Book Reviews
Lament not stressed in Christian canon
My guess is that we begin to ask the question “Why?” about things when we are about three years old. Who has not encountered the child who pursues the adult carer with that question Why?
“Why does the moon have a piece taken out of it?; “Why does the water in the sea always keep moving?
Jesus journeyed into the anguished realm of the question Why? As his life ebbed from him in the cruel pain and anguish of crucifixion, he shouted out a Why? question.
At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud shout “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabacthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why did you abandon me?” (Mark 15:34 Good News Bible)
Too readily Christians leap to fill this passage with various atonement theories. So the focus is on ransoms paid or blood sacrifice and other atonement agenda. And in so doing the human dimensions of Jesus’ experience and words are tragically reduced.
But we need steadfastly to acknowledge the human dimensions of Jesus’ anguish. For Jesus’ words have been echoed, and will be echoed, by millions of people who have to face tragic experiences in life.
In the English translation there are five words that follow the invocation of “My God…”. Preachers can create five sermons simply by putting the stress on each of the five words in turn. Each word so stressed highlights the anguish that can be encompassed by these bare words of the gospel. Anguish that millions of people experience who also feel abandoned by their God.
Here in contemporary Australia we live in a different explanatory universe from the writers of the Bible.They all lived in a pre-modernist world of explanations whereas our environment is replete with modernist – especially scientific -explanations for events.
Tension is now rising because of the surge of Christian fundamentalism in our times. Fundamentalism (Christian, Islamic or Jewish fundamentalists are very similar in their claims to infallibility) is opposed to the explanations that modernism bring to their sacred writings – whether it is the Christian scriptures or the Jewish scriptures or the Quran.
Explanations that are advanced by Christian fundamentalists that the 9/11 attack was due to American liberals, or that the Victorian bushfires were due to the Victorian government’s laws regarding abortion, may grate on our ears as contemporary Christians. But they have a long history, beginning in the pages of the Bible.
Consider the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that struck Lisbon on All Saints’ Day, November 1755, and which killed 60,000 people. When John Wesley asserted that God had caused the earthquake because of God’s anger at the Catholic Church and its Inquisition, few Protestant voices would have been raised in protest.
For believers, tragic experiences raise difficult questions about the very character of God.All our language about God is human language.And so all our language about God is inadequate, insufficient, and can even be mistaken. I recommend Karen Armstrong’s discussion of this in her thoughtful book The Case For God. In particular I commend her chapter entitled Silence.
Given the temptation Christians face of always wanting to have the last word, it is worthwhile to reflect that God dwelt in silence for eons before human speech was heard. God is not afraid of silence. It is we who are far more keen to have the last word than to be drawn into the divine silence.
It is not a bad thing to be speechless. Silence can be the deep experience of awe. Silence can also be the deep experience of grief.
Traditionally the three monotheistic faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) have been based on the threefold foundation of belief in God as an omniscient, omnipotent and all-loving God.
- God is all knowing
- God is all powerful
- God is all compassion
But every theology has to acknowledge that the three-legged stool of traditional belief in God cannot be sustained in facing, for instance, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. Before such a catastrophic event the three legs cannot stand with equal strength or with unquestioned certainty.
- Those who stress the sovereignity of God face the challenge of explaining God’s motivation in causing the Boxing Day tsunami to occur.
- Those who stress God’s full knowledge (omniscience) face the challenge why God was content not to forewarn the quarter million people of the impending disaster that would claim their lives. (Would not human parents have been prompted to utter a warning when they knew their children were endangered?)
- Those who stress the immanence (compassion) of God face the challenge of re-negotiating biblical and liturgical statements that assert that God is almighty and that God causes such phenomena as earthquakes (and consequential tsunamis) to occur.
- Those who stress human free will face the challenge of explaining why earthquakes, and other natural disasters, are caused by human sinfulness.They also face the challenge of explaining why some parts of the earth are earthquake free.Are the residents in those regions less sinful?
- Those who posit that this world can only operate as it does to give scope for human free will need to explain why earthquakes preceded human existence.
- Those who assert that their God is sovereign, or that disasters occur to test or strengthen faith, need to explain why others’ lives are sacrificed so as to strengthen or test the faith of Christians. Is that a divine model of ethical behaviour?
Anyone prepared to talk about God in the face of disaster will need to embrace paradoxes, contradictions, the absence of faith, even the absence of God.
The great Christian scholar Jürgen Moltmann expresses this in the succinct sentence,“Where the Kingdom of God is at hand, we feel the abyss of God-forsakenness.”1
How are Christians to respond to the anguished cry of Why? when tragedy strikes a family, a village, a town, a city, a country?
From its longer faith journey Judaism copes with this better than Christianity. In the Jewish scriptures one finds holy people who are prepared to sheet home to God their lament, their agonised cry of Why?
The Hebrew prophet, Jeremiah, challenged God directly in regard to the injustices experienced by people. He hedges his defiance with an opening statement of trust but then presents his case like a godly barrister: “You will be in the right, O Lord, when I lay charges against you; but let me put my case to you. Why does the way of the guilty prosper? Why do all who are treacherous thrive?” (Jeremiah 12:1-2)
No New Testament passage matches that questioning. Christians feel uncomfortable with such words addressed to God. Laments do not feature in the Christian scriptures. There are several reasons that account for this.
New Testament writings cover only a short range of time and human experience and so they cannot encompass the widest range of responses to God.
New religious movements are not noted for being self-critical or critical of their own ideology.
When such movements are buoyed by expansion and are convinced that God is on their side, they find it hard to give room for lamentation against their God. Not surprisingly, what is absent from the Christian scriptures has also been suppressed in subsequent Christian worship and piety.
Christianity has become the
religion of happy endings
Expressions of anger, hatred, rage, resentment, bitterness, betrayal, abandonment, unbelief have for the most part been, consciously or unconsciously, banned and eliminated from liturgies, hymnals and prayer books.2
There is another significant silence. Nowhere in the gospels does Jesus give counsel to those who face prolonged suffering. One is reminded of Terry Eagleton’s insight that, “It is notable that the Jesus of the New Testament, who spends much of his time curing the sick, never once counsels anyone to reconcile (themselves) to (their) sickness.”
Rather Christianity, especially sentimental Christianity, has become the religion of happy endings. Does not the Christian always end with resurrection and happiness for ever in heaven for the chosen ones, the Christians? A consequence is that popular Christianity will not face the reality of ongoing anguish.
Choruses proclaim that “our God reigns” while the questions that anguished human beings raise against such a well-established Christian assertion
are ignored or smothered because they disturb Christian triumphalism.
Did God reign over the Boxing Day, 2004 tsunami – or the Haiti earthquake? And what kind of godly reign is that?
We need to incorporate into our liturgies words, theology and passions that are prepared to confront the tragic realities of life and to face God with them.
There is an essential element in Christianity that – while it does not provide an answer to the anguished question Why? – opens a window into that anguish.
For within the many-faceted beliefs in Christianity is a belief in a crucified Messiah. Moltmann explored these depths in his book entitled The Crucified God.
A feature of Process Theology is that its stress is on the immanence of God rather than God’s transcendence.
Our liturgies and our scriptures largely focus on God’s transcendence. But Process Theology, rather than seeing God as an imperial heavenly monarch, locates God in the down-to-earth experience of pain, as well as pleasure. This theology focuses on the Crucified God.
To quote an image from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, it is the “vulnerable God” who emerges through Process Theology.
And it is the changing God – not the Aristotelian changeless God, or the Platonic timeless God
– with whom we and the universe engage. God is present, vulnerably within the tragedy.
Process Theology gives more room for God to be free. As Hartshorne commented: “If God is free to do new things, (God) is free to have new experiences.”3
The Revd Dr Ray Barraclough was ordained in the Anglican Diocese of Brisbane and is now retired. He was Senior Lecturer at St George’s College, Jerusalem and Lecturer in New Testament Studies at St Francis Theological College Brisbane. His book on Process Theology Why? The challenge of Giving Explanations for Tragic Experiences in Life was published this year.
1.Tyron Inbody,‘The Power of Prayer and the Mystery of Evil’, Anglican Theological Review, 81, 1999.
2.Herbert E.Hohenstein,‘Oh Blessed Rage’, Currents in Theology, 10, 1983, 167. For a similar observation note Inbody, 72-73.
3. Cited by Paul S. Fiddes,The Creative Suffering of God, Clarendon, Oxford, 1988, p.94
