How should we respond to the pain of others? We are too often quick to justify God's permitting horrendous evils, answering why, and talking too much. In this episode, theologian David Kelsey reflects on human anguish and God's power, noticing the anomaly of evil and its wild and inexplicable grip on creatures, the constant temptation of such creatures to talk and explain evil in the face of others' pain, and finally the analogously wild and inexplicable nature of God's grace in his immediate, if silent, presence among human anguish. Interview by Ryan McAnnally-Linz.
How should we respond to the pain of others? We are too often quick to justify God's permitting horrendous evils, answering why, and talking too much. In this episode, theologian David Kelsey reflects on Human Anguish and God's Power, noticing the anomaly of evil and its wild and inexplicable grip on creatures, the constant temptation of such creatures to talk and explain evil in the face of others' pain, and finally the analogously wild and inexplicable nature of God's grace in his immediate, if silent, presence among human anguish. Interview by Ryan McAnnally-Linz.
Show Notes
About David Kelsey
David Kelsey is Luther A. Weigle Professor Emeritus of Theology at Yale Divinity School. He is author of several works of theology, including Imagining Redemption, Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology, and most recently Human Anguish and God's Power.
Production Notes
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
David Kelsey: When you're consoling somebody who was in deep anguish, let them raise the why questions. Acknowledge those are real questions. And then acknowledge that as people of faith, we don't know the answer. What we do affirm is that God Godself is present in the situation of the people who are anguishing and the people who are suffering. God is there affirming the value of that life even as it suffers, while God is as offended by the suffering as you are; God is as angry at the suffering as you are. In those situations, part of faith, part of living a faith as trust in God is a matter of acknowledging that one doesn't know, and yet affirms that God is present in the midst of a situation that is simply unintelligible. I don't have to talk. Better to acknowledge what's there, witness to the presence of God's grace in the midst of it and be silent.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: I'm Ryan McAnnally-Linz with the Yale Center for Faith & Culture.
Evan Rosa: And I'm Evan Rosa. Thanks for listening to For the Life of the World. Ryan, you recently had a conversation with David Kelsey, a prominent theologian at Yale, someone who, I think I remember rightly, you studied with when you were a graduate student.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah, that's right. David was one of my professors as a master's student at Yale Divinity School and then for a bit in my doctoral program as well. And I'm really thrilled to be able to chat with him for the show because I've just learned so much from him about being a theologian, about being a human.
Evan Rosa: And it's been a pretty crazy week when you think about the nature of world events that's going on. And here I'm referring to the conflict along the Gaza Strip, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has just raged for so long and has been embedded in a kind of narrative that is now turning over on itself all the time. And one of the feelings I have around this is just the exposure to so much suffering in other people. And it's a sunny day outside here. It's a relatively peaceful place where I live. And yet, there's this question that seems to constantly haunt me. And I'm sure it haunts many other people, as we read the news and are exposed to suffering on social media. And it's: what to do about the pain of others, observing human suffering when it's not our own? It's an important part of the questions we ask at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture.
David is precisely the sort of person I do turn to, to try to get some wisdom for that--lurking, all too often not really looking, right there in front of--problem and question. I personally have been really lucky over the course of the pandemic year not to have lost anyone I was particularly close to, but I know a lot of people who have. And it raises all sorts of questions. What do you say? What do you do? How do you interact when there's horrible loss and anguish that's not yours. It turns out David Kelsey had recently published a book on precisely that question: how to speak as a Christian when you're in the presence of those who are in anguish over the suffering of their loved ones, the presence of those who are losing and have lost people.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. It's such a sacred place. As soon as we learn of someone who has lost someone or someone who is encountering such grief or suffering or pain or lament, it just feels like it's a sacred place to be in. And yet, we're so often at a loss for the words.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. It may be that it is a sacred place, but I have the feeling in that space of something like Isaiah, when he is presented with his vision in Isaiah 6 and says,"I'm a man of unclean lips." So, yeah, this conversation is in part just my hope to find and then to offer some resources for how to live in that sacred but difficult place.
David Kelsey: Yeah. I'm
Evan Rosa: wondering if you could introduce a little bit about what David says about this particular issue. What are some of his thoughts and reflections on witnessing the pain of others?
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: I'm sure David says it better than I will. He looks at the way Christians tend to respond and says the main problem is that we seek explanations where there are in fact two mysteries: the positive mystery that is God cannot be grasped, who is beyond our powers of speech and imagination, and is the ground of all goodness, and the negative mystery that is this evil, which is also beyond our capacity to grasp, and it makes no sense in conjunction with that positive mystery. And David says, "Look, when you look for an explanation there, you're going to get God wrong and you're going to hurt people. There's a better way and it starts and ends with silence.
Evan Rosa: David Kelsey is Luther A. Weigel Professor Emeritus of Theology at Yale Divinity School, where he taught for 40 years. He's the author of several works of theology, including Imagining Redemption, Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology, and most recently, Human Anguish and God's Power. In this episode, Kelsey reflects with Ryan about the anomaly of evil, its wild and inexplicably grip on creatures, as well as the constant temptation for such creatures to talk and explain in the face of other's pain, and finally, the analogously wild and inexplicably nature of God's grace and His immediate, if silent, presence among human anguish. Thanks for listening.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: David Kelsey, it's really such a joy to see you and talk with you today. I have lots of fond memories of being in classes years ago at Yale Divinity School, so to get a chance to talk to you is really quite an honor.
David Kelsey: Thank you. Thanks for the invitation. It's a pleasure to be here.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: We're going to discuss your most recent book, which is called Human Anguish and God's Power. And the book is a theological reflection trying to figure out what goes on wrong when people make problematic pastoral remarks to others who are in anguish, over suffering, and in particular over other people's suffering, to others who have been affected by the suffering of people in their lives. And, I wanted to start by asking: how did you come to write this book? How did that particular problem come to be something that mattered to you?
David Kelsey: It was an intersection between two rather different things. On the one hand, I hang out with clergy more than maybe most people do, and in particular, with clergy who provide pastoral care in hospital settings. And over and over again, I would hear them puzzling, complaining about a kind of rhetoric that they hear people saying in hospital settings to the loved ones of someone who is terribly ill, and in anguish about the fact that those loved ones are so ill and have had someone say to them things like "this was sent for a purpose," "there's a plan here," "God knows better than we do what God's doing," which makes those people just plain furious. And that only makes their grief more complicated instead of easing or consoling them. Why do people say those sorts of things to those who are in anguish became the kind of question that I've mused on. That's one side of it.
The other side of it is that I had been thinking, I've been wondering about traditional Christian interpretation of the phrase, God almighty--and then this now as a sort of thing academic theologian, I suppose, think about--and thinking about what it is in scripture that has traditionally underwritten that phrase, justified our using that phrase in Christian circles. It's actually a heritage that is in the Abrahamic tradition. It's not only Christians, Jews and Muslims speak the same way about God. And basically for the same reason, namely that in my view, those traditions assert that God created the world when there was nothing there. Traditional language for that is ex nihilo, from nothing, which I think basically means God didn't make it out of anything, which is to say don't ask, and we just don't know what to say.
But that's wow, imagine, snap your fingers and there it is. Say the words and it appears. That's power. And then having created it, God's in charge of it. So we have doctrines of what we call providence, where God is in charge of what's going on. What's "in charge of" mean? Almost always, that kind of talk leads to the picture that allows people to infer that it means that God can just haul off and do anything God decides to do. Okay. But that's what justifies these remarks. The people in anguish that this suffering that their loved one is undergoing is something God intended for, that God wants them to suffer. What kind of a god would do that?
A family member in our family, man in his early sixties, was dying very painfully of cancer. And it was really dreadful situation. And his wife who was no longer a practicing Christian was absolutely furious about it and tore into the clergy person who was asked to do the funeral. Don't talk to us about a God of love. A God of love wouldn't have done a thing like this at all. She's right. That's the logic. A God of love wouldn't do. This seems perfectly straightforward, and it makes sense. So how do you fit those two things together? The theological tradition about God's power or at least the language we use almightiness, on the one hand, and pastoral care, generated the thing I wanted to think through in the book.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: It struck me that the approach you take is subtly encoded in your title. A more balanced kind of symmetrical title might go "human anguish and divine power." And you've titled the book, Human Anguish and God's Power. And I wonder if you might tell us a little bit why that choice. What difference does it make to think not in terms of divinity, but in terms of God, or as the term use in the book, the God of Abraham?
David Kelsey: Yes. You've nailed it because initially in my head, the title was "human anguish and divine power." And then as I got further into the book, I thought, no, that's wrong now. One way I can express it would be like this. It's the difference between words that are abstract or words that are concrete. A human being-- my gosh, that's as abstract as can be. A being is an entity. It could be any whole thing: a stone, a rock, a molecule. This one happens to be a certain type--human. But human's very abstract. It isn't anybody in particular. It's just some set of qualities that human beings have, and that makes them human because others don't have them. So human anguish. It's the anguish of human beings whoever else you may be. But Tom, Dick, and Harry are particular people. Jill, and Jane, and Jackie are too. They're not just human.
And God isn't an abstraction. If we talk about the divine, what does that mean? It suggests that there's some sort of way of being that's divine and there might be one, or there might be 10. And who knows? I had a college classmate--he said his creed was: there is at most one god, which is a very curious idea. There might be more, but in fact there's only one. But the idea of God in the Abrahamic tradition is that that way of talking about something called divinity is inconsistent with the understanding of God that goes with the Abrahamic traditions, where God is a proper name. We use it to refer to a concrete actuality, that has certain qualities to be sure--the way any concrete person or animal or even inanimate thing would have--but is, in the nature of the case, absolutely singular so that it really is ungrammatical to ask why God exists. You can ask why you exist or anything else in particular exists because creatures come into reality, pass out of reality. We all know that.
If you're going to talk about God in the way that the Abrahamic traditions do, then you can't talk about God as though God were like a creature. And one of the ways to distinguish the two between God and a creature is this stipulation that God exists eternally, timelessly, and doesn't come into existence, and does not pass out of existence. And therefore, there's no question about why God came into being that can make any sense. Now you don't have to talk about God. And if you decide not to talk about God--you can talk about the word "god"--but if you decide not to address God, not listen for God, not to live life in relation to God, that's one thing. But if you do, then you got to get your mind around how odd the idea of God is. So I wanted to use the word God, and I want to make it very specific--the God of Abraham. This is the Abrahamic tradition notion of God that we're dealing with.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And what difference does that make in the way that the question comes out? How has it changed the approach you might take to this question of God's power?
David Kelsey: With relations specifically to suffering, God so exceeds our capacity to get our minds around what it is to be God that everything we say about God in the tradition--my tradition labels that "analogically said" that "God is kind of like someone who loves," "God is kind of like someone who is focused on justice." But it's that somehow alike that is the slippery part. There's a medieval Roman Catholic formula that says that in an analogy, the two things are said to be similar, but the dissimilarities outweigh the similarities by far. And that's what we always have to keep in mind, which means that when we believe we are speaking correctly to characterize God as, say, just, we have to very careful before we draw inferences from that, because we have to acknowledge immediately we don't really quite know what justice in God's case means.
So one implication of this idea of God is that, I want to say, when we talk about God, we've got the start and then correct ourselves, and then start over almost endlessly. I call that stammering. When people talk very fluently about God, I get very uneasy. It's too slick. That's one thing it means. But that has an application about suffering in particular. God almighty. God is powerful. Yes. But don't just assume that you can infer from that that therefore God sends everything that happens. Just don't take that for granted.
And that leads me to a second kind of implication about this. The way our tradition says God relates to other realities than God--the generic name for all that is creatures. The way God relates is told in scriptural stories and those stories have certain particularities to them. They're stories about how not just that God relates to creation to hold it in being, sustain its reality, and nurture its fruition, but how God goes about doing that. So too, the tradition says God relates to draw us back to God when we have separated ourselves from God. Yeah, that's true. But that's awfully abstract. At least for Christians, the story about that is a story about what God is doing in the life of Jesus, and that's the very concrete way God goes about doing it.
It also tells us a story about God working to draw creation to ultimate fulfillment and endtime glorification of some sort--beatitude at the end. But again, the images and the narratives in the scriptures are about how God seems to go about doing that. And it's that particularity that I want to focus on because there's different sets of images that scripture uses in each of those ways God relates to us, and they tell us something about God and what you can say about God and what you cannot say about.
When we talk about how God relates to suffering, how God's involved in it, we have to ask ourselves who is this God we're talking about? What are God's qualities? Would God do a thing like send suffering for a purpose? Is that something God would do? I say in light of the kinds of stories that we take to be scripture's accounts of our God goes about relating to us, the answer is "no, God would not do a thing like that," although you can find passages of scripture that seem to assert that very thing. So this is a matter of reading scripture in the light of scripture.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: It strikes me this is a very different approach to take to the question of suffering and how God's power relates to it than one that would find an explanation either in terms of purposes and plans and sending and things like that, or in terms of incapacities, a kind of principle--it's not within God's power in some sort of strict sense, which would pull God into the same plane as creatures and just quarden off some things as doable versus not doable. And it leaves me with the feeling that part of what you're driving at is explanation--an explanation may not be on offer here. I don't know if in the experience of anguish over a loved one suffering, explanation comes to the fore. But it does seem to me that at least at a step remove, there's a powerful drive to want an explanation.
David Kelsey: Yeah, there is. There is. And I guess I'm urging that two things at the same time. On the one hand, to acknowledge that human creatures want explanations. Yeah. We all do. It's very important to us to make sense of our lives by being able to see why things are happening, see patterns in them. What I want to stress is two things here. In the actual pastoral situation, or you're consoling somebody who is in deep anguish, let them raise the why questions. Acknowledge those are real questions. And then acknowledge that as people of faith, we don't know the answers. What we do affirm is that God Godself is present in the situation of the people who are anguishing and the people who are suffering. God is there affirming the value of that life even as it suffers, while God is as offended by the suffering as you are, God is as angry at the suffering as you are.
To trust God on the part of the one who is offering pastoral care, for that person to trust God in that situation involves a witness to the fact that they trust God's presence and want to affirm that it's the case to the person who is suffering, whether the person who is suffering at the moment is able to affirm it is another matter, and that doesn't matter finally at that point. But also to do that instead of being sucked into the game of giving explanation, because that just plays into the urge to have explanation. And in those situations, part of faith, part of living a faith as trust in God is a matter of acknowledging that one doesn't know, and yet affirms that God is present in the midst of a situation that is simply unintelligible.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: You use the term, "enemy" to designate, I think, the unintelligibility of...
David Kelsey: The experience of the unintelligibility. Yes, Lutheran theologian, Deanna Thompson, has written about this out of her own experience as a cancer victim. And the word means the feeling that there aren't any norms here. The norms that would explain why there's--this is not the way it's supposed to be. This is not the way ought to be because there's no quid pro quo that makes any sense out of all of this. And that kind of means that the world was a bit inexplicably. That's the point. Evil is inexplicable. I think people of faith don't take that into consideration. God created a good world. The world is good is explicable in terms of the character of the creator of it.
But that means God did not create evil. And yet unmistakably the evil is there now. That's anomalous. There's no norm to that. It's absurd. And it's real. How it came to be that way, we don't know. Presumably God does, but hey, I'm not God. And I think that part of the life of faith has got to include the acknowledgement not only that we don't fully grasp God, but that the world also is experienced many times as anomalous. And that God is in the midst of the anomalies, present to us in the anomalies, not only in the occasions when it all makes beautiful sense, which also do happen.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So there's a kind of spirituality attached to this of not short-circuiting the mysteriousness of evil and yet affirming somehow the priority of what you call the positive mystery that is God.
David Kelsey: Emphatically yes.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: That feels hard.
David Kelsey: It is hard. Yes. It is hard. Christian people all too easily slide into one of the "making it easy." And the way we make it easy is the claim that in principle, we have all the answers. And on the one hand, like God's grace--what I do call the positive mystery--and on the other hand, the reality of evil are somehow reconcilable if you just think hard enough about it. And that was a way of obscuring the sheer wildness of evil on the one hand--wild in the sense that it's unpredictable. Inexplicable as I keep insisting is the "why it's there." And on the other hand, the wildness of God's grace, which is also "why in the world would God love us this way." In the Christian story, God loves us to the extent that God Godself enters into the suffering in the life of a particular human being.
Why would God do that? We say because God loves us. Fine. But why does God love us considering what we've made of the world? It's wild. And we try to domesticate all that by making it manageable. And one sign of our drive to manage it that people who engage in pastoral caring, people who care about people who are anguished by someone's suffering--one sign that we're tempted always to manage it is that we talk, and we talk in an explanatory way as though that's going to get it all together and make it feel better. Better not to talk. Better to acknowledge what's there. Witness to the presence of God's grace in the midst of it, and be silent.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: It struck me. There's a striking parallel in your language about God and your language about evil--mystery on both sides, wildness on both sides. And, it seems to me that there may be a sense in which the doctrine of analogy that you referenced earlier comes up here as well. These two things, they share some troubling similarities.
David Kelsey: At an abstract level, they do.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: But the always greater dissimilarity is that place of trust and faith.
David Kelsey: Yes. And,that they're asymmetrically related. The inexplicable love of God is, in this Christian view of life, fundamental. It is after all the love in which God creates. Without it, there is nothing. End of story. The wildness of evil is parasitic on that because evil is a deep distortion of what God created good. Without creation, there's no evil. But evil is not itself a creature. It's a distortion of creatures. It's a powerful distortion of creatures because the creatures that God makes each are little centers of power themselves. And when their powers get twisted and the way the powers of the creatures relate to one another get twisted, then you've got that kind of systemic distortion of the whole network of creatures relating and interrelating. That is fearsomely powerful, but it's all powerful because it's feeding off of the intrinsically good power of creatures, simply as creatures. Disease is a distortion of the dynamics of a healthy organism, but not some other sort of dynamic. It's just that gone awry. And so it's that asymmetry where the mystery of evil is parasitic on the mystery of what grace produces that keeps them from being parallel.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: You've mentioned silence. I'm trying to get at where this lands in the life of any particular person who in the course of their life is going to encounter suffering, is going to encounter anguish over suffering. I guess I'm wondering: how might you prepare yourself for that? What sort of stances might make you ready to be silent rather than to reach for those explanations, which are offer the prospect of a sort of controllability that is deeply attractive?
David Kelsey: Yes. I'm sure that there are multiple answers to your question, but one that I think of as fundamentally important is nothing more special than what's connoted by the word "worship"--to regularly participate in corporate worship shared with other members of the community of faith, as well as, of course, private and personal devotions. The point is that worship is, in my view, best understood as an array, a set, of practices, of things we do--all kinds of things. It's praying; it's singing; it's asking for help; it's confessing our sins; it's helping our neighbors; it's charitable care of those who don't care about our community. It's just a whole lot of different sorts of things you do--practices. Some of them you do sitting still. Some of them you do standing with a bunch of other people holding a handbook. Some of the things are things you do in the local food kitchen. There's just lots of some things you do--walking down the sidewalk. Some things you do in organized cooperation with other people aimed at a particular social action project and so on.
But there are things you do that involve your body as well as your voice and your mind. And you do repeatedly and they are in one way or another all acts of praise of God. I want to focus on the word "praise" because so often when Christians, at least, talk about worship, they tend to think of it as a matter of asking--petitionary prayer being central--or of telling--proclaiming the gospel, which is a way of inviting other people and reminding ourselves about what the good news of God's wild grace is. But all of that way of thinking about worship--asking and telling--treat God as something that's useful to us. We need to get something off our conscience, we will confess. We need help to get through the next day, we petition. We're worried about somebody, we pray for them. All worthy things to do. But they all focus on how God is useful to us, which God is. No question about it. That's appropriate to affirm also.
But the way God relates to us in sustaining us, and in shaping our lives and bringing human life to flourish--the way God goes about doing that, we call grace precisely because we claim that God does it absolutely freely. God doesn't have to do that. It's not what makes God God. And praise is celebration of God for God's own sake, not for what he can do for us, but simply because "wow"--that in a way sums up praise. That's the foundation of worship--praise of God's glory in and of Godself. Whether God relates to us or not deserves that celebration by us of God's reality, of the kind of reality that God is, which is what justifies talk about the beauty of God.
Former Archbishop, Ron Williams, has a really nice little analogy for that. He talks about you go to a concert that turns out to have been just absolutely spectacular. And when the final chord dies out, there is this astonishingly long moment of absolute silence. And it's not because the music has somehow put everybody to sleep or bored everybody, it's because there's a kind of astonishment, a kind of wonder that people is still "wow." And then the thunderous applause erupts, and then it dies down and you walk out still thinking in silence about the music. Before God, the first response to God's glory is silence. And then praise.
Again, we got the analogy with evil. I think the first response that witnessing intense suffering has got to be not to chatter, but to be just silent. And then there are things to be said, but not a lot of chatter, and then silence. But the God whom we praise is a God that has some qualities we know we are entitled to describe on the basis of scripture stories of how that God relates to us and which we do describe very inadequately in language that we use analogically. And we stammer, even as we do that. And then we stop.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: I can't think of a better place to end our conversation than there. You've done it. So thank you so much for joining us.
David Kelsey: You're very welcome. Thank you for this.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured theologians, David Kelsey and Ryan McAnnally-Linz. Production assistance by Martin Chan and Nathan Jowers. I'm Evan Rosa and I edited and produced the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu. New episodes drop every Saturday with the occasional midweek. If you're new to the show, so glad that you found us. Remember to hit subscribe. So you don't miss any episodes. And if you've been listening for awhile, thank you friends. You're liking what you're hearing. I've got to run.
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