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When Bob Seiple called to ask if I would be willing to co-host the Brandywine Forum on the Seattle Pacific University campus, I jumped at the chance. What a privilege it was to partner with the Institute for Global Engagement and to focus serious discussion and reflection on a Christian response to global suffering. I can think of three reasons why I wanted to participate in this gathering. First, I have enormous respect for Bob Seiple and his lifelong quest to alleviate suffering in the world. Bob has been a model for me of someone who can look deeply into the pain of the world and yet cast a vision of hope that is shaped by light of the good-news gospel of Jesus Christ. That is a rare gift. We need this kind of leadership in our troubled world. The second reason I wanted to participate is my conviction that our hearts as Christians must be broken by the profound suffering that flares up daily all across the globe. The problem of suffering in our time seems intractable, so utterly complex, so rampant. I fear that our hearts grow numb, that we could be dangerously close to resignation, a kind of overload. This conference must signal that there can be no lapse into resignation among Christians toward suffering. And third, this conference is one of those ways Seattle Pacific University can engage the culture and change the world. This is our mission, our clear purpose, and we seek in every way possible to sharpen this mandate for our University. And so we partner with the Institute for Global Engagement to say there can be no circling of the wagons for Christians, no protection from the harsh realities of our world, no shielding our eyes or hearts from the searing circumstances of those who suffer every day. We must be engaged. We must seek to craft a vision of hope — even against the odds. And so this conference aligns significantly with the mission of Seattle Pacific. But I must say, while I was eager to accept Bob’s invitation to co-host the conference, I was reluctant when he asked me to speak. I bring no special authority to this subject. My credentials, my expertise, on the topic of global suffering, or suffering of any sort, are not very strong. As I have said, I admire people like Bob Seiple, but my calling has been elsewhere. The focus of my life has been on education, Christian higher education. Some might say I have lived in an ivory tower. But that doesn’t catch my sense of calling either. I fiercely resist the notion that our work at Seattle Pacific is ivory-tower work. I hate it when our students talk about living in a bubble, because we do everything we can to burst that bubble and immerse them in a living, dynamic, thriving, and hurting world. I can remember how worked up I would become, as a young faculty member, an English professor no less, when my business-minded older brother and father would accuse me of living in an ivory tower, protected somehow from the real work and real decisions that most people in the world must experience daily. How could I have much to offer, they would ask, to a practical world, or to a hurting world, when I lived in the realms of poetry and literature and stories and theory? These questions touched me to the core, and I have spent my life trying to make the connections of my work as a Christian educator with the real work of the world. That’s part of the reason we call our mission at Seattle Pacific engaging the culture and changing the world. This is my passion. This is my calling: to make the connections between the work of the Christian academy — the work of the scholar, the work of learning, the work of shaping the lives of young people through that learning — and the work of the world. In October of 1939, C. S. Lewis gave a sermon for Evensong at Oxford University that he called “Learning In War-Time.” Just as the Nazis were steamrolling their way across Poland, Lewis told a packed-out crowd of students and faculty, “We have to inquire whether there is really any legitimate place for the activities of the scholar in a world such as this.” Doesn’t it seem we are living in an ivory tower, Lewis is asking, when such horrific things are happening all across Europe, and here we are reading our books and writing our scholarly works? Don’t we have to make sure we are connecting our work with the work of the world, the violence, brutality, and suffering that seem to be consuming the world? Should we not be required in these times to throw down our books and march out into the battle that rages around us? Should we not be required to actually do something? These are all good questions, to be sure, and they are surely relevant questions for our own time as well. These are the questions a Christian university must answer, the questions really any Christian must answer as we confront the scourge of suffering and war and violence and dividedness everywhere. What use is the life of the mind when the world splits apart at the seams? I believe Lewis zeroes in on an answer to this question. The key reason we must sustain and nurture the life of the mind, Lewis says, in times of violent upheaval and great suffering is that “good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.” We must spend our time exploring, discovering, and articulating a good philosophy for life and culture and people, if for no other reason, than bad philosophy will overwhelm and control and dominate our lives if we do not. This is the reason a Christian university should exist, especially one that chooses not to circle the wagons. The world rages out of control it seems. There are far too many who suffer profoundly. We are numb and confused and overwhelmed by the problem of pain in our world. Can it be possible that much of this suffering is the result of bad philosophy, a view of the world, an understanding of human life and personal dignity, that says we can treat each other badly, that we can, for our own gain or pleasure, inflict pain and suffering on others, especially those on the margins, those without power, that for reasons of religion or ideology or racial or ethnic hatred we can eliminate those who differ with us? If bad philosophy, a terribly distorted view of the world, a mangled understanding of human destiny and dignity, is so often at the root of suffering, as I think it is, then C. S. Lewis is right, we must counter that philosophy with good thinking, with good scholarship, with a radically different view of the world and a profoundly different view of human life. I propose that this is the work of the Christian university, indeed the work of any Christian, and it is not ivory-tower work, but work that is deeply engaged. The great poet Czeslaw Milosz died this last August at the age of 93. Milosz was a Nobel Prize-winning, Polish-American poet who many regard as one of the greatest poets of our time. He grew up in a strong Polish Catholic community in Lithuania. Much like Karol Wojtyla, who went on to become Pope John Paul II, Milosz witnessed the bloody and brutal occupation of the Nazis and then was asked to show his own support as an intellectual to the iron-fisted oppression of the Soviets. He knew the consequences of bad philosophy, what it meant to live and to be asked to support a culture of lies, what it felt like to have that culture imposed by force and suppression, one group of people with almost absolute power over another. He knew the consequences of bad philosophy supported by enormous power. And somehow he came through all of this with an unblinking realism that is nevertheless, amazingly, always tempered by what we might call a tender heart. The source of that saving tenderness, a tenderness that kept him from the bitterness and despair that gripped so many intellectuals and writers throughout this period of history, was his enduring, thoughtful, sometimes skeptical, but in the end life-affirming Christian faith. “I am not afraid to say,” Milosz tells us, “that a devout and God-fearing man [or woman] is superior as a human specimen to a restless mocker who is glad to style himself an ‘intellectual,’ proud of his cleverness in using ideas which he claims as his own though he acquired them in a pawnshop in exchange for simplicity of heart. . . . The sacred exists and is stronger than all our rebellions.” We must counter, Milosz is saying, bad philosophy, our tendency toward restless mocking, our cynicism, our prideful cleverness, our resignation to the darkness that surrounds us, with the goodness that comes from simplicity of the heart. Milosz goes on to say, “as is well known, the philosopher Adorno said that it would be an abomination to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz, and the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas gave the year 1941 as the date when God ‘abandoned’ us. Whereas I wrote idyllic verses . . . in the very center of what was taking place . . . and not by any means out of ignorance. . . . Life does not like death. The body, as long as it is able to, sets in opposition to death the heart’s contractions and the warmth of circulating blood. Gentle verses written in the midst of horror declare themselves for life; they are the body’s rebellion against its destruction.” [emphasis mine] I want to propose that there is great mystery in suffering. I do not understand it. I believe it is a violation of God’s desire that all of his children flourish. But there is great mystery, and great power, in goodness too. This mystery of goodness is main proposal. Again from Czeslaw Milosz: “Evil grows and bears fruit, which is understandable, because it has logic and probability on its side and also, of course, strength. The resistance of tiny kernels of good, to which no one grants the power of causing far-reaching consequences, is entirely mysterious ... Such seeming nothingness not only lasts but contains within itself enormous energy which is revealed gradually. One can draw momentous conclusions from this.” So what is our response to the suffering that breaks our hearts on a daily basis? Perhaps we begin, even as we live “in the very center of what is taking place,” an unblinking gaze at the great horror and mystery of suffering, fully engaged, to grab hold of that greater mystery, I believe God’s mystery, that “gentle verses written in the midst of horror declare themselves for life,” that “tiny kernels of good” are “entirely mysterious” and contain within, God knows how, “enormous energy” to change even the most dire and evil of circumstances. This is how we change the world, even against the odds. Let me frame all of this with two stories. In some ways our world is making a choice between the worldviews sketched out in these two stories. The first is from that great American short story by Flannery O’Connor called “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” O’Connor was notorious in her work for finding the deepest insight into human meaning right at the heart of grotesque, often violent, jarring moments of suffering. In this particular story, one of her best, an ordinary family sets out on a family vacation driving across the South. We discover early on that this is an ordinary Southern family, living a mundane, sheltered, and shallow existence in a comfortable middle-class world. For O’Connor, we know we are headed for trouble as we ride along in the ordinary. And sure enough, as they drive down an isolated road, the family cat on the floor in the back seat, suddenly leaps out of its cage and sinks its claws into the back of the neck of the dad who until then blithely drives along. The car swerves off the road and flips over into a ravine, each one in the family badly shaken but not seriously injured. Most of all they find themselves suddenly isolated from help, confused about what to do, and entirely vulnerable to what comes next. Into this moment of vulnerability steps the Misfit. The Misfit is an escaped convict, on the run, in the newspapers. He shows up with his gang of thugs to survey the possible spoils of an accident. And then something happens that changes everything: the grandmother recognizes the Misfit from the newspapers and blurts out her newfound knowledge. The Misfit feels obliged, because he has now been recognized, to set into motion a chilling, slow-moving sequence where each family member is taken into the woods and shot, one by one. The grandmother is the last one left. She has had to endure the sounds from the woods as each of her children and grandchildren are shot. Of all things the Misfit begins to talk to her about the resurrection of Jesus, and here we find a penetrating insight into suffering in the 20th century. “’The resurrection changed everything,’” the Misfit casually says to the grandmother. When Jesus was raised from the dead “’he thown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can — by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,’ he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.” The grandmother is somehow moved in this moment by compassion and reaches out to touch the Misfit, saying, “Why you’re one of my babies,” to which the Misfit recoils from her motherly touch as if bitten by a snake and shoots her three times through the chest. The Misfit is a philosopher of our day. Of course he echoes the great Nietzsche who was one of the first to tell such a story: When God is indeed dead then pleasure and meanness and power are the only ways we will relate to one another. The name of the game is the struggle for power, says Nietzsche, and if I gain power over you, then there is nothing, no authority apart from us, that can keep me from subjecting you to suffering or annihilation or humiliation. Dostoevsky said as well: “When God is dead, anything is possible.” When God is dead, what is to keep us from inflicting pain and suffering on each other? This is the bad philosophy that Lewis encourages us to counter with good philosophy. Well, let’s look then at the beginnings of what we might called good philosophy. Let’s think about another great story, this one from Genesis 3. As the overall story of creation unfolds, we find this rich and mysterious text. God has already created a man and a woman in his image. And what a profound starting point as we grapple to understand human destiny and personal dignity. Why should we counter a philosophy that supports inflicting suffering on another human being — why, each of us is created in God’s image. Imagine that. Imagine how that might shape our actions and our culture. And of course God speaks goodness into all he had created, and he offers this beautiful and useful creation for the man and the woman to enjoy. It is good to see and good to touch and good to taste. Enjoy. And enjoy each other. And enjoy a meaningful partnership with God. This then begins to build the good philosophy with which to counter bad philosophy. But be careful, God says. There are some points of danger, even in this garden that is yours to enjoy. There are indeed some boundaries to your pleasure. Enjoy everything in the garden, but don’t mess with a certain tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I’m not going to explain things here with any kind of detail, he seems to say, but just be aware that there are some boundaries. You can ponder the great mystery of those boundaries for the rest of your lives, for the rest of human history, but don’t cross those boundaries. There is danger there. And so, of course, we have indeed spent the rest of history pondering those mysterious boundaries. Why did God create this tree? Why not limitless pleasure? As the great Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has said, we will never know the answer about boundaries from this text, and we have never been given easy answers anywhere. The tree is just there. God drew some circles around some behavior. He said yes to almost everything, but no to something. And if we violate that circle, pain and suffering will surely come. And of course the man and the woman did violate these mysterious boundaries. And as soon as they did, they found themselves with broken connections, with each other and with God. There was enmity where none existed before. There was shame and self-consciousness and hiding and lying. There was pain of separation. There was yearning toward reconciliation. Ultimately there was death and murder and war and ethnic cleansing. And then the focal point of this amazing story leaps out from one of the most incredible passages in all of Scripture. Here is what the text says: “... and then the man and the woman heard the sound of the Lord God walking about in the garden in the cool of the evening.” [emphasis mine] Violated boundaries, broken connections, yearning toward reconciliation, inevitable suffering and pain, shame — and into the midst of this violated garden God walks in the cool of the evening. We hear him “walking about.” A palpable presence calling out our names. And so the mystery of brokenness and suffering is countered by the mystery of a present and palpable God walking in the cool of the evening calling us to reconciliation, calling us to a better way of looking at the world, calling us to good philosophy instead of bad. When God is present there are boundaries to our actions. There is some way to recognize what is good and what is violation. There is some way to explain why suffering is bad and not acceptable. When God is absent, totally and fundamentally absent, then anything goes. Why not kill someone or burn down his house, asks the Misfit? The answer must be that God walks in the garden in the cool of the evening. That changes everything. And so what have we learned about our response to suffering from all of this? I have learned that our first task is to sketch out for the world around us, day in and day out, a garden where God walks in the cool of the evening. We have got to figure out how better to articulate this view of the world, this view of human life, a view that is fundamentally different from the dominate view of our world today. Indeed, we have to counter bad philosophy with good philosophy. If God is dead to our world and to our culture, then there is no hope against suffering. The Misfit is right: there is “no pleasure but meanness.” But if we believe, as I do, that God is alive in Jesus and walks in the garden with us in the cool of the evening, then we too can walk into the heart of suffering knowing that this God wants all of his children to flourish, to use theologian Ellen Charry’s language, that God wants reconciliation, that God calls us to another way, another philosophy, another view of human flourishing. So, that’s my starting point. God walks in the garden, and we can be reconciled to him and to his flourishing plan for our lives and the life of this world, and we can be reconciled to each other so that we cease inflicting pain and suffering on each other and on the least of these among us in this world. The second thing I think I have learned is that our approach to suffering can never be one of resignation or numbness. We must live in the mix, and we must live with outrage that suffering is the violation of God’s plan of flourishing. We must be attuned to suffering around us and in our world. We must never turn our face. We must look into the heart of the mystery of suffering without blinking. As Christians we cannot be separatists. We can never circle the wagons to shield ourselves from the bad news. We cannot afford to live in the comfort of the mundane, because, as O’Connor reminds us over and over, danger is just around the corner. But thirdly, we must remember with Milosz that “gentle verses written in the midst of horror declare themselves for life.” Just as suffering and evil are shrouded in mystery, and seem overwhelming in power — so are reconciliation and healing, so are acts of goodness. We must proceed — even against the odds — to write those gentle verses, to sow the “tiny kernels of good, to which no one grants the power of causing far-reaching consequences.” The power here “is entirely mysterious.” And out of “such seeming nothingness” comes “enormous energy.” We have to believe this is true. This is a leap of faith without which we feel only our own helplessness. Finally, we must bear witness to hope. There is no other way for Christians. We must craft a vision of hope for our lives and for the world — again, against all odds. We must articulate a vision of hope that suffering will come to an end, that suffering is not God’s final answer. As Miroslav Volf says, “for Christian faith to give up the hope for the final reconciliation — for a reconciliation that can neither be surpassed nor undone — would mean to give itself up. ”We must be about the business of crafting a vision for hope, for ourselves, for our communities, for those who suffer, for the world. There is no other choice. I want to end these reflections with one of the most powerful statements of hope ever written. It comes from Isaiah 11, and it is a strong and sturdy vision worth lifting up to our broken world where suffering seems on the march across the globe. This too is good philosophy to counter bad.
Such a vision is called naďve in our time. You’ve got to be kidding. This can’t really happen. This is just idealistic poetry. You must be living in an ivory tower. We live in a time when we are overwhelmed with the mystery of suffering. Suffering inflicts confusion on us. Suffering seems to have the upper hand. It causes us to lose hope. It causes us to question God. It causes us to grow numb and to grow angry. Notice in Isaiah’s poem that reconciliation is not the nature of things. The leopard was not made to lie down with the kid nor the lion with the calf. If we just accept the ways things are, we will resign ourselves to suffering and brokenness and dividedness. And yet there is another, greater mystery we claim as Christians. Out of “the stock of Jesse” will spring forth a liberator, a reconciler, one who comes to heal the wounds and bring together the broken, one who brings hope beyond all understanding. We’ve got to believe, against all the odds, that someday “there will be neither hurt nor harm in all my holy mountain.” We’ve got to keep finding the ways to say, to ourselves and to all who will listen, that God, the one who walks in the garden, wants all of his children to flourish. And
it is our calling to bring this flourishing into the world. It is our
calling to craft this good philosophy
with which to counter the
bad philosophy that permits even one child to suffer. This is the calling
of a Christian university like Seattle Pacific University for our time.
This is the calling of all Christians everywhere. And this is no ivory-tower
work, believe me.
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