#416: Suffering and Disordered Desires
Theodicy Problems and Repentance
TLDR: Distinguishing between our ‘wrongfulness’ and ‘culpability’ allows a more healthy theological response to suffering.
In Sermon 22, Augustine suggests that God’s providence uses suffering to chasten His people into holiness. “And everything we suffer,” he writes, “the troubles of this life, is the whip of God wishing to correct us now and not condemn us in the end.” Augustine frames this comparatively: however bad you might have it now, your suffering are not even trifles compared to the everlasting fire. Which means that they are effectively warnings: “Everything, brothers, inflicted on us in this life by the Lord is a warning, prodding us to correct our faults.”
This is a hard account of God’s providence, and yet there is something strangely therapeutic about it. The comparative claim (“it could be worse!”) is thin gruel on its own, of course, but that is Augustine’s qualifier. His real contention is that we can reframe suffering as the hand of God purifying us from our sins. As moments that anticipate and herald our death, sickness and suffering give us glimpses of the judgment of God—calling us to repentance and giving us the chance at new life.
Yet repent of what? One option is that we would repent of all our wrongness, we might call it. Such wrongness includes those sins that we have “committed in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and left undone,” and the desires that we had which themselves were misdirected. We merit punishment not only for what we do, but what we are.
Yet I am not ready to grant this. While I am wholly willing to endorse our ‘wrongness,’ and even willing to say we have an inherited wrongness (due to original sin), it is an additional step to say that deep disordered demands punishment in the same manner that my intentional, volitional wronging do. The wrongfulness of who I am is a matter of great shame, to be sure, and that shame is itself conducive to bad moral conduct: but it is not clear to me that the correction for shamefulness is identical to that which is given for intentional wronging.
One worry about collapsing them is that we might regard the ‘corrections’ given through suffering in retributive terms, which in its worst form would generate a kind of vaguely sacralized form of ‘karma.’ I steal a book from the library and get away with it, and then get cancer the next year. The cancer is simply retribution for my wrong, a cosmic form of payback.
Or, perhaps I did not steal the book. Instead, I recognized my desire to steal and then proactively engaged the librarian in a tedious conversation—depriving myself of the occasion to steal. And then I get cancer. If we simply collapse our wrongness together and say it merits punishment, what is to keep us from concluding that our suffering is (in some sense) a payback for our disordered desires? It does not matter whether we gamefully resisted them or not: we deserve punishment for having them, and punishment is what we were given.
This way of looking at suffering is, I think, deeply misguided—even while I think there is some truth to Augustine’s suggestion that suffering has some therapeutic value for the Christian.
Augustine’s claim is that suffering is an opportunity for correction—not that suffering is a form of payback or retribution. A non-punitive, non-retributive chastening depends upon some conception of our wrongness that does not bottom out in our need for punishment for it. The child who needs correction might need punishment, if they knew the good and did not do it—but they might also simply need guidance, direction, the turning of their hearts toward the good that they did not know to do. Every teacher and parent has to learn the art of the non-punitive correction, which works with the grain of the child or student to lead them into goods that they might not have known otherwise.
Yet if our wrongfulness and our need for punishment are simply one and the same, there is no room for this therapeutic correction to emerge. All God can do is enact retribution on us. More precisely, all we can do is see ourselves as in need of such retribution. God’s atonement for our sins in Jesus Christ means that we will not be punished for them—but we still deserve to be punished for them, and we should act with the type of contrition of those who deserved to be punished by them.
Those qualifiers mean, I think, that we would meet the slings and arrows of this world in a very different way than we would if we have non-culpable, disordered desires. As long as we are culpable or every desire, no matter how much we resist it, even the limited suffering we experience will come to us as our ‘just deserts.’ Yet if we have disordered desires that are really wrong, but we are not culpable for them, then the suffering of this world can come as a means of therapeutically reforming those desires without necessarily being ‘just punishment’ for them.
I think this leads to a type of contrition that is not founded upon us ‘paying back’ our sins, but upon the recognition of our shamefulness for being born into and participating in a world that is disordered. Such contrition means an openness toward God, the counteracting of our shamefulness by the confession of our sins.
In that way, suffering might be an opportunity for repentance—but it might also simply be a way of purging us from attachments to this world that we did not realize we had, and so equipping us for love and good works on a scale we were not otherwise prepared for.
Around the Web
Facing Fragility: I won’t be able to be in DC for this Baylor in Washington event on the fragility of America’s young people, but if you are in the area I strongly endorse going. Jean Twenge wrote the book on tech’s effect on young people, and Anthony Bradley is just one of my favorite people. You can also stream the conversation if you aren’t in DC.
I knew Google was everywhere, but I did not realize just quite what that meant. Here’s what happened when a Gizmodo writer tried to block Google completely out of her life.
From the ‘Drafts’ Folder
“In the beginning was the Word.” On this single claim hangs a whole theology of the questioning life. Either our searching leads us into a universe which is orderly, rational, beautiful and good—or it does not. Either the ambiguities and suffering and ambivalence bottoms out in a final, joyful (even while sober!) resolution—or it does not. The world is either God’s good creation, which heralds His glory (even while it is sometimes hidden) and has been comprehended by God—or, again, it is not. Between these two paths there is no third, and no reconciliation. The world is either given to us by God in Christ so that we might be stewards within His domain—or, finally, it is not. The confession that ‘In the beginning God created’ is the ground from which we understand the world.
“All things are yours,” Paul tells the Corinthians. The world as God’s good creation has been given to us—not because of us, but because we are Christ’s, and Christ’s is God’s. The Incarnate Word of God who died for our salvation and renewal was there when the foundation of the world was laid, and the morning stars sang together for joy. Christ alone can respond to the questions put to Job with questions of His own, who speaks to us of what He knows. His exile on our behalf enabled us to return to God, opening up the riches and depths of God’s life and wisdom for us. This Christ has given us “all things,” a claim so overwhelming that the only appropriate disposition is humility. The person who is given a car, or a pony, knows exactly what to do with it. But the one who receives everything can only be lost in wonder, love and praise.
The Penultimate Word
Surely his mercy must be unlimited and his good will must know no bounds if he redeemed us with the blood of his Son, when our sins had reduced us to nothing. He certainly made something great, when he created man to his own image and likeness.1° But we wanted to become nothing by sinning, and we derived mortality from our first parents, and became a lump of sin, a lump of wrath, 20 and yet he decided in his mercy to redeem us at such a great price. For us he gave the blood of his only Son, who was born in innocence, lived in innocence, died in innocence. After redeeming us at such a price, he will scarcely wish those he has bought to perish. He did not buy us to destroy us; he bought us to give us life. If our sins are too much for us, God does not disregard the price he paid. It was a very great price he paid.
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