More Tim Keller summary

Tim Keller wrote a book that impacted me greatly--Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering. For the past several blogs I have been summarizing this book. Here we go again:

In the last blog I mentioned two doctrines that Keller believes can help us deal with pain and suffering. The third doctrine he covers is the incarnation and atonement. The book of Job calls for complete surrender to the sovereignty of God. Then the New Testament comes in with unimaginable comfort because the sovereign God himself has come down into this world and experienced its darkness. Here, Keller says, we see the ultimate strength – a God who is strong enough to voluntarily become weak and plunge himself into vulnerability in darkness out of love for us. There is no other religion that even conceives of such a thing. Here's a comment by Keller I want to stress: Yes, we do not know the reason God allows evil and suffering to continue or why it is so random, but now at least we know what the reason is not. It cannot be that he does not love us. It cannot be that he does not care. If God didn't withhold from us his very own son, will God withhold anything we need?

 

Keller then turns to a key question--Why didn't Jesus do something about evil when he was here? But the evil and darkness of this world come from within us mostly. It would've meant there would be no human beings left. Jesus died on the cross in our place taking the punishment our sins deserve so that someday he can return to earth to end evil without destroying us all. We always want God to put a stop to evil, but we seldom think that we would be in trouble too!

The Bible says that Jesus is the light of the world. Again, Keller has a powerful thought here: If you know you are in his love, and that nothing can snatch you out of his hand, and that he is taking you to God's house and God's future – then he can be a light for you in dark places when all other lights go out. His love for you now  and this infallible hope for the future  are indeed a light in the darkness by which we can find our way.

In Chapter 6  Keller describes how the Bible's picture of suffering is nuanced. We see two foundational balances – suffering is both just and unjust; God is both a sovereign and the suffering God. Start with number one. The world is now in a cursed condition that falls short of its design. But God has not abandoned us. The Bible then says that the existence of suffering in the world is really a form of justice. But it also says that individual instances of suffering may not be the result of a particular sin. Consider the book of Job, in which Job is not at fault but still suffers greatly.

Keller then talks of something that interests me as a teacher of the Bible as literature at Palomar College. The biblical story of creation was unique among ancient accounts of the world's origin. Other accounts say the world came into existence through a battle or struggle between divine beings or other supernatural forces. The world was basically chaotic. But the Bible says that creation was the result of one God without a rival acting much as an artist. The world has a pattern to it. The fabric of the world has a moral order to it. Our world has been created by God and therefore has a foundational moral order to it. And yet something is wrong with that order now. It is crucial to understand evil as an enemy of God.

In John 11 Jesus is furious about death, evil and suffering. Evil is the enemy of God's good creation and of God himself. Evil is so deeply rooted in the human heart that if Christ had come in power to destroy it everywhere he found it, he would have had to destroy us too. He went in weakness to the cross to pay for our sins, so the someday he will return to wipe out evil without having to judge us as well.

If we forget that suffering is just, we will become drowned in self-pity. If we forget suffering is often unjust, we may be trapped in inordinate guilt in the belief that God must've abandoned us. This balance – that God is just and will bring final justice but life in the meantime is often deeply unfair – keeps us from many deadly errors.

Again, there is much to think about here. I'll stop for now. More to come from this book in the next blog.

Tim Keller--continued (on pain and suffering)

Here is more from Tim Keller's book on pain and suffering. We need to know this material so when we face tough times, we are ready for them.

In Part Two of his book, Keller says there are three powerful themes of Christian teaching that can help us deal with pain and suffering. The first has to do with the doctrines of creation and fall. The second has to do with the final judgment and the renewal of the world. The third has to do with the incarnation and the atonement.

First, he tackles the doctrines of creation and fall. He reminds us the evil we see today was not part of God's original design. We were not meant for mortality, for the loss of love, for the triumph of darkness. This teaching rejects the idea that people who suffer more are always worse people. It is fair to say the suffering and death in general is a natural consequence and just judgment of God on our sin. The teaching of creation and fall remove self-pity that afflicts people with the deistic view of life. It strengthens the soul, preparing it to be unsurprised when life is hard.

Then Keller turns to the doctrine of final judgment and the renewal of the world. If there is no judgment day, what about all the evil that has been perpetrated? This doctrine gives us hope, it enables us to be gracious, to forgive, and to refrain from vengeance and violence. The resurrection of the body means we do not merely receive a consolation for the life we have lost but a restoration of it. Isn't it possible that the eventual glory and joy we will know will be infinitely greater than it would have been had there been no evil, he asks. Apart from sin and evil, we would never have seen the courage of God, or the astonishing extent of his love, or the glory of a deity who lays aside his glory and goes to the cross. Because of our fall and redemption, we will achieve a level of intimacy with God that cannot be received any other way.  I want to highlight a particularly good point he brings up--What if in the future we came to see that just as Jesus could not have displayed such glory and love any other way except through his suffering, we would not have been able to experience such transcendent glory, joy, and love any other way except by going through a world of suffering?

More from Keller dealing with God and the problem of pain

I'm continuing to summarize key portions of Tim Keller's book Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering. I just heard of a friend and his wife who are now going through crushing loss of a son. So, this book is not just for those who wish to discuss pain and suffering from an ivory-tower perspective. the pain is real, and we better get ready for it in our lives. So, here's more from Keller.

Most attempts to explain why God permits evil seem tepid, shallow, and ultimately frivolous, according to Alvin Plantinga. As a result, most Christian thinkers and philosophers have increasingly recommended the believers try not to formulate reasons but simply mount a defense. This simply seeks to prove that the argument against God from evil fails. The burden now is on the skeptic. It is up to the skeptic to make a compelling case that there can't be a God and evil in the world at the same time. Here's what the skeptic's argument has to look like: "A truly good and all-powerful God would not want evil to exist. Evil exists. Therefore, God who is both good and powerful cannot exist." 

But the believer in God can point out that the argument has a hidden premise, namely that God does not have any good reasons to allow evil to exist. If he has good reasons, then there is no contradiction between his existence and that of evil. The skeptic must reply that God cannot possibly have any such reasons. That is very hard to prove. We know that we often allow suffering in people's lives to bring about some greater good (doctors, parents,…). There's another assumption inside the first hidden premise – "If I can't see any reasons God might have for permitting that evil, then probably he doesn't have any." But this is obviously false. Our comeback is this: "If God is infinitely knowledgeable – why couldn't he have morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil that you can't think of?" We can't know as much as God. If you have a God infinite and powerful enough for you to be angry at for allowing evil, then you must at the same time have a God infinite enough to have sufficient reasons for allowing that evil.

Most people who see evil object to God's existence not for philosophical reasons but for visceral ones. But not everyone who experiences radical evil automatically loses faith in God. The assumption for skeptics is that God, if he exists, has failed to do the right thing. But this creates a problem for the person who disbelieves in God. We humans have moral feelings. Now if there is no God, where do such strong moral feelings and instincts come from? Is it from evolution? But that can't account for moral obligation. Where do you get a standard by which our moral feelings and senses are judged as true and others as false? This happened to C. S. Lewis. He rejected the existence of God because he hated the evil in the world. But eventually he came to realize that evil and suffering were a bigger problem for him as an atheist than as a believer in God. He concluded that the awareness of moral evil in the world was actually an argument for the existence of God, not against it. His objection to the existence of God was that he could perceive no moral standard behind the world – the world was just randomly evil and cruel. But then if there was no God, any definition of evil was just based on a private feeling of the individual. If morals are totally subjective, then you can't say Hitler was wrong.

In summary, the problem of senseless suffering does not go away if you abandon belief in God. If there is no God, why have a sense of outrage and horror when unjust suffering occurs? Violence, suffering, and death are completely natural phenomena. More from his book to follow in the next blog.

Pain and suffering, according to Tim Keller--more from his book

Here's more from Keller's powerful book on pain and suffering as it relates to the existence of God (the full title is Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering):

He says we in the West think we can solve suffering through public policy. But the world's darkness is too deep to be dispelled by such things. In our pride, we think we can control and defeat the darkness. Pain and suffering in this world are pervasive and deep and have spiritual roots. If we're going to face it, it takes more than earthly resources. One of the main teachings of the Bible is that almost no one grows into greatness or finds God without suffering, without pain coming into our lives like smelling salts to wake us up to all sorts of facts about life in our own hearts to which we were blind. I underlined that statement because it seems central to Keller's message, as unpleasant as it sounds to us.

In Chapter 4 he discusses the history of the argument against God due to pain and suffering. The argument from evil never had anything like popular appeal and broad attraction until sometime after the Enlightenment. Things changed when Western thought came to see God as more remote, and to see the world is ultimately understandable through reason. Human beings became far more confident in their own powers of reason and perception.

Modern discussions of the problem of suffering start with an abstract God. Modern people are far more prone than their ancestors to conclude that, if they can see no good reason for particular instance of suffering, God cannot have any justifiable reasons for it either. If evil does not make sense to us, well, evil simply does not make sense. It has been widely conceded that the logical argument against God (the argument against God from evil) didn't work. Skeptical thinkers began to formulate a new version called the evidential argument against God. A much weaker claim was made, namely that suffering is not proof but evidence that makes the existence of God less probable, although not impossible.

Keller's next section of his book deals with traditional answers to the problem of evil. Some people said suffering is good because it provides "soul-making." But pain and evil do not appear in any way to be distributed according to soul-making need. Many people with very bad souls get little of the adversity they apparently need. This also does not account for the suffering of little children or infants who die in pain.

A second explanation is the free-will version. Free will can be abused and that brings evil. There are two problems with this. The first is that it seems to explain only a certain category of evil – moral but not natural. The second problem is this – Is it really true that God could not create free agents capable of love without making them also capable of evil? If God has a free will yet is not capable of doing wrong, why couldn't other beings be like that? It assumes that despite the horrendous evils of history, merely having freedom of choice is worth it. But is it?

Another way to argue for the problem of evil was put forth by C. S. Lewis in his book The Problem of Pain. It argues that the world created by God must have a natural order to it. If we break natural laws, it must rebound on us. But most suffering does not happen in an orderly way. People suffer even if they haven't done something stupid.

Well, there's much more Keller covers in the rest of the book. Because the topic is so important, I want to discuss additional portions of the book in future blogs.

More from Tim Keller's book

I'm devoting several blogs to explore the deep insights Keller has in Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering. Here's some more:


When Christianity came along, how it dealt with sorrow helped its appeal. It offered a greater basis for hope. Earlier, stoics had said after death people continued as part of the universe, yet not in an individual form. Christianity shad a new message: we will be saved as individual selves. John 1:1 says, like the Stoics, that there is an ordering structure behind the universe, but that it was not an abstract, rational principle that could be known only through high contemplation by the educated elite. He said the logos of the universe is a person-- Jesus Christ, who can be loved and known in an interpersonal relationship by anyone. Christians, unlike Stoics, were not to stifle tears and cries – they are natural and good. Suffering was not to be dealt with primarily through the control and suppression of negative emotions by using reason or willpower. Salvation was through humility, faith, and love rather than reason and control of emotions. Grief was not to be eliminated but seasoned and buoyed up with love and hope . . .

In modern times the West has become much more secular. According to the modern Westerner, because there is no transcendent, supernatural order outside of me, it is I who determine what I am and who I will be. Deism became popular. A huge earthquake in Lisbon (1755) caused many philosophers and thinkers to see this as evidence against the existence of the loving God of the Bible. This began the "problem of evil" discourse. Virtually no one on record had previously argued that evil made the existence of God impossible . . .

During the early 19th century, American culture began losing its grip on the Christian doctrines of the evil of human nature and the reality of Satan. Today we see ourselves as able to control our own destiny, able to discern for ourselves what is right and wrong, and we see God is obligated to arrange things for our benefit, especially if we lived good enough life according to our own chosen standards. Some call this " moralistic, therapeutic Deism" . . .

Christianity has superior beliefs for facing evil, suffering, and death: belief in a personal, wise, infinite, and inscrutable God who controls the affairs of the world, God came to earth in the form of Jesus and suffered with and for us sacrificially, through faith in Christ's work on the cross we can have assurance of our salvation, there will be a bodily resurrection from the dead for all who believe . . .

Keller argues for the failure of the secular viewpoint. He says secular humanism fails to provide any theology (larger explanations of life that makes sense of suffering) and its adherents do not offer community (forged only when there is something more important than one's own interest in which I'll share a higher allegiance). You can't make the case that atheism has inspired more movements for social justice than religion has. Without a theological worldview, defining moral and just behavior become an enormous difficulty. The deeper question for secular thinkers is what to base standards on so they are not purely arbitrary. David Hume and others have pointed out that science and empirical reason cannot be the basis of morality since they tell us how people live but not how they ought to live. Hume wrote that reason alone "is incompetent to answer any fundamental questions about morality, or the meaning of life." Secularists say we should not fear death because we are nonexistent. But this is a state in which we are stripped of all love and everything that gives meaning to life. That's not much consolation to the Christian view of the resurrection. The intuition that we are not just a collection of matter and chemicals but also a soul is one of the most widespread convictions of human beings in the world today. Research and experience tell us that a majority of people reach for the spiritual to help them interpret and bear up under hurt and suffering. You have meaning only when there is something in life more important than your own personal freedom and happiness. So, the secular view of life does not work for most people in the face of suffering because human suffering comes in such enormous variety of forms, and the Western approach oversimplifies the complex causes of suffering reducing all to victimization; another problem is that the Western view is naïvely optimistic about human life (the secular person can't find meaning in evil and suffering, can't prepare to triumph over it in some future life, but has to make the world better right here). To live with any hope, secular people must believe that we can eliminate most sources of unhappiness for the majority of people, but that is impossible. The causes of suffering are infinitely complex and impossible to eliminate . . .