Czech Republic Series - A Bone to Pick with God

Whatever you say about God you should be able to say standing over a pit full of burning babies. – Elie Wiesel

God either wishes to take away evils and is unable; or He is able and is unwilling; or He is neither willing nor able, or He is both willing and able. If He is willing and is unable, He is feeble, which is not in accordance with the character of God; if He is able and unwilling, He is envious, which is equally at variance with God; if He is neither willing nor able, He is both envious and feeble, and therefore not God; if He is both willing and able, which alone is suitable to God, from what source then are evils? or why does He not remove them? Epicurus: b.341 BCE

OK, so I preached in the Czech Republic. Big deal. I think the sermon (which you can request) did a fair job in addressing one of my life themes, and one of the gospels: You can’t rely totally on habit and custom to craft any future dealings with God.

This sermon was prepared before the visit…

…Before Auschwitz.After Auschwitz, "future dealings with God" seem an unseemly choice of words. Even "God" seems vapid, like cotton in the mouth.

Time at Auschwitz-Birkenau focused my attention on the here-we-go-again issue that I’ve addressed in the classroom and personally, academically and faithfully: theodicy. How can one call God "good" in the light of real evil? But this time it was different.

I mean this: When Harvard’s chaplain Peter Gomes starts off a new rendition of The Lord’s Prayer like this – “Our Father, Who art in Heaven (except for 1939-1945)…” – I get this.

“Where was God at Auschwitz?” is the traditional phrasing of the question, and I worry that it gets phrased so often that it’s become vapid.

It’s against the vapid that I write today. What could I preach that would not offend victims of Auschwitz with its utterly empty vapidity? “Don’t worry, in the end, God will provide an answer.” Please.

One person has suggested “The Laments” and I guess that Psalm 102 is a good place to start if one has to break a word-fast and say something, or anything.

Hear my prayer, O LORD; let my cry for help come to you.

Do not hide your face from me when I am in distress. Turn your ear to me; when I call, answer me quickly. For my days vanish like smoke; my bones burn like glowing embers.

Psalm 56:8 speaks about the faith that one’s tears are recorded in God’s scroll.

The Laments seem to be a good response, except they seek to convert the very nexus of the problem, hidden in plain sight: “God, who art in Heaven, except for 1939-1945.” For the Laments imply that only if God really knew what we were going through, that would be enough. Does that satisfy you?

As bitter as we may cry, weep, grieve, rail, tear our clothes and point to the smokestacks of Auschwitz, it seems at the end of this never-ending conversation that we are more moral than God. That somehow, God’s silence implies that the deaths of millions, at the hands of hatred, advanced the divine and inscrutable will. That a Larger Purpose is at work, and needed these sacrifices. Please. May I ask here, "Do you feel better now?" and not be dismissed?



I cannot go to Larger Purpose-land. Might as well be Never-Never Land. So a horrific agnosticism tempts me. Just throw up my hands, and say, “I really don’t know.” But this lets God off the hook. Is not “no answer” an escape hatch, wiggle-room for God? One less human being to worry God?

What can I preach in a Christian church, after Auschwitz, with a silent God with Whom I sometimes think (out of habit?) it is still worthy to contend? Is not my name Israel (“God-contender”) with a God-habit he cannot shake?

If I shake it, am I reduced to ethics? An Ethic without God? The Golden Rule spread as horizontally as I can, which sees the fellow human as no less than divine, and that how I treat others or neglect them is how I do the same to God?

Is that it? I mean, I have to leave out an afterlife! Easter! The church becomes a social service agency. Doctrine? I don’t think so. What kind of faith-life is this, where the beginnings and ends of things are less important than the here-and-now? Is this more real, more faith-full?

I can preach this, but people hate it. We don’t like to be reminded of our current obligations to do better. And is there something short-changed in Christian faith when all we are reduced to is, “Jesus loves you, and we gotta do better!”? I can ramp it up: “Jesus is every one of the victims, and the victimizers. Let’s be careful out there.” Will that ramp launch enough good news?

There’s a story out of one the concentration camps. For hours one Friday some Jewish men had argued the goodness of God from the context of their immediate life-circumstances, without resolution. When sundown came, someone said, “OK, time out. It’s the Sabbath.” And they all took off their hats and started their Sabbath prayers.

Is that a rare and deep faithfulness, or an abysmal lapse of it?

I cannot control God, and my questions here imply that I want to. God is wild and free, more so that I can say. But it seems that such freedom is purchased with the most horrible human circumstances possible.

Free Will?

There is one escape hatch here that I have not yet mentioned. Free Will. If we have it, and we are truly free, then whatever we do has no chance of being interrupted by the Interrupter upstairs. Free Will is the #1 rationale against a true theodicy where one is reduced to head banging against impossible answers. Free Will says that Hitler could have done otherwise, and people of equal free will and good will could have stopped him. Why rely upon God for that which we can and should be doing already? That question will preach, no doubt.

And if we constantly badger God to do these difficult human assignments for us – and God does – then what good is that to us in the long run? (And if we are free, then why pray?)

Free Will portrays God with hands behind her back. And the world is considered a better place because of this indeterminacy. We think of ourselves as most human when we have/exercise freedom. We think that our decisions add to God’s decisions. If you have all things created, decided, written down in ink, then human freedom is destroyed. To be free, one must really be able to choose something freely. The issue: To be free means that we introduce unintended consequences. Moral evil exists because of this freedom of creation.

Make no mistake: The free will defense questions God’s divine power. It means that God is happy with creating free agents who can choose good, and can also choose evil. Hitler is somehow allowed. The world is supposed to be a better place because Hitler is here. Or, the world is better with a devil on it, as someone said, as long as we keep our foot on its neck.

(The back-door problem to this is the foreknowledge of God. Does God know that we are going to choose something. Does God have knowledge of our future? If so, are we really free? If so, does that mean God has determined us to choose what we think we have freely chosen?)

There is no answer. And I have a head/heartache. It’s the only honest response to Auschwitz. What can I say about the dead that would not enrage by its vapid triviality?


Silence. 

Well, if God does it, then I can do that, too.