Several years ago I was invited to join an “Ask a Christian” panel on a college campus. It took place in the large programming space of a residence hall and was respectably attended. The idea was very open-ended: come ask a real, live Christian anything you’d want to ask a Christian about.
Two animated young women sat toward the back that night. I could tell by their demonstrative body-language and side talk following responses, they were skeptical. Then I saw one of their hands shoot up:
“How can you really believe there is a good and all-powerful God when there are so many terrible things in this world? Why would God make a world like this; full of so much suffering? If God is good and has all power, why doesn’t he do something about it?”
It was the exact type of question we hoped might come up, and yet sitting there, each of us glancing up and down the panel, it felt like being in a police lineup. Who would step forward, open their mouth and indict the faith? Both women leaned forward as the question crackled through the room. This young skeptic had probed directly to the credibility or incredibility of the Christian faith. She had probed to the heart of Advent.
We Christians give cataclysmic questions like this neat, philosophical names, so as to decrease if not defuse their charge. This one gets called “theodicy” – the conundrum of God (theo) and justice (dike), coined by the Renaissance French polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. When faced with a question like this, one can lean back in one’s chair and say, “Ah, yes. The age-old question of theodicy.” In doing so, one firstly distantiates one’s self from the payload of the question and, secondly, insinuates the question to be easily answered.
In fact, the first panelist to respond began by saying, “We all must remember, these are merely logical questions.” (I remember him emphasizing “merely.”) He continued, “They can be very emotional, but are satisfactorily answerable through logical reasoning.” He went on to answer their question through a thoroughly rationalistic framework which, I’ll admit, served as a rhetorical anodyne. Yet I watched the two women squirm during his answer and realized that I myself was squirming. Why? These are neither merely logical questions nor is there any ease in their answering. Advent asserts as much.
In his book, The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis reminds us, “Christianity is not the conclusion of a philosophical debate” about such things but rather “a catastrophic historical event,” adding, “In a sense, it creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless, side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that the ultimate reality is righteous and loving.” Christianity and Advent are coterminous; the former being the effect and the latter its cause.
Thus Advent insists that ultimate reality is not only righteous and loving but does in fact “do something” about our world of pain. No plea nor probe is merely logical when the logic or, in John’s unforgettable intimation, the Logos of all creation is a righteous and loving person who, presented with the dilemma, entered it flesh and blood.
Advent is God’s answer.
So we puzzle over the prophet Isaiah’s infuriatingly lovely word about this gloom, darkness, disgrace and oppression dispersing child “born to us“; this gladness, light, glory and peace bringing son “given to us”; this promised boy upon whom all government shall rest and through whom shall be realized proliferating and permanent peace. And we puzzle over the perplexingly marvelous names by which Isaiah introduces him to our pained and pining world,
And he will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
(Is. 9:6 NIV)
In my last post, I asked us to consider this child as “Wonderful Counselor” or wonder-counselor. But the question these women asked, indeed the one we all labor to answer, affixes to what is the most outlandish title the prophet registered: Mighty God. No doubt his own hand trembled as he penned such hallowed words: What on earth have I written? What on earth indeed.
The scholars would like us to keep in mind how the original recipients of Isaiah’s words might have understood them. “It would be as though this child were the mighty God.” Something like that. And yet. And yet, we really find no similar statements to these in our bibles. This child born to us, the son given to us we would call by the name Mighty God? That is what the prophet wrote.
Now this word for mighty doesn’t exactly convey the sense of what theologians call “sovereignty” – God’s mysterious and total reign over every happening in the cosmos. It is actually rarely used in reference to God at all! It connotes the type of warrior figure you never want to mess with; if you’ll allow: a badass. It’s the type of term that might convince you that if Die Hard isn’t a Christmas movie then it is absolutely an Advent movie. The outlook is grim, Hans Gruber and his henchmen are in complete control, apart from one important fact: John McClane is inside the Nakatomi Plaza.
This just got interesting.
Isaiah gave an oracle about a child who was to make things very interesting, one of the mighty ones who is none other than God himself, and he has stolen into the complex. Yippee ki-yay!
After my fellow panelist laid out his theodicy, as I said, I was squirming. Another panelist, relieved, said, “Yeah, that about sums it up.” Then I heard myself blurt out, “It is right for this to be emotional!” The heads swung around. “These are real lives we’re talking about, and their suffering is no small thing!”
I don’t know what got into me but I know I meant what I said. Advent is emphatic about this. The theodicy will never be abstract to God and you can bet it will never be easy. It will prove fierce, there will be pain and loss, blood will be shed, but the One of whom the oracle spoke is on the loose. This answer-child.
The French philosopher Voltaire lampooned Leibniz in his satirical tale Candide by way of his character Dr. Pangloss: called him a “professor of meta-physico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology” and, no matter how harrowing their circumstances or devestating their setbacks, had him espousing, “All is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds.” To Voltaire this was a form of tragicomical denial. He was probably right.
When we marshal out our theodicies it may seem we’re defending God, but I wonder if we’re not defending ourselves. The darkness of this world is too immense for our minds to comprehend or for our hearts to hold. As I write, whole families are crawling out from subterranean concentration camps in Syria: children born in captivity to dissident mothers who have only known deprivation for the opening decade of their lives. No mere logic can answer for such horrors, nor can Hollywood.
Maybe we pose such questions for similar reasons, like the many in the Old Testament whose prayers resembled defeatism: “Don’t call me Naomi (sweetness). Call me Mara (bitterness), for the Almighty has made my life very bitter!” (Ruth 1:20) We secretly hope the Almighty will overhear and do something! Or maybe we would expose this far-fetched story as a sham; just resign yourself to the bleakness! As Lewis said, Christianity creates this problem by going and offering “a good assurance that the ultimate reality is righteous and loving.” Maybe we don’t want this good assurance. “A hope deferred,” after all, “makes the heart sick.”
But Advent is God’s answer: a God-child born to us, a mighty One who has entered the saga, a life and death that defies mere human logic about God, a resurrection that suggests many sequels and an epic finale. We may reject such a story: our skepticisms and sorrows will always balk at it’s brutal plot. But is there a better story? This we must also ask and answer.
Neorologist, psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl describes what he discovered during his time in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Türkheim and Dachau:
It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.
The answer was literally a life and death matter. No highfalutin theories would suffice.
During the extended climax of Die Hard, John McClane’s wife observes one of the henchmen returning from an altercation with her husband. He storms past the hostages, then stops to smash a drink cart to smithereens with the butt of his machine gun. She smiles and whispers, “He’s still alive.” The terrified woman next to her says, “What?” She replies, “Only John can drive someone that crazy.”
He’s still alive. This is the madness of Advent. Only this child whom Isaiah bids us call the Mighty God can drive evil so crazy.
Like Mrs. McClane, we Advent pilgrims say such things from our own experience also: Only this child whom we have learned to call Jesus, can drive ones like us so crazy.
The skeptical and clear-eyed woman in the dorm asked three questions: How can we believe in a good and powerful God amidst such suffering, why would God abide a pain-populated world like ours, and why doesn’t God do something?
Advent doesn’t answer the middle question. It just doesn’t. I suppose that is what the speculations of theodicy are for. There is, however, another fancy word for what Advent does assert: theophany – God-appearing. Advent is the great theophany! God has done something, God is doing something, and God will do something more fantastic than our minds or hearts can fathom. Advent is both protagonist and plot of our drama, and, though Christ’s comings and goings and doings always elude our expectations, this is how we believe.
Advent is how we believe.
It is during the second week of Advent that we light the Bethlehem candle; the child did slip stealthily into our human story! JB Phillips wrote, “We must never allow anything to blind us to the true significance of what happened at Bethlehem so long ago. Nothing can alter the fact that we live on a visited planet.” Frederick Buechner describes that significance this way, “Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go.”
He is still alive, and Advent is how we believe.
Matthew Podszus 