“The hard fact, beyond all sentimentality, is that either we share suffering in love or outside of love, and it is not the same in one case as in the other.” -Daniel Day Williams

It seems like this topic is coming up a lot for me. And rightly so because it’s definitely one of the biggies.

Kester Brewin has been ranting about suffering lately too—particularly human suffering.

In December he came down hard-core on Rob Bell for suggesting that ‘the universe is rigged in our favour.‘ And now he has forcefully declared that he has had enough of all this ‘God in the midst of suffering’ mumbo jumbo. In his latest post, Kester is really mad at Giles Fraser (an Anglican priest who writes for the Guardian) for suggesting that God suffers with us while whispering consolingly that “all will be well.” Brewin writes:

“All will be well. Or, as Rob Bell put it, ‘the universe is rigged in your favour.‘ Which means the cigarettes don’t matter much. Because all will be well. And presumably ebola isn’t much more than a little problem, because all will be well. War doesn’t matter because all will be well, and oppression doesn’t matter because all will be well.

Sing loud, slaves, sing your fine gospel songs because your chains are only temporary because all will be well.”

I hear what Brewin is trying to say here, and it’s good stuff. He’s trying to say that if one views the future as already determined, not open, and also holds a view of an all-powerfully in control God who will eventually “make things right” in the end, this could very well lead one to a place of uncaring, detached, self-destructive apathy. Certainly, equipped with this type of view a person could indeed say ‘who cares about Ebola? God will fix it.’ This is a legitimate concern. It’s almost like Brewin is criticizing some sort of Calvinism here…So right on! Nice work, Kester.

Anyway, long story short, Brewin acknowledges that Fraser’s God isn’t Calvin’s God, but Brewin doesn’t like Fraser’s God very much either. He writes:

“To create a theological scaffold that, on the one hand, wants God to be powerful enough to work towards a point of universal reconciliation, but on the other avoids any of the tough questions of being and wants to be a poetic idea, is as cruel as the God Stephen Fry rightly refuses to believe in.”

Brewin thinks Fraser is making excuses for God, attempting to get God off the hook for all the suffering in the world, and by doing this he is also deemphasizing suffering (mainly of the human variety). Further, this is just the latest excuse in a long line of religious excuses. Here again I tend to agree with him. Western Christianity does tend to do this, i.e. we feel the need to rescue God from all God’s stupid mistakes.

Brewin makes it very clear that Fraser’s weak, poetic conception of God is not “radical” enough. Nope. Fraser needs to go further, and Kester has the answer:

“The radical move is not to suggest that God suffered with us. The radical move is to say that God died. God is finished. Ended. If Fraser wants one, that is the true horror of the cross: our assurances of a higher power who would make all things well are erased. Gone. To put it in Fraser’s other language: the heart of the crucifixion is that the long-held human dream that our universe has some higher purpose which we are central to needs to die.

We need to wake up from the dream. I won’t any longer accept this story of God being in the midst, of God being in the gas chamber and in the offices of Charlie Hebdo. Far more humanising is the acceptance of the horror of the fact that suffering is ours alone to alleviate. If there are bugs who burrow into the eyes of children, then we must work to lift those children out of the poverty that makes them susceptible to those bugs.”

So Kester doesn’t want to comfort people anymore by saying that God is in their midst, suffering with them. OK, that’s fine with me. Go right ahead and lovingly comfort people in other ways. Not a problem. We should show love in many different ways, and I agree humans need to work to make the world a better place (for ALL life, not just humans of course).

But look, like I’ve written before, humans (especially well-to-do European and American white men, living in a modern, oppressive society) probably shouldn’t go around projecting their individual feelings of anxiety and meaninglessness onto the nature of existence itself. Doing this is almost like claiming that pizza unconditionally sucks because it has cheese on it.

I mean, lament if you must, shake your fist at the heavens and curse the God of your understanding for all the pain and suffering in the world (psychologically, it’s quite healthy actually), but at some point one must realize that pain and suffering is not all there is (at least I hope one can do this). Pain and suffering is not the whole story…I can only speak for myself here, but what I’ve noticed is that my feelings, emotions, and experiences are like weather systems; they move in and move away, move in and move away. I certainly experience existence as bleak and meaningless sometimes. But other times I do not.

Now don’t get me wrong, this type of “radical thinking” is important, and a whole lot of fun, but what I just can’t abide is this anthropocentric, absurdist outlook that much of it seems to be saturated in. In fact I’ve grown less and less fond of it. For Kester Brewin, then, one can’t be truly “radical” unless they heroically affirm the individuality of an individual as the end and beginning of everything. As Brewin writes, “suffering is ours alone to alleviate.” One must accept that human kind is in eternal exile, damned to suffer forever without ever knowing why. We can not know because there is nothing to know. What can be known is the limited knowledge that one gets through the senses (perception in the mode of presentational immediacy) which dooms us, as Santayana once said, to solipsism of the present moment.

Conversely, to Brewin’s credit, he does seem to want to DE-center humans ecologically, and recognize that we are part of a deeper, interdependent ecology and not masters of it. This is a great thing! But my question then is simply this: if humans aren’t at the center of the Universe anymore, why should we hang on to and keep employing excessively individualistic, rationalistic, narrowly empirical and human-centered metaphysical philosophies that only deal with one small aspect of experience, namely that of human subjective experience or consciousness?

In other words, since European and American White men aren’t the center of the Universe anymore (or at least they shouldn’t be), the rest of Nature (including marginalized and oppressed humans, as well as non-human animals, plants etc…) should now get a say on whether or not the Universe has value, whether it is or is not devoid of purpose/meaning, and whether God is ontologically dead or not, right? This seems only fair to me.

That’s all.

…

Painting above by Ipalbus Art

Tags:absurdismKester Brewinprocess theologyradical thoughtsuffering