Vulnerability

I’m shocked – but really shouldn’t be. After all, it’s not as if I haven’t witnessed this time and again. Specifically, I’m talking about how flummoxed Christians seem to be when confronted with adversity, as with the current pandemic.

One notable example (about which I’ve previously written), occurred during the one-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. PBS ran a documentary entitled, Out of the Ashes: 9/11, the basic thrust of which was that amid such unmitigated evil faith has no good answers.

As proof, they paraded a bunch of bewildered religious leaders before the cameras who solemnly lamented that doubt was about the best one could hope for.

Now, I’m not saying we shouldn’t be concerned when adversity strikes, much less that we take it lightly. It’s just that adversity is at the core of biblical faith. It is its mother’s milk, so to speak.

Why, in other words, would we need a savior, or any god for that matter, if everything in life was already hunky-dory? If life were perfect and we were blissfully self-sufficient, it’s highly unlikely we’d need the promise of salvation in any form.

Judeo-Christian thinking is thus premised on the reality of sin, evil, and, yes, adversity, yet offers God’s unconditioned response to these unavoidable facts of life.

Therefore, adversity really shouldn’t surprise us. We ought to expect it. Which is not to say it is to be welcomed. There’s a difference.

A friend once argued in a sermon that if Christianity is all about suffering, we should reject it. In this he was indeed correct. It is not that we go looking for adversity or that we welcome it in order to feel pious somehow. Rather, the idea is that when adversity does strike, as it will, we are accorded the life-sustaining consolations of our Creator God.

One major reason we tend to be surprised by adversity is that we’re conditioned to think modern science and technology will shield us from it. Until a few decades ago, writes R. J. Snell, human beings interpreted death from famine, pestilence, and war as unavoidable. They were powerless to ward them off. As such, for most of history, people lived with a tragic sense of life’s innate precariousness.

Today, many of these same maladies have been tamed in degree. What were once thought to be incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature are now deemed manageable challenges, ones hardly requiring an appeal to a God or gods.

Epidemics that killed millions well into the 20^th century have receded with the development of vaccines and new treatments. Indeed, our age offers, as Snell puts it, “a new freedom from pestilence.”

“Plagues,” he concludes, “are no longer tragedies but technical challenges, no longer to be passively borne but actively prevented.”

Naturally, we celebrate these scientific and technological achievements, and hope for even greater gains. But if we expect such things to save us from all adversity, much less death, then we are of all people most to be pitied, to borrow the Apostle Paul’s illustrious phrase.

In addition to the deceptive complacency born of what Snell calls “techno-optimism,” there’s another variety of false optimism to be found in today’s churches. In his essay entitled, Uncertainty and the Christian, Ephraim Radner calls it “Big Picture” Christianity.

As with techno-optimism, its secular cousin, “Big Picture” Christianity also denies the need to face adversity head-on, in this case, by effectively ignoring the fact that “uncertainty is at the center of the Christian vocation.”

The “Big Picture” Christian will say: “We know with certainty all that is important to know…God is in control; God is good; God rewards the faithful; Jesus is Lord and in him death and sin are defeated; the gates of Hell will not prevail against the church, and heaven awaits us.”

In other words, as I stated in my last post, because we know how the story ends, we need not suffer adversity. We’re saved and thus invulnerable!

But the “Big Picture,” says Radner, is made up of a lot of “small pictures,” the “bits and pieces that make up the Big Picture’s mosaic.”

“In these little corners of reality,” he continues, “dark holes of uncertainty await the unwary, and teeming abysses of confusion stand ready to swallow the complacent. In the Time of the Virus, church leaders seem to be focusing mostly on the Big Picture. They shouldn’t…”

I’m reminded of a remarkable statement made by one of my professors in divinity school, Paul Holmer, during a debate with the world-renowned Evangelical theologian, Carl Henry, who was, be it noted, highly knowledgeable, articulate, and gracious.

In any event, after Dr. Henry presented his opening statement laying out his beliefs, Professor Holmer responded with this brilliant one-liner: “The problem I have with your theology,” he offered kindly, “is that it puts the truth too easily on the lips of too many.”  

“Big Picture” Christianity, in other words. Knowing Christian doctrine and holding to the kind of faith that overcomes all ills does not necessarily mean we have internalized the gospel or grasped its deeper meanings.

I once worked with a pastor who was counseling a woman in the church who had serious and longstanding psychological and emotional problems. At one point, she decided to attend the local Bible church down the street.

After a time, she returned to our church despondent. She had tried to have faith, as she had been advised to do, but her problems did not magically go away. Commenting on this sad situation, my colleague later lamented in frustration, “It’s not as if you can just take a Jesus pill and then suddenly you’re OK.”

Having the right beliefs, in other words, or a singular faith that “moves mountains” does not mean adversity, and the suffering it produces, automatically disappears (mind over matter). In fact, telling someone, as in this case, that all she needed was faith seems almost cruel. Sometimes the most faithful stance is it to accept suffering with humility and earnest hope.

In the end, “Big Picture” Christianity suffers from what theologians call an “over-realized eschatology,” that rather than seeing ourselves as living in the in-between times, between Christ’s coming and his return, we act as if we live at a time post the return, knowing all and seeing all. It’s a delusion.

“Scriptural revelation,” Radner reminds us, “is riddled with the deepest of uncertainties, often signaled by the question ‘who knows?’ It is a question that both unveils our fundamental ignorance as creatures, and that, in that revelation, turns us to the dizzying grace of God in the place we actually live.”

He cites, for example, the psalmists’ frequent cry of “how long?’ in the face of God’s silence, wrath, or seeming injustice.

“Bad things keep happening, bad people keep pressing their will, bad things gnarl the minds and the heart” and the psalmist steadfastly proclaims, “No one knows!”

Accepting one’s ignorance and vulnerability, however, also leaves the faithful open to the unexpected gift of God.

“Because we do not know tomorrow,,” Radner concludes, “we do not know God’s plans or even the depth of God’s character in planning. We do not know how it all adds up, we are stuck firmly in this one place where God has thrust us, stripped of organizing frameworks of meaning based on the plotting of the stars. ‘Today,’ God seems to say, ‘take stock of today.’”