God's Will and Human Suffering: Why Theology is So Important

   

                         
                                       (Pauline Marie Peterson Erickson  1950-1982)

In my last blog I wrote about the way in which I felt “held by God’” in my times of deepest suffering.  However, it was not always that way.  In actuality, a change in theology saved me.

I grew up in a Christian home in a small town in North Dakota.  While both of my parents were active church-goers, most of my theology was learned from my mother.  She was the daughter of a Methodist pastor, who had died before I was born.  She was a person with a deep, mostly unquestioning faith.  She loved to study the bible, and we even took the Bethel Bible Series together when I was in high school.

I think she believed that everything that happened was pretty much God’s will.  Our task was not to question that will, but to submit to it.  At the same time I was studying the bible in my home congregation I was very involved in bible camping as a counselor each summer.  The theology there was pretty much the same: whatever happened was God’s will.

So, when my father died when I was 14, and my mother when I was 16, I assumed that their deaths were God’s will.  The good thing about that theology is that it gave some order to the universe.  It kept me going in the midst of my deep loss and sorrow, accepting that there must be some purpose in their deaths even though, as a human, I could not understand how that could be.

The bad thing about this “God’s will” theology is that unconsciously I was angry at God.  I had no awareness of this at the time.  But during my college years I seldom went to church or school chapel and I didn’t take time to pray.  I was majoring in religion as well as philosophy, but religion at that point was an academic, intellectual exercise.  I didn't feel close to God, nor was I strengthened by what we normally call faith.  How could I worship and feel close to the very being who had taken my parents from me?

I married Pauline right after college and headed to seminary.  I didn’t really want to be a pastor, but I loved studying theology, and didn’t know what else to do.  I continued to question many aspects of our traditional, rather conservative interpretation of Christianity, but had trouble knowing what to put in its place theologically.

One summer after I had become a pastor, I took a week-long course taught by Dr. Paul Sponheim, a Process theologian at Luther Seminary in St. Paul.  He talked about  the different forms in which evil comes, and I began to realize that most of the suffering in the world is caused by human beings, not by God.  Other forms of suffering are metaphysical—just a part of the structure of reality that often defies understanding.  Later I would read what I believe is the best book on this issue:  Douglas John Hall’s God and Human Suffering.

Pauline and I were married 10 years.  She suffered from a rare lung disease known as pulmonary hypertension of the lungs. and during our years together her health continued to deteriorate and we both knew that, without a heart and lung transplant, she would die.  As we discussed this uncertain future, we spent a lot of time discussing our faith and theology.

Like my mother, Pauline had a kind of natural, deep faith.  However, even though she was raised in a North Dakota, Christian home almost identical to mine, she saw the relationship of God’s will to suffering differently.   She did not see her illness and possible death as God’s will for her life.  She saw her illness as just one of those mysteries that are a part of life, and she saw God as suffering with her.

During the last month’s of her life she kept a journal.  One day she wrote: “Dear God, thank you!  No, not for life, nor death, or of my human condition, even though fundamentalists say I ‘should.’  I’m ill—it’s a dirty shame—but something you certainly did not cause and I feel it would be blasphemy for me to thank you for ‘it.’”

I realized that because Pauline did not see her illness as God’s will, she was able to feel close to God, held by God.  She did not blame anyone or God for her illness.  Her theology “worked” for her in a positive way.  That does not, of course, prove it is true, but it began to feel to me like the truth.

Pauline’s theology continued to give her strength to and through her death.  In her last journal entry before her death she wrote:  “My theology, please don’t desert me now.  It would be much easer to be a radical right-winger—to say this is all God’s will.  But I believe that God doesn’t cause suffering and that many times God doesn’t interfere.  Thus, if I am dying, let God’s tears be enough.  It is enough.”

Pauline not only changed my life, she changed my faith.  During my deepest moments of loss and sorrow, I, like her, felt God was crying with me.  Unlike after the deaths of my parents, I was able to pray, and I felt close to God.  It was only because my theology had changed that I was able to feel held by God.