From: http://www.veritas-ucsb.org/library/russell/Unique.html

So the problem goes like this. If there is a tri- omni God. That means a God who is omnipotent (All-powerful, able to do literally everything), omniscient (All- knowing, knows everything, all thoughts, all knowledge, and most importantly exactly what is going to happen) and Omnibenevolent (All – loving, loves and cares for everything in the fullest sense of the word possible). So, if there is this God, How can there be pain and suffering in the world? The argument (made popular by Hume) goes, that one of the omni’s would have to drop:

• He is not Omnipotent – God loves everyone and knows that pain would happen, but is powerless to stop it
• He is not omniscient – God loves everyone but when he created things, didn’t know how they would turn out and things have turned out badly (So really he isn’t omnipotent)
• He is not omnibenevolent – God knows that pain and suffering will, have and do happen. He has the power to end all suffering on the earth but chooses not to because he doesn’t love us.

Hume’s Problem of Suffering

If God were truly all powerful and all loving, he would end suffering, but he doesn’t so either he is evil, or he is powerless to stop it. Now this was a philosophy that was put forward to disprove God a while ago. However since then philosophers have apparently move on. It doesn’t really disprove God. This is because it assume we know what it would be like to be all knowing, all loving and all powerful. It says, Why would this God allow suffering to happen? Then assumes that because we humans can’t think up an answer that there must not be an answer and if there is no answer then there cannot be a God like this. But this is a massive assumption, it could easily be possible that God knows exactly what he is doing, he has the full power to end suffering and he is simply doing it the best possible manner that anyone could do. We’re simply human so there is no way we’d be able to fully understand that. So it doesn’t disprove God. So why do people still ask the question again and again when talking to us Christians? In fact, why do Christians still have a massive problem with this? I know full well that there are many times Christians get angry at God for allowing certain things to happen. Even C.S Lewis who wrote a book dealing with this question in, A problem of Pain, started to doubt that God was a nice God after his wife died of cancer in the book, A Grief Observed. I’d like to make two points about this question.

Old Testament solutions

Firstly there is someone who definitely knows the answer. That is God. God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. He is the tri-omni God and therefore, as he knows everything, he should know the answer. Fortunately for us he is a communicative God. It is actually possible to ask God this question and he will answer. In fact, this is something I recommend anyone who takes this question seriously does for themselves. However, there is another place we can go. The scriptures. This question is not a new question and is in fact raised twice in the old testament. Twice, a person encounters a problem similar to this question and twice God answers in such a way that is satisfactory to them. Firstly there is Job, He is a Godly man who has done nothing wrong, he has a lot of land, a wife and many children, he is happy. God allows Satan to totally destroy Job’s life, destroying Job’s fields, killing all his children and then covering him in boils. Job is suffering and cries out to God multiple times, What have I done wrong God? Who are you to Judge me? Come down here and tell me what I have done to deserve this God because I have done nothing! (Job 31:28). Indeed, Job’s friend’s get annoyed at Job. Who are you to Judge God? they say, You’ve clearly done something wrong because God always judges correctly and you, a mere mortal are in no position to tell God otherwise (Job 21:22). However, at the end of the book God himself comes down and answers the question. He directly answers the problem of Job’s suffering himself! And what is his answer? Well its kind of “Look at me, I’m God and I’m pretty amazing”. He simply explains how great he is for a couple of chapters and the confusing thing is. Job buys it. Job never cursed God, he merely questioned him and desired an answer. God answers Job so Job gets well happy and worships God. It is interesting that God rebukes Job’s friends. God prefers it when people put the question to  him instead of make up answers to make people feel better (or worse)(Job 42). 

So God likes it when people ask him the question and there is a second person in the bible who asks it of God. The book of Habakkuk. In this book the prophet Habakkuk asks God the question, How can God allow the injustice that his people (the Jews) are committing to continue when God loves the Law so much? Well God replies, don’t worry about it, I’m going to punish the Jews by sending a big army of evil people to wipe them out. Then Habakkuk says, What!? If you love the Law so much, how can you send evil people to do your will? So God says, yeah don’t worry about that either, I’m going to send some more evil people in an army to wipe out the first evil army I sent and punish them for being evil to my people (the Jews). Now this is heavily paraphrased and you can read it yourself (its very short) by clicking the link but the surprising thing is, Job is actually satisfied by that answer! He gets really happy and praises God.

Now we have two answers to the problem of suffering: 1) I’m really great and 2) I’m going to punish a huge bunch of evil people using evil people who will then be punished. I very much doubt any readers dealing with this question will be convinced! But it is important because it shows that God knows this question, he likes it when people ask him (instead of just assuming what he is like) and when he has answered people in the past, they have been satisfied with the response. Now, the introduction is sort it leads me into what I wanted to talk about in this blog.

The Emotional Problem

The reason I think people still ask the question, despite what the philosophers say is something like this. People hate suffering, they hate immorality and they hate injustice. It makes people angry. When they see it happen they want it to stop and think if I had the power to end this, I would! Why isn’t God? I realise that this doesn’t prove his non-existence but it is still a problem. I realise it is possible he has a master plan behind this suffering. But why should I trust him? If someone was beating you up every day for 10 years, but told you that they knew best. You’d still want to tell them to clear off as soon as you knew you could! This is what many (not all) atheists are doing now. Many people don’t care whether he exists or not. They simply don’t like him. This is not a theological problem. It is an emotional problem. And an important one. I think that instead of answering the question in the title of this blog people should answer the question, “If God made us in his image, with his heart and a view of injustice similar to his, How comes we all hate how things are going and all want something done by it? Why is humankind so pro-change and anti-injustice? If its because we reflect God’s attitude then why isn’t he doing anything about it?” Some answer this question with, “well humans are so depraved that we hate things that are good”. I don’t like that really, if I really hate things that are good because I’m so messed up then God is pretty much evil to me. So lets try something else.

An Answer

The problem with Hume’s problem is the nature of “Omniscience”. The image conjured up by Hume’s depiction of an omniscient God is a God more similar to the “God games”. Its like someone playing The Sims. Its like a child feeding her toy doll fake milk, its like a man with his train set. We have this idea of a God who knows everything but is totally separate from everything. He can oversee it, but he is not involved. Even Christians sometimes fall into this trap. They see that God is loving because he can give them things. God loves us because he gives me money. Its like the person playing The Sims. They give their little computer animated characters some food and see happy points go up. This is the point raised in the quote at the top of this blog post. This view of God is horrible. This “God game” like God is a horrible dictator who is giving us pleasure and sufferings for his own purpose that has nothing to do with us. He is overseeing our lifes for his own selfish master plan but has no stake in it. 

But this is not the biblical view of Love, and this is not the biblical view of God. In 1 John 4:10, John says “This is Love: not that we love God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” There are lots of things people think of when they think of God loving them. They think God comforts them when they are sad, that God gives them Job security, that he gives them money or great kids. All of these things are things you can do for you “Sims” in a computer game. But, whilst these things are nice, none of these are the main reason why we know God loves us. He did something more significant that we can’t even do in God games. He became fully human and then he died.

This is such an important point in Christianity that it is sometimes taken for granted. The utter insanity of the idea that God, the creator of all things, the most powerful, the rule on high. Became human. My guess is that its difficult to image Jesus as fully human because our literature has so many pictures of God like humans. We see Arnie in the terminator, we see Christian Bale as batman, we see mel Gibson in Braveheart. We constantly see pictures of men triumphing over struggles, people being shot and continuing on. We’re (or at least I) are desensitised to real suffering. The fact is that suffering is BAD. Men and women both cry, both hurt and it is always horrible. Sometimes humans can become almost Godlike briefly, sometimes people are able to triumph against ridiculous odds. But it almost always comes back to them, it almost always hurts and many Vietnam vets have needed counselling and gone crazy. One problem is that people see Jesus in this way. They know he is a man, but see him as a Superman, that he was simply able to deal with his family doubting him, his friends abandoning him, his people despising him and the physical torment of flogging and then a cross. Its possible to belittle Jesus’ suffering like we might belittle a tortue scene of James Bond in a movie. But it was real suffering. When you’re sad, when you’re angry when you feel like you can’t go on. Those were Jesus’ genuine feelings. He wept, he felt hurt when his friends left him, he experienced an anxiety that pushed blog through his sweat glands, he hurt and he even felt spiritually seperated from the father.

The thing about Hume’s omniscient’s is that he assumes God knows all objective knowledge. But he makes this knowledge emotionless and impersonal. The fact is Jesus knows suffering because he felt it. God is not a “God game” God, or a child with a doll who allows us to suffer for his master plan. God felt that the way things are going to be are so worth it that he’d suffer for it himself. He Joined in with human suffering, he joined in with human’s feelings of injustice and feels that it is worth it. We can’t know exactly why it is worth it, we have a vague idea, Jesus talks about his kingdom, he talks about heaven but we don’t really know what that is like and why its so important. But we do know that he felt it so important that he would die for it, and that is why we can know he loves us and why we can trust him. This is the basis of a christina’s faith. Faith in God is not a blind belief in his existence (though that might be part of it), faith is much more this question. Faith is believing based on the evidence of his love for us, that when he says it will be worth it, it will be. Its like a mother with a new born baby. I’ll bet most babies hate being born. Taken from that warm safe womb and being traumatically forced into a cold horrible world where they have to do things like breath. But the mother is not simply a dictator, pushing the baby through harsh times to a possibly better future. No, when a parent loves a child, they join in with their suffering to pull through to the goal the child can’t always see. And that is what God is doing with us.

There is quite a bit of controversy in the church on the roles of men and women in marriage. Now I’m not a feminist exactly, I do believe that the bible has a definite distinction between men and women in marriage. I do believe that the man is the head of a marriage and that a wife is supposed to submit to her husband. For this blog post I don’t want to get into too much of what I actually believe, instead explain mainly something I don’t agree with. However I do think the bible paints a picture of marriage with the man at the head of the church, but he is head in such a way that is very different to how some bosses run their companies or kings ran their countries. I also think the bible’s description of marriage is one that is genuinly the best and desirable to men and women, even the more spirited women who’d never describe themselves as submissive.

Anyway, this is something I’ve heard on the matter that I don’t agree with. “Yeah its true that most of the time when a husband and wife disagree, they should argue it out and listen to each other. But sometimes there comes times when you just can’t agree and in those disputes, as the man of the house, the husband must get the final say. Someone needs to have final say“.

Now it’s the last bit in italics that I disagree with. I agree with the husband as the head of the household but I think this practical application of the principle is problematic. Back in Genesis the marriage of a man and women is described by a man leaving his father and mother and joining with his wife where the two become one flesh. Now, lets take this concept of one flesh a bit further. It is easy to understand one flesh because I spend most of my time being me, and even though I’m me and I’m not divided. Even then I have disagreements with myself. Sometimes I do things I don’t want to do, sometimes I get confused and can’t decide between two different I need to do. So lets spread this out, say I’m very confused… I seem to change my mind every other day. I need apply to my room a new lick of paint. On Monday I wake up and decide it should be white and then on tuesday I decide it should be black. Say I do this every other day for a year! I’m pretty indicisive. This is an example of me, being torn between two different mes. Jamie who likes white and Jamie who likes black, but they are both me. This is a conflict that needs to be resolved but it would make no sense to just pick Monday and say this is what we should do. Then make some kind of rule that says, “Whatever I think of on mondays, I’ll do, but I’ll ignore my oppinion on tuesday”. I’d be miserable, every tuesday which is half of my life! 

But then there is another concept people apply to marriage – compromise. If two people disagree, one shouldn’t be more right then the other so you should compromise between the two. In this example that would be like finally deciding to paint my room grey. Its kind of inbetween black and white so that works right? Well no, I never wanted my room grey… I’d be miserable EVERY day!

This is the thing, a husband and wife are one flesh. If one part hurts, the whole hurts. My left hand is no more important then my right hand. If either one is hurting, I want it to stop. And I think the same COULD (not necessarily should) apply to marriage. If there is a problem within the one flesh, whether its the wife or the husband. Then that is an issue that HAS to be resolved. This is different to every other relationship I ever enter into where I am not “one flesh”. If one of my friends didn’t like my career decision, I’d probably listen to their views but I wouldn’t change my life because of them. However in a marriage, with this mutual submission, I have to take that issue seriously simply because she does. It is a problem, an indicision that needs to be resolved.

Is this of any practical use? Well no… you can’t spend that much time deciding on paint colours. Sometimes you have to live a life that is less then perfect and just get on with other things even if you’ll never be fully happy about the colour of your room. BUT… the bible doesn’t talk like that. In the Sermon on the mount we are commanded to be perfect, we’re commanded so many things that just don’t seem to be practically reasonable. God hates decay, he hates sickness, he hates death and he hates imperfection. So as christians we realise that eternal life is our ideal, we’re striving to perfection, happiness, health. But not through our own ability, we’re striving there because we need it and because God has offered it to us.

So maybe, there are marriages that need to have the husband decide what to do in the case of those arguments. Personally I think it makes more sense that if the wife is staying home looking after the kids, she should have final words on which schools they go to, and if the husband is at work, then he should have final say on career choices (and visa versa). However, however you solve your issues within your marriage. It does not mean that the eternal universal principle of the husband’s headship over the marriage has to be solved in this manner. If you want to argue that your principle of “Husband always decides” is fully biblical then you need to show biblical support that this concept “Arguments need to be resolved by one party” is also biblical. 

I have an inkling (not full biblical support, its hard to say what is not in the bible) that this concept is not biblical. That the alternative, all disagreements in one flesh can eventually be fully resolved, is just as biblicall viable (though it feels not practically). Finally I think that if those people are right, then heaven might not be such a cool place. The model of husbands being the head of the marriage is used analogously to Christ being the head of the church. We are described as the bride of christ. I know there are times when I disagree with my head, and in this life I just dutifully submit. But really is that perfection? Is that what heaven is going to be like? Is heaven going to be an eternity of disagreeing with Jesus but simply forcing myself into submission? I really hope not

So I’m reading John Piper’s “Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonism” and it says something on marriage. Now most of this hedonism stuff I really like. He’s systematically going through many of the things people intuitively feel they “should do” and then shows how really the reason we should do them is simply to enjoy them. He’s basically getting rid of all “shoulds” instead replacing it with a “you should do what you most want to do” then going through and explaining the true biblical remifications of that (compared to the world’s view). I won’t go into it now but you can see more at www.desiringgod.org.

 Anyways he’s now talking about marriage and there is so much really cool stuff in it. He explains why marriage is the way it is, how its modelled on God’s eternal plan for the relationship of Christ with the Church. He explains how the most important thing in marriage is to enjoy your partner through their Joy. Its amazing because, like other things, it marries our cynical view that people are basically selfish with our idealistic view of how things should be. In my parents marriage course (our church runs our course from HTB) the guy talks quite a bit about sex in these terms. See alot of people seem to think that if you’re “nice” you’ll see sex as about giving. However this hedonistic view on sex says you should see sex as about taking, about totally selfishly pursuing your own pleasure. Imagine that! A couple, both mutually totally trying to please themselves by enjoying the their partners pleasure! Really like a lot of their stuff….

 But then he moves onto “roles of men and women in marriage” and says this (He says he is specifically talking to guys now):

“What I mean is this: You should feel the greater responsibility to take the lead in the things of the Spirit, you should lead the family in a life of prayer, in the study of God’s word, and in worship, you shoudl lead the family in giving the family a vision of its meaning mission…”

I don’t know why that horrible word should needed to pop up there? Surely, in a similar way to the way he deals with other things, he could write this in a way that appeals to the souls of both men and women rather then listing shoulds and should nots. There is an example of a wife who is better at reading the bible, so she reads instead and he suggests that in that case the man should tell the family, time for bible reading listen to your mother. It just seems like such a weak example! The husband is not good at something so he should take to something small just to asert that he is indeed the leader. I really think that men trying to prove their manliness is the very essense of what it means to be pathetic (What I believe to be the opposite of manly, as opposed to womanly being the opposite). It just seems sad…

 Having said that, the more I read the chapter, the more I found myself agreeing with John Piper. He did argue his point very well from the bible to come up with his “shoulds”, but its unfortunate he has resorted to the classic rules of should (even though he clearly doesn’t see it as a rule in his own marriage, from the way he writes I’m pretty sure neither him nor his wife feel like they are living anything other then a hedonistic lifestyle, even in submission). He essentially argues that whilst there must be mutual submission in marriage, like christ and the church, the forms of submissions are different. This, I believe is his most important point in a world where feminism and political correctness suggest men and women are the same. I don’t propose to know what the differences are and everything I’ve heard of or read that tries to categorise men and women seems to fail. But it does seem like this is just true, men and women are different. We have different desires, what makes us happy is different and therefore a hedonistic marriage will have “roles” where the man and women are taking pleasure in the pleasure of their partner in different ways. I also think that the biblical analogy to explain this of “man like christ, women like church” is perfect. But I think the words submission and leadership (love) are just good words, but they can definitely be misintepretted.

 So just for fun, here are four stories of men and women. I think these “feel” like a good couple. They feel like a couple where most men would respect the man in the situation and most women (however passionate and powerful they are) would respect the women in the situation. I think the stories gradually get more to the point with the last one being, in my oppinion, a very powerful view of Marriage. I’ll publish them sporadically.

 1) Husband and wife in Malcom in the middle

2) Man and women finding the last seat on the train

3) Mum and dad dealing with each other in illness

4) Story of pastor denying his faith to help his family and his wife edging him on.