Sparks Fly Upward: why God allows us to suffer

By Kenneth Matthews Ph.D.

If you, or anyone you know, has suffered pain or loss, or has ever simply wondered how a merciful and omnipotent God can allow such tragedies, Matthews' book offers a unique perspective on this age-old question. Matthews takes a very different approach than other well-known authors on this subject such as Kushner's When Bad Things Happen

• Language: English
• Publisher: TOPLINK PUBLISHING, LLC
• Release date: Feb 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781948779197

Kenneth Matthews Ph.D.

Ken Matthews grew up in a Christian pastor's family. He earned a doctorate in English literature, with focus on C.S. Lewis, from UCLA, and subsequently taught English for many years in a Christian University. He and his wife live with their four dogs in central Oregon.

Book preview

Sparks Fly Upward

Why God Allows Us to Suffer

Kenneth Matthews Ph.D.

Copyright © 2018 by Kenneth Matthews Ph.D.

Paperback: 978-1-948779-18-0

eBook: 978-1-948779-19-7

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Ordering Information:

For orders and inquiries, please contact:

1-888-375-9818

www.toplinkpublishing.com

[e-mail]

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction

1: The Problem

2: The Plan

3: Design

4: Possibility

5: Freedom

6: Job

7: Gospel

8: Miracles

9: Universal Providence

10: Water to Wine

11: Prayer

12: Of Dog and Chicken

13: Good Pain

14: Deliverance

15: Comfort

16: Why?

17: Workaround

18: Afterthought

Notes

∞ Bennie Howard Matthews ∞

1922–1967

father

auto accident

This book is dedicated to Amy,

whose love reminds me daily

that God does indeed make

really good things happen

…the dread of something after death,

The undiscovered country, from whose bourn

No traveler returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

---William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Introduction

∞ Roy S. Cornell ∞

1920–1977

employer

polio, quadriplegic

Philosophy teaches us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of others

—Oscar Wilde

This book was born of my own pain, of the effort to understand my own experience. I try here to bring together some thoughts and ideas on the subject of pain and how it relates to our concept of God—what is known formally as a theodicy, an attempt to explain in rational terms the question of why we suffer. I make here no offer of pastoral comfort to those who are in the midst of suffering, though a chapter is devoted to the subject. Some people are able to find comfort in understanding; and I will be very glad if this discussion helps anyone in that way. But I am neither pastor nor counselor, and any who want what those professionals offer should look elsew here.

Primarily, this work is addressed to those who are intellectually curious, who like things to make sense. It is for those who have struggled with the inadequate, unsatisfying, and sometimes outright horrifying explanations that so often mar Christian discussions of pain. It tries to relate other issues—miracles, prayer, and the power of God—to the problem of pain, all against the backdrop of what I hope is a more or less consistent cosmology. It reflects what has come to be, for me, an explanation that accounts for as many of the facts as possible, and most of those of which I am aware. Whether that makes it correct is more than I can say, but I have found it fairly difficult to poke holes in, and I therefore like it. Above all, it is a proposal, not a conclusion set in stone—my views have evolved and are still open to change. Any error in what follows should be seen as a failure to complete my evolution rather than as an intentional heresy.

I know that my own experience of loss and pain is far from the most profound that any human being has been forced to endure, but it was bad enough; and at least any reader who disagrees with my views must know that they are genuine, that they come from one who has seen the problem, so to speak, from the inside. I have known a number of people who lived long, full lives and died what we might call a normal death—my grandparents, for example, who died of what we have come to label natural causes well into their 80’s. But the lives of the people who I name to begin each chapter of this work were marred or cut short by disease, accident, or foul play. Although each of these touched my life personally, I do not remember them here to suggest that my circle of acquaintance has been specially visited by mayhem and mortality, but because each loss has in its own way devastated and each story has moved me, and because I feel compelled to try to understand the meaning of the tragedies that befell each of them.

I have had no formal theological training, though I have been formally trained to read and to think, and as those who know me will attest, have had years of practice in argument; and while I have read enough books about pain written by people with more theological training than I have had to know that formal training is not everything, I do not offer this work as a strictly original, formal philosophical treatise. To be sure, I have not encountered a work that makes my argument as I make it here; but that is not saying quite the same thing. If someone else has made all these points before me, please do me the favor of not telling me about it—once this is published I cannot undo it, and discovering that I could simply have read it long ago instead of working it out for myself through years of struggle would just annoy me.

1: The Problem

∞ Harold Vences ∞

1948–2002

brother-in-law

heart attack

For there was never yet philosopher

that could endure the toothache patiently

—William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

It would be better to die once and for all

than to suffer pain for all one’s life

—Aeschylus

What is described herein as the problem of pain has been a topic of enduring interest throughout the history of written discourse, and has been stated in many ways. It should be beyond obvious that I am not talking about the problem that pain creates because we do not like the experience of it. If we do like it, we have a different sort of problem. I mean, of course, the intellectual problem of pain. For our use here, we can state the problem simply by the following equa tion:

If, as almost all Christians believe, God is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, then he knows all our sufferings, is present in all our circumstances, and is able to relieve all our human sufferings. If God is omnibenevolent, he must want to put an end to human suffering.

Obviously, he does not either stop or prevent human suffering. This is a matter neither of interpretation, nor of accusation, but is a simple fact that any observer can see almost everywhere almost all the time in real life.

Therefore, either God is not omnibenevolent (that is, he in some way approves of pain, or at least uses it even if he does not personally inflict it) or he is not omniscient (some of our pain escapes his notice) or he is not omnipresent (he cannot be present in every place and time where pain occurs) or he is not omnipotent (he is unable to put a stop to it).

Since B is self-evidently true, then if A is true, we have our problem of pain. If C is true, then we have a problem with our concept of God. Either way, as Ricky Ricardo used to say to Lucy, someone has some ‘splaining to do—thus, the problem. Granted, pain is a problem only if we first assume that our ideas of good and bad are real values. We cannot simply be mistaken in thinking that human suffering is a bad thing, or that when we talk of the goodness of God, the qualities we think of as making up his goodness are not merely mislabeled, or subject to a kind of definition that we never encounter in our experience. Without taking our normal, everyday definitions of good and bad for granted, we cannot have this discussion, so I allow that a different argument could be had if we were to accept different assumptions. But for the sake of this discussion, I take our commonly held ideas of goodness and badness in general, and also as they relate to pain, to be assumable facts—but not because they have been revealed or proven by argument to be so. Rather, I think most readers will instinctively share enough similar understanding of the concepts to make rational discussion possible; without such shared understanding, only disagreement could happen. Our instincts tell all, or at least enough to work with—I am interested in explaining the presence of pain within a reasonably familiar, shared context, not in trying to persuade anyone that what they have always felt was good is in fact bad, or the reverse. If the only way to deal with the problem of pain is to try to persuade most people that Hitler was really a good guy, then we have a problem much bigger than I want to undertake to explain.

I take for granted also, that for pain to pose a problem we must assume that the universe is not deterministic in nature—if all that happens is pre-ordained to occur then our lot may be ugly, but there is no problem of pain; that is to say, pain is no easier to endure, but it is intellectually simple to explain: determinism would make it merely one detail in the operation of the pre-determined plan. Chapter 5 explains in greater detail why I do not think the universe is deterministic, but I will say at this point simply that there would be no point in a book like this if it were.

I assume as well that the problem of pain is a real dilemma. God is either good or he is not. He either has the omni-attributes we consider him to have, or he does not. We cannot have this both ways to support the needs of our arguments as they arise, and there are no other alternatives. It matters what we think or believe about these issues. The existence of pain and suffering in human life directly and forcefully pushes these questions and issues into our consciousness and makes us choose. If we are going to be intellectually honest we cannot sweep away the questions that pain forces us to confront with simplistic or self-contradictory explanations. Many pages could be written merely detailing the multitude of ways in which other theodicies have tried to wriggle off the hook and the reasons why I think each of those ways will not work. If this were a more formal academic treatise, written to persuade the professional philosophical or theological communities, I should now do just that and launch into what would be called a review of the literature, but I will not do that. I recognize that not doing this may detract from the persuasive value of what I say hereafter for any professional theologian. But if you are a casual reader, a thinking Christian with a busy life, you may be grateful for the extra pages you do not have to choose whether or not to read.

What I will do, instead, is to summarize all the views on this subject that I have encountered (I hope not unfairly) into two admittedly simplified ideas:

The punitive model, where pain is the gods’ way of punishing mortals for any of a variety of misdeeds or is inflicted to improve human character. The flip side of this model is that success, long life, happiness, pleasure, and wealth—the usual categories of experience which define an absence of pain—indicate that the gods are pleased with us. One subset of this model is that pain is merely used by the gods, not inflicted as punishment, exactly; this variant could be described as the character improvement model. I would separate these two into distinct categories, but they have in common a vital conviction: that pain is either a weapon or a tool of the gods, and for that reason, I think they are essentially the same. Nearly all of the theodicies with which I am familiar fall into this category. Outstanding examples are C. S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain,¹ and Joni Eareckson Tada’s Joni,² along with nearly all of the ancient treatises and commentaries on the problem.³

The naturalistic model, where pain is the result of living in an uncaring, mechanistic universe. There is neither purpose, nor pattern, nor meaning in the occurrence of pain—it simply is the human condition, living as we do in nature, red in tooth and claw. An example of this view is Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People.⁴

There are many variations of these two views, some of which may seem significant enough to warrant treating them as separate categories, but all, I think, come down in the end to one or the other of these models. Some Christians try to negate the problem of pain altogether by claiming that God’s dealings are all a mystery; and from this, they argue that we should merely love and trust him without trying to understand. I suppose this could be offered as a third view that we might call the blind faith model; but while I have nothing against loving and trusting God, this does not seem to me to be much of a view—rather more of an effort to avoid thinking about the issue. If merely not thinking about it provides intellectual or emotional comfort to anyone, I would not take it from them, but it will not do for me.

It should be obvious why there are so many treatments of the punitive model and so few of the other two: there really is not much to say after you take God out of the discussion, or if the basis of your position is that we should avoid thinking about it. I hope to offer here an alternate view that keeps God in the discussion, but that rejects pain as either his weapon or his tool. Let me start by establishing that I believe God is ultimately responsible for the existence of pain. I deny that he inflicts it, that he uses it, or that he likes it. But if he is the author of the whole universe, and if as the prime mover he creates, sustains, and maintains all, then there is no one to whom he can pass the buck. Everything in the universe is his responsibility, and since pain is here, he is responsible for it. I also assert in what follows that God is really God—i.e. that he has those omni-attributes, including being all-good, that most Christian thought ascribes to him. Thus, he does have the raw power, the ability to stop human suffering. The problem of pain does not exist if God does not have those qualities. We would have other problems. But pain would require very little intellectual investigation; we would suffer simply because the universe is sloppily managed, not managed at all, or even managed with malice toward humans. I do not want to live in that universe—I do not think we do live in that universe—but we can imagine it, and it does have the virtue of being easy to explain.

All of which is simply to repeat that I believe there is a problem of pain to address. It would not make much sense to invest the time to write this book if I did not think so. It will not make much sense for you to read what follows if you do not also think so. I hope that whether or not we still agree when you finish, you will not feel that I have wasted your time.

2: The Plan

∞ Irma Elaine Landis Matthews Phillips ∞

1924–2003

mother

cancer

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed

us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use

—Galileo Galilei

Miss Prism, upon hearing that Mr. Worthing’s brother Earnest has died:

What a lesson for him! I trust he will profit by it.

—Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

The Way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason

—Benjamin Franklin

I have said that this book was born of my own pain and my own struggle to understand it. My pain is described simply enough: when I was thirteen, my father, not yet forty-five years old, died in a completely preventable single-car accident. They told me that he did not suffer. I did. When I was near fifty, my mother died of cancer at age seventy-nine. I did not suffer. The intensity of her sufferings was matched only by their pointlessness, and I could only stand by and watch helplessly. A number of other people who have touched my life are named in the chapter headings of this book; each of them suffered a significant, life-shattering tragedy, or died too young, or in pain, or under horrible circumstances. Each of their stories contributes its weight to the sum of my qualification to talk about this sub ject.

My own significant pain has been emotional in nature—never, to this point, physical beyond the odd toothache and migraine; and it has not been remarkable in any way. Many have endured far worse than I, worse too than my mother did; bad as it was at times, her pain was largely managed by the miracle of modern chemical miracles. Had her death taken place in another era, it would have been an unimaginable nightmare of long-drawn-out agony, and for many others before her time, the death from cancer that she suffered has been exactly that. Beyond the level of pain she suffered, and as if such horrors that nature is capable of bringing upon us via accident and disease were not enough, humans have invented and inflicted on their fellow humans tortures both mental and physical that make my sufferings and hers look downright petty. We do not have to look back to the rack, thumbscrews, and eviscerations of medieval torture chambers to find examples; within the past century have arisen numerous monsters, both individual and state-sponsored, who have pushed the science and practice of torment to unthinkable depths. I know that my sufferings could have been far more intense, and that life could have something much worse in store yet for me, than anything I have actually seen or felt to date. To the gods who take offense when mortals question their dealings, I wish to make it clear that I am not hereby requesting a more thoroughly qualifying experience! But, knowing that it could be worse does not make current pain hurt less. Pain hurts. That is why we call it pain, instead of using some nicer word with more than four letters. That is all we need to