When Bad Things Happen to Other People by John Portmann

Author:John Portmann [Portmann, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Philosophy, History, Social Sciences, Psychology, Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780415923354
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2000-06-30T07:00:00+00:00

The simplistic equation of suffering with sin excludes the possibility of innocent suffering, which is a real problem. Abraham and Job both reproached God for unjust suffering, and God conceded to Job the unsettling possibility of innocent suffering. The Book of Job’s unique effect is to have silenced God himself. Notably, it was over the question of appropriate suffering that God withdrew from direct conversation with human beings for the rest of the Hebrew Bible. As Jack Miles has noted:

God’s last words are those he speaks to Job, the human being who dares to challenge not his physical power but his moral authority. Within the Book of Job itself, God’s climactic and overwhelming reply seems to silence Job. But reading from the end of the Book of Job onward, we see that it is Job who has somehow silenced God. God never speaks again, and he is decreasingly spoken of. In the book of Esther—a book in which, as in the Book of Exodus, his chosen people faces a genocidal enemy—he is never so much as mentioned. In effect, the Jews surmount the threat without his help.1

An extraordinarily vast body of critical literature focuses on the Book of Job; it is a work to which Jewish (though not only Jewish) thinkers return again and again.

The reason why some Jews and Christians view suffering as divinely caused likely derives from a false analogy between the hereafter and the here and now. I will turn to that analogy shortly. For now, I want only to establish the point that the association of suffering with sin survives in popular belief. In American writer David Leavitt’s novella “The Term Paper Artist” a college student, who is a committed Mormon, confesses to the narrator in a private garden at UCLA:

Well, in the church we have this very clear-cut conception of sin. And so I always assumed that if I ever committed a really big sin, like we’re doing now...I don’t know, that there’d be a clap of thunder and God would strike me dead or something. Instead of which we’re sitting here in this courtyard and the sun’s shining. The grass is green.2

In a similar vein, Rabbi Harold Kushner explains that the impetus for his enormously popular work When Bad Things Happen to Good People came in part from “all those people whose love for God and devotion to Him led them to blame themselves for their suffering and persuade themselves that they deserved it.”3 Here Kushner puts into play the idea that persons can and do persuade themselves to adopt certain beliefs about desert and, consequently, suffering. This capacity to persuade ourselves, whether about our own desert or someone else’s, stands as the central issue underlying questions of the appropriateness of suffering. Thinking of suffering as divine punishment inclines us to feel guilty about our own suffering and righteous about the suffering of others.

A certain rudimentary problem with the idea of seeing God in suffering should be noted here before moving on. If God’s

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