Friday, October 19, 2007
A Good Ol' Fashioned Rant
I looked back on some old posts today. There were some real duds in there; I'll admit it. I've really gotten out of the habit of blogging about the thoughts that go through my head, the occurrences that give me pause enough to stir some new idea or challenge.
Here it is. I was reading someone's blog, I don't remember whose, and the person started by saying, "I'm sure we can all agree that most Christians are concerned with eliminating poverty." I didn't even read the rest of the article, so remiss was I to concede that eliminating poverty is our concern. It's not that I think poverty is a good thing, or that its elimination wouldn't provide some good to the world. It's, quite honestly, that the idea of eliminating poverty is simply ridiculous. It's not even ridiculous in that noble, idealistic kind of ridiculous way that noble, idealistic ideas are. It's just implausible.
Still, there seems to be this effort amongst modern societies to eliminate entirely the existence of a state of being that is considered a state of suffering. There are copious examples of efforts by organizations or movements to eliminate war, or eliminate hunger, or poverty, or even suffering itself. What strikes me as the thoroughly un-Christian ideological pith of these approaches is that suffering is evil. Suffering should be eliminated. What it has given rise to, among other things, is the ethic I mentioned in my last post (pointed out by Dr. Leon Kass), that it is acceptable to eliminate suffering even by eliminating the existence of a suffering person (i.e., aborting a genetically defective fetus). When suffering is a moral evil, its elimination becomes the ultimate end.
Read 1 Peter, or 1 Thessalonians, or the Gospel of John, and you will be given a picture of a purposeful suffering, of a God who embraces suffering to an eschatological end. This portrait of a suffering God is at odds with the idea that suffering is evil. Suffering cannot be both redemptive and evil. That is not to say that suffering is good, or at all times redemptive. But how can, for example, poverty be so evil that the only intercourse we have with it becomes how to eliminate this state of being, when the biblical message is that the poor are somehow mystically blessed, if only, as Gregory Nazianzus says, because we are all poor and serve a God who clothed his Son in the poverty of human existence?
The first biblical antidote to this ridiculous philosophy, then, is to remember that suffering is morally complex in the Christian tradition, a purposeful, potentially redemptive phenomenon within which we must discover what it means to shed these fleshy cloaks to reveal our true, heavenly bodies. In these efforts to eliminate societal woes we will not find an iota of what we seek on our path as Christians.
Here it is. I was reading someone's blog, I don't remember whose, and the person started by saying, "I'm sure we can all agree that most Christians are concerned with eliminating poverty." I didn't even read the rest of the article, so remiss was I to concede that eliminating poverty is our concern. It's not that I think poverty is a good thing, or that its elimination wouldn't provide some good to the world. It's, quite honestly, that the idea of eliminating poverty is simply ridiculous. It's not even ridiculous in that noble, idealistic kind of ridiculous way that noble, idealistic ideas are. It's just implausible.
Still, there seems to be this effort amongst modern societies to eliminate entirely the existence of a state of being that is considered a state of suffering. There are copious examples of efforts by organizations or movements to eliminate war, or eliminate hunger, or poverty, or even suffering itself. What strikes me as the thoroughly un-Christian ideological pith of these approaches is that suffering is evil. Suffering should be eliminated. What it has given rise to, among other things, is the ethic I mentioned in my last post (pointed out by Dr. Leon Kass), that it is acceptable to eliminate suffering even by eliminating the existence of a suffering person (i.e., aborting a genetically defective fetus). When suffering is a moral evil, its elimination becomes the ultimate end.
Read 1 Peter, or 1 Thessalonians, or the Gospel of John, and you will be given a picture of a purposeful suffering, of a God who embraces suffering to an eschatological end. This portrait of a suffering God is at odds with the idea that suffering is evil. Suffering cannot be both redemptive and evil. That is not to say that suffering is good, or at all times redemptive. But how can, for example, poverty be so evil that the only intercourse we have with it becomes how to eliminate this state of being, when the biblical message is that the poor are somehow mystically blessed, if only, as Gregory Nazianzus says, because we are all poor and serve a God who clothed his Son in the poverty of human existence?
The first biblical antidote to this ridiculous philosophy, then, is to remember that suffering is morally complex in the Christian tradition, a purposeful, potentially redemptive phenomenon within which we must discover what it means to shed these fleshy cloaks to reveal our true, heavenly bodies. In these efforts to eliminate societal woes we will not find an iota of what we seek on our path as Christians.
Chris B., 2:22 PM
