Culture: Ways of Dealing with Pain and Suffering
Keller goes straight neither to the Bible nor to theology. Instead, he looks into the problem of cultural narrative. As Keller deals with the issue, he shows by and large two big insights. First, all cultures have come up with their own narratives to deal with the problem of pain and suffering. Second, Keller yields a sharp self-reflection for the culture he dwells. Keller incisively critiques Western culture and its tendency to be overly therapeutic in all human lament and sadness, which Christian Smith calls a moralistic therapeutic deism (While Smith confines this only to teenagers, it would not be too much of a stretch to say that this applies to adults, since teenagers have grown out of the culture nurtured by adults.) Going back to the first insight, Keller enumerates four cultural narratives dealing with pain. This is a matter of how people in each culture approaches pain and suffering; it is also a distinction from the perspective of the study of religion and anthropology. First, there is a moralistic narrative. This narrative attributes people’s pain and suffering to their moral faults. A representative example would be the doctrine of Karma in Hinduism. (As was shown among Job’s three friends in the book of Job, we have a stream of this thought in both Judaism and Christianity.) Second, there is a self-transcendental narrative. This narrative tells that the cause of pain and suffering consists in the illusion of atomizing each person as individual and the accordingly remaining, unfulfilled desires. Thus, the only way out is to get out of such illusion, staying away from the material and the earthly and achieving “a calmness of the soul in which all desire, individuality, and suffering are dissolved” (18). A representative example of this narrative is that of Buddhism. (Doubtless, Christianity has this perspective too) Third, there is a fatalistic narrative. This narrative tells that one needs to acknowledge our helplessness about pain and suffering, portraying a person who silently endures all of them as ideal in the narrative. Implicit in this perspective is a kind of lionizing for enduring pain and suffering. (Personally speaking, I think the Christian culture in Korea is also guilty of this tendency. However, any concrete demonstration in this regard will be forfeited, given that the task goes beyond the scope of this review, let alone it being too long.) Last, there is a dualistic narrative. This narrative understands the world as the battlefield between the good and the evil. (It is in this regard that Jung’s dualistic understanding of God, which he severely criticized, resonates with this narrative.) Rather than being under God’s control, evil has its own autonomy. Wars like these will end when the final redeemer shows up at the final moment. (But no one know who wins in that moment.) Thus, the suffering judges that they are crushed by the powers of evil, being called for by the good to participate in the battle for the good. (and once again, Christianity has this aspect too.)
According to Keller’s judgment, these four narratives have three things in common. First, pain and suffering are givens in life, so there is nothing surprising about their storming in our lives. Second, they all assert that the sufferers will be able to achieve self-fulfillment and spiritual growth, and pain and suffering are absolutely necessary for that. Third, therefore, we all should take responsibility for taking appropriate actions in the face of pain and suffering.
All these cultural narratives approach pain and suffering with more positive than negative eyes, thereby suggesting people ways to cope with the moments of pain and suffering. However, in Keller’s eyes, unlike all these narratives, there is one more cultural narrative rather clumsily dealing with pain and suffering, and that is Western cultural narrative. This is the second insight into cultural narratives’ dealing with pain and suffering, namely, pointing out the pulsation of the Western culture’s narrative on pain and suffering. According to Keller, the reigning narrative in Western culture on pain and suffering is that they are something bad, and it is best to avoid them as much as possible. Alongside this, as Smith has pointed out already, modern Western culture tends to reduce pain and suffering into something in need of therapy. Therefore, in Western culture therapists and specialists get the upper hand. However, Keller draws upon the current research in psychology to criticize this culture. Robert Spitzer headed the taskforce in producing DSM-III (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-3rd edition). After 25 years, in 2007, Spitzer had an interview with BBC, in which he confides the following: when the interviewer asked Spitzer “so you have effectively medicalized much ordinary human sadness?” Spitzer responded, “I think we have to some extent… How serious a problem it is, is not known… twenty percent, thirty percent… but that is a considerable amount” (24).
(Of course the fifth edition in 2013 most of the abnormal medicalization of ordinary human sadness have been revised, but that does not mean that Keller’s perspective on pain and suffering in the Western culture is mistaken.)
Now, is there any alternative narrative to the Western culture’s perspective on pain and suffering? Of course the easy answer to this question would be the Christian gospel. However, rather than going straight to the Christian gospel, Keller takes an indirect route, and the indirect route Keller takes is the human heart. Behind this is Keller’s unique understanding of what the gospel is, that is, God’s solution for getting at the center of the human heart, which leads the reader to an area in the philosophy of religion called theodicy.
Keller discusses the problem of theodicy in the last chapter of part one and the first chapter of part two in this book, composed of three parts. Philosopher Leibniz coined the term theodicy, meaning “justifying God’s ways to human.” In other words, it is a matter of communicating why pain and suffering are necessary from the perspective of God. However, as was said already, Keller’s approach to theodicy is unlike other approaches, for Keller asks in the face of theodicy whether it could bring around people to God, which is entirely pastoral and practical. And of course Keller’s answer to the question is “No.” The reason Keller says “No” is that Keller does not see any possibility for theodicy to touch and affect the human heart. So what is the human heart for Keller? It is worth a fuller quote from one of Keller’s articles defining what the human heart is for him.
The heart is used as a metaphor for the seat of our most basic orientation, our deepest commitments — what we trust the most (Proverbs 3:5; 23:26); it is what we most love and hope in, what we most treasure, what captures our imagination (Matthew 6:21). Every heart has an inclination (Genesis 6:5), something it is directed toward. The direction of the heart, then, controls everything — our thinking, feeling, and decisions and actions. What we most love we find reasonable, desirable, and doable. Whatever we cherish in our hearts most controls the whole person. No wonder Jesus is so concerned about our hearts. No wonder God ignores outward matters and looks supremely at the heart (1 Samuel 16:7; 1 Corinthians 4:5; Jeremiah 17:10) No wonder the prophets said that the goal of salvation is not mere compliance but having the law “written on the heart” through spiritual rebirth (Jeremiah 31:33.) We always, in the end, do what the heart wants the most. Tim Keller, “the Revolutionary Christian Heart”
Thus, Keller begins to speak of how the gospel narrative affects our hearts facing pain and suffering, and his answers lie in the perspectives on suffering and God. The Christian Gospel presents,
Suffering as both just and unjust,
God as both sovereign and suffering, (130)
The two irreconcilable truths about suffering and God are based on the gospel narrative. First, the reason that suffering is justified is that humanity and creation have fallen, by which pain and suffering entered into the world. Yet the reason suffering is unjust is that it does not necessarily visit more upon the evil and the wicked, and less upon the good and the conscientious. Therefore, Job’s question is still valid. At the same time, that God is sovereign leaves some questions unanswered form the secularist perspective, yet the Bible still states God is sovereign who rules and plans everything under God’s providence. In spite of this, God is still a suffering God. If God had never suffered, God would not have much to say to the suffering people, yet God came down to earth to suffer with all of us, showing God’s solidarity with humanity. For all its explanations of God suffering with us, this can never take away suffering and pain from those who actually suffer. We are still in pain, and our lives are under excruciating agony. So Keller begins to speak of wisdom.
Of course wisdom is not something to be gained cerebrally, but known through the heart. What I am most committed to and where my devotion of heart is, and the process of changing them into loving God and neighbor is, that is, the re-ordering of my loves from the heart is the first step of gaining wisdom. And the basis of such wisdom is beginning from getting in touch with reality. Reality of life brought about by pain and suffering. And proclaiming that even in the midst of that suffering God is the one who is sovereign and suffering at the same time is the beginning of wisdom. According to Keller, the basis of wisdom in both Old and New Testaments is to be competent with “reality,” which is never a single-dimensional. It is no use to understand realithy with one or two perspectives. This is true of pain and suffering. Pain and suffering come in a variety of shapes and molds, and Keller argues that the Bible is delicate enough to describe all the various shapes and shades of pain and suffering. Thus, wisdom is “an awareness of complex reality and being competent with it,” without reducing it to one or two perspectives (138). This is true of the New Testament. God is not living inside our illusory image of who God is, but living over and beyond our mental and physical worlds who still rules and plans everything in the universe, yet still suffered for us; acknowledging this is the beginning of wisdom.
“Seeing and embracing God as he truly is makes us wise, for it gets us in touch with reality” (187).
Even so, for most of us, being blinded by the Western cultural narrative of pain and suffering, it is difficult to see reality as is. This is not to say that the Westerners are less likely to be in painful situations, but to say that the Westerners are more vulnerable to accepting pain and suffering as part of reality. Of course the non-Westerners are not excelling the Westerners in this regard, but at least we can say that the non-Western cultural narrative help them to cope with pain and suffering much better than the Western ones.
The perspectives that suffering is both just and unjust, and that God is sovereign and suffering with us. These two standpoints on suffering and God are not easily reducible to the other. Therefore, it is not easily reconcilable to the other either. We humans are apt to harmonize whatever theory or understanding, yet these perspectives are not helpful for doing that. Thus, according to Keller, accepting neither that suffering is both just and unjust, nor that God is sovereign and suffering at the same time, is easy task. In particular, those who are actually suffering find them especially hard to accept, yet they are the ones who are on the way to accepting them, for such is reality. It always transcends human brain and system, and that is why the advice Keller gives to the suffering people is to make it both the beginning and the ending point of accepting and embracing reality.
We humans are shocked to learn that reality cannot be understood by our own understandings and representations of the world. This is especially true when we are the ones under suffering. Christians have to face God and reality in light of the aforementioned views of suffering and God. When Christians keep facing reality, the muscles of our hearts are beginning to grow, and this is what Keller calls wisdom. In other words, wisdom is not something cerebral, but something that we have learned has reached our hearts.
In this regard, Keller suggests three steps to dealing with pain and suffering (and these steps are not so much different from what other books and authors have suggested, except that Keller brings out the metaphor of enduring suffering, pointing out that the Western cultural narrative of pain and suffering is devoid of the metaphor of enduring, making pain and suffering as something to avoid or lessen.) The first step is to weep of suffering before God, pouring out your heart is absolutely necessary, says Keller. Second, you have to trust God in spite of all these. This is the process of laying bare what I have trusted and committed myself to thus far, and you get to learn what reality is. Last, you have to pray. Of course these three steps are not chronologically separable from one another. They are all in one process, possible only when we do them and engage them as whole person process. Through prayer we learn to weep before God, and to trust God no less. And it is through prayer that we get to face reality. This is why we learn wisdom through prayer, being detoxciated from our inherent poison of self-centeredness. This is not the kind of prayer of begging God about what we want, but of stripping us of our self-centeredness, and helping us stand honestly before God in the face of the infinite God, and mysterious reality of suffering.
Overall, this book has reminded me once again of the reason that I get to like Tim Keller in the first place. His insistent pursuit of the “human heart,” investigating into how the human heart is changed and transformed is described well in this book. In particular, Keller had gone through a surgery for thyroid cancer, and his wife Cathy was contracted with Crohn’s disease at a serious level and had to go through numerous surgeries. Therefore, this book is never at any moment merely theoretical, but practically theological all the time. I highly recommend this book to anyone.