Rain, Rain Go Away?

I have been reading students' “critical reflection” papers on a selection from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The assigned excerpt from the novel deals with Ivan Karamazov’s challenge to his brother Alyosha (a Christian monk), regarding the role of God in the suffering of the innocent. It is a classic reading in the field of theodicy and works to challenge the traditional justifications for God in the face of radical evil.

 

So help me (Whoever), if I read one more paper that contains the statements, “we’ll never know the answer,” or “we can’t know the mind of God,” or “it’s up to us to trust that God knows what God is doing,” I am going to scream so loudly, I’ll be heard across the bridge into downtown Charleston.

 

I wonder sometimes if students think and write in other disciplines the way that they do in religious studies courses. I have had numerous papers in which Dostoyevsky is mentioned in the first sentence in an introduction to the essay, e.g. “Ivan Karamazov, in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, presents a challenge to the faith of his brother Alyosha when he questions the divine justice of innocent suffering,” and then, the author, the book and the characters are never mentioned again. The student forever abandons the focus of the “critical paper” (the reading under review) and launches  into her/his own theology, theodicy or spontaneous stream of speculative theo-consciousness. I wonder how their history professor would respond if a student were assigned to write a critical response to the Gettysburg Address, mentioned Abraham Lincoln in the first sentence and then wrote for two pages about what it was like to be six years old and living in the South never mentioning the Gettysburg Address again.

 

They tell me that God knows what God is doing and that, in other words, it’s none of my business; that we can’t know the mind of God and so “we just have to trust.” Often in response to these statements I will write in the margin, “If we can’t know the mind of God then everybody had better stop right now telling us who God is, what God is, or what God does,” because if the mind of God cannot be known in relation to suffering than the mind of God cannot be known, period. So the project of theology and Biblical religion must stop all together. If they tell me that God knows what God is doing and we cannot judge God’s justice I write, “According to Christianity, human beings are innately endowed with reason, which grants to us the ability to know justice; to know right from wrong and good from evil. If your divine Being would endow us with the ability to identify injustice, are we prohibited from using this faculty when the critical finger is pointed at the divine Being itself?” Abraham, Moses, Job and Jesus would answer with a resounding, “No,” for these heroes of the Bible (according to the Bible) were notoriously audacious for challenging their God when they judged Him (sic) to be unjust. When they tell me that we will never “know the answer” to the Problem of Evil, I write various things. Sometimes I write that it is a good thing that the medical community had not decided that the cure for polio would never be found and that cancer researchers don’t throw up their hands in frustration and declare, “Cancer is a mystery!” Sometimes I write that perhaps Theists will never arrive at a logical, intellectually satisfying theodicy, but some theodicists have proposed that some theodicies are more dangerous and damaging than others, so perhaps it is good for us to pay attention. And sometimes I write that atheists, on the other hand, think they have found the “answer.” And yes, I will often utilize the student’s own world view and language in the hope that they will see from another location. “What you see depends upon where you stand,” in the words of Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza.

 

Very often when Voltaire’s poemThe Lisbon Earthquake or the selection by Dostoyevsky are the readings under consideration, students often accuse the authors of being “negative,” and their subsequent remarks lead me to understand that they see this as something negative. I swear I have no idea what they mean. What is “negativity?” Do they mean that critical thinking is negative? Do they mean that logic which leads to doubt is negative? Would they prefer some kind of Pollyanna, rose-colored sight that never critically evaluates anything? Or is criticism just restricted as regards theology? I have been reading these papers which accuse “negativity” in Voltaire and Dostoyevsky for years and read in them a perfunctory dismissal of the authors’ critique, but I do not know what it means. Perhaps I should ask my students.

 

To me, a negative outlook on life would be displayed by someone who, without meteorological information might say, “I just know it’s going to rain tomorrow. We’re going to have a terrible time. We’ll have to run from the picnic grounds in a downpour.” This is not the same as saying, “”Hey look, it’s raining!”  To point to a conflict or injustice that is apparent in an idea or an action or a belief is not the same as pessimism that would doom a picnic before it occurs or before one gets the current weather report. The conflict already exists. It is not created by the one who points to it and this is what Voltaire and Dostoyevsky do. They point to irrational, contradictory or problematic theology and say, “Hey, look at this! It doesn’t make sense!” It seems the same with relationships. Often a person who calls attention to an issue or a problem in a relationship is sometimes accused of “causing trouble.” What is not recognized is that the problem already exists. The one pointing to it is  simply saying, “Hey look! It’s raining!”

 

I remember a long time ago when I started to read feminist theologians, one Thanksgiving one of my books was on the counter in my Rhode Island kitchen. My brother walked by, saw the book and said, “What are ya’ reading that for?” I answered him exactly why. An intellectual argument ensued. When everyone had gone, my son, who was very young at the time said, “I don’t like that book. That book is bad. It makes people fight.” I said, “Oh Honey, Uncle Bert and Mommy weren’t fighting. We were having a discussion about things that are important to us. That’s what people do who trust each other.” I would challenge my students, that if they trust their God as much as they say they do, then like Abraham and Moses, they should feel comfortable and confident to challenge Him (sic), to doubt and to argue with Him too.

They should be able to point to the sky and say, “Hey look God. It’s raining!”