is mostly an exercise in just talking about ourselves.

As I mentioned, I watched The Passion of the Christ with the guys out at the jail this week. The movie was terrible in all the ways that I expected it to be terrible (and a few others besides). Aside from this, I had somehow forgotten that the film is in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Latin. It’s a bit of a problem when you have some guys who struggle with reading and a 2+ hr film is all subtitles. But the guys were very gracious. They were mostly just happy to be able to watch a whole movie from start to finish with no interruptions.

At any rate, it’s interesting to think of the cross through the lens of our philosophical and theological hairsplitting between God’s active and God’s passive will. There’s obviously a lot going on, theologically, in the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. Here, too, we are trembling before a deep mystery. At the very least we must say that God somehow actively willed this evil, and that it was at the same time it was and is meant as an act of love.

Jesus was both victim and victor. God was both casualty and causality. We must not insist upon one at the expense of the other, lest we risk thanking ourselves under the guise of thanking God.