Yep. He was before he came:

Everything that exists (other than him) came are through him. (1 Corinthians 8:6)

He was rich, before he was poor. (2 Corinthians 8:9)

Our place with God was secured in him (by him?) before the universe itself got rolling. (Ephesians 1:3-14)

He was equal to God, before he became a condemned Roman prisoner. (Philippians 2:5-11)

When everything began, he already was with God, and was God. (John 1:1-14)

This is part four in a series of posts about the way Christians have sought to explain suffering and evil in light of God’s goodness. It’s all from Thomas Oden’s book Classic Christianity. If you haven’t yet, read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

In this section, Oden brings in the cross of Christ to help us think about these things:

The Mystery of Human Suffering Viewed in the Light of the Cross

The faithful stand in the lively awareness that each of us was there—at the cross. All humanity was there. All sins were representatively being atoned and reconciled. “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” the black evangelical tradition asks. Each one must finally answer yes or no.

Of the boy who is the main character in the novel Bevis, Richard Jefferies writes: “The crucifixion hurt his feelings very much: the cruel nails, the unfeeling spear: he looked at the picture a long time, and then turned over the page saying, ‘If God had been there He would not have let them do it.’” But the whole point of the cross… is that God was there! For it was God who was on the cross!

Evil Does not Disappear

There is never an adequate theoretical answer to the riddle of suffering because actual suffering wishes most to be solved in practice not in theory. But the cross points to an event in relation to which suffering is transformed from absurdity to renewed meaning.

Even then, suffering remains a continuing mystery even to the faithful, as it did to Job. Paul’s thorn does not go away. The daughters of Eve labor with pain. Rachel weeps. Mary wept.

Christianity does not promise an end of pain, but a word that God shares it with us.

Why the Cross Remains a Meaningful Disgrace

Yet the cross remains repulsive. We turn our eyes away from a public execution. How could it have happened that Christianity could be such an aesthetic and beautiful religion and have such an ugly central symbol?

The answer is that only there do we most fully discover how far God has gone to reach out for us. Before beholding the cross, we were unaware that God was searching for us, reading our hearts, seeking us out, desiring to atone for our sins, ready for reconciliation. The cross is evidence that God the Son comes far out to look for us and is willing to suffer for us as to reconcile us to the Father (Rom. 5:10; 2 Cor. 5:18-19).

The cross hardly looks like a place where evil is being overcome. Rather it appears to be history’s most massive example of injustice. This is one aspect of the cross that is unavoidable: the brutality of sin. This world is just such a place where such things can and do happen. The innocent do suffer. This we learn from the cross, where the most undeserved suffering and the most deserving goodness meet with devastating irony.

The cross reveals the meaning of history, specially at those points in history where it least appears as though God is truly righteous or where it appears that God may be indifferent to human suffering. The meaning: God suffers for sinners, wiping away their sin.

One of the most amazing facts about the New Testament is that it was written under conditions of radical social dislocation, oppression, injustice, war, written by people who were suffering endangered because of their faith and made more complicated because of their baptism. Yet no book is so filled with hope and joy and mutual support and encouragement. It is virtually free from the bitterness that so prevails in human life. Whatever they had to suffer, they suffered in the awareness of their sharing in the dying and rising Word of life.

The Christian life is a continuing spiritual warfare whose crucial victory is already known and experienced, but whose ancillary battles continue in human history until the last day.

The warfare is deep in the human spirit, appearing in the subtle forms of pride, seduction, greed, and envy. This is not something that can be done away with by means of another march on the capitol, a more searching docudrama, stalwart investigative reporting, a revolution, or a committee for neighborhood improvement, however important those might be. “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God” so that “you may be able to stand your ground,” with the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, with prayer, with feet prepared for running, and with “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (Eph. 6:12-18).

This is part three in a series of posts about the way Christians have sought to explain suffering and evil in light of God’s goodness. It’s all from Thomas Oden’s book Classic Christianity. If you haven’t yet, read Part 1 and Part 2.

In the next section, Oden looks at the way the death of Christ affected human suffering…

How does Christ’s Death Impinge upon Human Suffering?

Christ’s death Negated Neither Our Freedom Nor Natural Causality

Christ’s death did not change the way the world is put together as a natural order of cause and effect. Causality was not banished and the chance that I might harm you was not taken away. That would have paid too high a price for freedom from sin, namely freedom from freedom, a parade of automatons, causal chains without self-determination in a nonhistory lacking freedom.

Christ’s death does not reduce the freedom that risks causing evil and suffering. Rather Christ’s death is proclaimed as the birth of a new freedom amid the complexities of causal chains.

This can be celebrated without attempting to pronounce in detail upon the eternal destiny of each individual. We do well to trust God to care rightly for those who have no heard adequately of divine mercy. The promise is that “He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2).

God Personally Knows the Suffering from Which We Are Saved

But what is meant by punishment for sin? Above all, God knows. For God has felt the full brunt of human violence. Christians know that this has happened as an actual event in human history. God knows fully what we know partially—that sin cannot finally endure in God’s world, that it must be atoned for, paid for, and has been transcended and bound up by God’s love. The cross is the actual event in which that ransom or payment was made once for all. From the moment of Christ’s last earthly breath, the world is redeemed from sin and reconciled to God, and the divine-human account is paid up—a reality in which faith may share.

This does not imply that everything necessarily wills to share in the freedom Christ offers: “If any soul were finally and forever to put aside Him Who has vicariously borne the punishment of sin, it must bear its own punishment, for it places itself under those conditions which brought from Christ’s lips the cry “forsaken”…The alternative is this: to meet the future alone, because forsaken, or to be saved in Him Who was ‘forsaken’”.

The Absurdity of Continued Bondage

How is it possible that one might now continue to remain in bondage to sin, Paul asked in Romans, chapter 6? If actually freed by God from sin, how could one absurdly continue to believe that God is now punishing us for sins already atoned for? To say that is to disbelieve that God has effectively taken punishment for our sins.

The cross has become for Christians a mirror through which humanity may behold both its own sin and God’s willingness to share the suffering that sin creates. Through the cross suffering is, first of all, faced, and borne and, secondly, transcended by the awareness that God confronted, bore, and transcended it. This is Christian theodicy. It is called the good news.

This is part two of a series of posts about the way Christians have sought to explain suffering and evil in light of God’s goodness. It’s all from Thomas Oden’s book Classic Christianity. If you haven’t yet, read Part 1.

He begins with the observation that in many cultures, suffering is explained simply: You get what you deserve. So, if you’re going through something hard, it’s because you did something wrong…

It may seem absurd that so much of a human history and acculturation have so often been formed around the seemingly odd premise that suffering is a punishment. But that correlation appears virtually everywhere in the history of human experience, and especially in morality and religion. The logic is unsparing; if we receive the due reward of our deeds, and if we suffer, the thought suggests itself that we suffered because of our evil deeds.

The Common Experience of Suffering for Others: The Social Nature of Suffering

The deeper level of the perplexity of suffering is not when people suffer for their own sins—that has a ring of justice. It is rather when they suffer for the sins of others—that seems unjust.

Your neighbor may have to suffer innocently for something you have done (even inadvertently). Who does not know how it feels to suffer from something someone else has done? Sad but true, there appears to be universally experienced a profoundly vicarious aspect to human suffering. It is as if all humanity had become mixed in a transgenerational stew where one person’s willed evil causes others to suffer. No one comes out unhurt. One generation hurts another. One member of a family system hurts another.

The premise of individualism does not help toward a solution of an enigma that is intrinsically social: there is an inexorable, ever-changing relational interweaving of human beings in covenant histories: the histories of tribes, cultures, languages, associations, and nations.

It is odd that the most profound forms of human intimacy are revealed in suffering. We are cursed by others, yet no one discerns exactly from whose voice the curse came. We are blessed by others, yet often these blessing seem to come from nowhere.

The Consequences of Sin are Socially Transmitted in Subsequent History

Why has it recurred so convincingly within so many cultures that human beings are cursed and punished by their own or other’s bad choices, which Jews and Christians call “sin”? The consequences of sin, like all self- determined historical acts, become locked into causal chains. These consequences cannot be simply stopped. It does no good to say; “Stop the world, I want to get off.” To pretend that the consequences of sin could be suddenly halted would be to suspend the present natural order of cause and effect where one person’s bad choice causes another to suffer. To change that would require the redesigning of the world totally, and no one is up to that.

This is why Irenaeus, Athanasius, and Augustine argued that evil is not substantially or originally existent in our created nature, but that it has emerged out of an unnecessitated history, a result of human freedom—self-chosen and abused. Its history is basically self-determined by will, not necessitated. That is not our created nature, but our fallen nature. It has a history- everything east of Eden. If so, the view that evil is natural to humanity needs correction, as does the mistaken view that evil is as old as God.

Consequent Innocent Suffering

Sufferings for the most part appear to be the inevitable consequences of the corporate sins of humanity working intergenerationally to affect persons mostly but not wholly innocent of their own original acts of wrongdoing. Each individual then places his or her own distinctive stamp upon the history of sin. My flawed choices are added to a history of flawed choices. When we make wrong uses of good creaturely gifts (like sex and power and wealth and influence), when we choose the lesser good above the greater, it is often the case that others who did not make our choices have to suffer the consequences of our bad choices.

These causal chains flow like all natural ordering flows, from person to person, mother to daughter, family to family, neighbor to neighbor, seller to buyer, nation to nation (Jer. 31:29-30). What we sow will somehow be reaped, if not by us, by others who may suffer from our choices. Our choices propel unwelcome and unintended reverberations into others’ futures.

That all sins stands under the penalty of death is proven by this empirical fact: There has never yet been a sinner who has not in time died.

In the late Judaic apocalyptic tradition, grossly unfair distributions of rewards and punishments were viewed as proof of the anticipated end of history, the final resurrection of the just and unjust. Jesus’ resurrection meant the beginning of that end time. We leap ahead of our story by referring to the resurrection meant the beginning of that little, since it comes immediately after the cross, our current subject. The resurrection would provide a way by which the faithful may come to participate already in the end time, when all wrongs shall be righted.

Much of the Old Testament viewed prosperity as a sign of God’s favor, and adversity as an indication of divine displeasure over sin. But such a view was inadequate to explain innocent suffering, such as that of Job. Finally lacking a formal solution to his urgent queries, Job submitted himself to the infinite majesty of God, confessing that “no plan of yours can be thwarted”; Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know” (Job 42:3). In this way the evil of suffering led to the good of repentance. “When I tried to understand all this, it was oppressive to me—till I entered the sanctuary of God. Then I understood their final destiny. Surely you place them on slippery ground” (Ps. 73:4-18)

“No theological question is more difficult or recurrent,” writes Thomas Oden in Classic Christianity, “than why bad things happen to good people.”

“But there is one even deeper perplexity for Christians–” he continues, “why the absolutely just One has suffered so absolutely.”

That is how Oden opens an extended discussion on the way Christians have worked out their thoughts on suffering and evil in the last 2000 years. His book is a systematic theology in which he tries to say “nothing new,” but instead just compiles and lays out what has been the basic, broadly agreed on truths across the breadth of the whole church over the generations since Jesus ascended. So what you get is exactly what the title of the book implies: classic Christianity, especially as it was taught in the first few hundred years after the Apostles wrote.

Over the next week or so (and several posts) I want to share an entire passage from this book, because it contains the best concise exploration of these things I’ve read. I’ve already recently posted another resource for these issues, and Monday night’s study hit on them as well, and you should totally check out Joni Eareckson Tada’s message from Sunday night at CC Philly. So maybe it’s a season to think about all of this.

Let’s get started. Oden begins with some definition:

For classic Christian teaching, the wisest theodicy flows out of a deep reflection upon the cross. There the profound mystery of God’s suffering becomes transmuted [that is, changed] by the even deeper mystery of God’s suffering for humanity.

Wait–let’s define that word “theodicy” first (this is helpful). Oden says:

Theodicy is the attempt to speak rightly of God’s justice (Greek theos-dike) under conditions of suffering and evil. Theodicy is an intellectual discipline that seeks to clarify the hidden aspect of God’s goodness despite apparent contradictions of that goodness in history.

In other words, whether you know it or not, “theodicy” is what you do when you or someone you know suffers some hardship, or there’s a tragedy somewhere in the world, and you do your best to fit it in with what you know about God’s goodness. It’s a “justification of God”–saying that God’s still good and right and just, even when horrible things happen. How you do it depends on your view of Jesus, and whether or not your effort is successful depends on your ability to think long and hard about Scripture’s teachings on the matter. Oden continues:

“The gospel of salvation is intricately connected with the interweaving problems of suffering and evil. If there were no problem of evil, there would be no felt or experienced need for the gospel of salvation. The gospel is the good news of evil’s defeat.”

Starting tomorrow, we’ll begin travelling through Oden’s compilation of Christian thought on the matter.