Category: Crisis

Job and the Divine Game: Faith Amidst Suffering

Featured ~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

In a letter discussing the infant theory of quantum mechanics, Albert Einstein famously observed that God “does not play dice.” Perhaps, but sometimes, it feels as if God does play games with us. At least, Martin Luther seems to have thought so. After studying the Old Testament patriarchs, Luther concluded that God is a Ludus Deus, a God who plays and often engages with us in a ludus divinus, or divine game. In modern vernacular, we might be tempted to paraphrase this by saying that God is “messing with us.”

This divine game is a kind of adversarial love, often reflected in circumstances that cause us to echo Jacob’s complaint recorded in Genesis 42:36: “Everything is against me!” What we really mean when we think this is that God is against us. In the divine game that Luther describes, God relates to us as if he were our enemy in order to make himself our friend. He judges in order to bless. He rejects so that he may eventually accept.

The nature of this adverse love is captured in the line from William Cowper’s hymn God Moves in a Mysterious Way which urges:

“Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, but trust Him for His grace;

behind a frowning providence, He hides a smiling face.”

Luther’s thinking about this is part of a larger theological framework called Theologia Crucis, or the theology of the cross. This is, in part, a theology of suffering. Vincent Kam summarizes Luther’s theology of the cross this way: “God’s grace is hidden under his wrath, and his salvation is hidden under the cross.”[1]

What Luther describes is a sort of masquerade. This is not a pretense so much as a one-sided display that paves the way for grace. We find several instances of this in the Old Testament. One prominent example was the Lord’s expressed intent to destroy Israel after they sinned with the golden calf. “I have seen these people,” the Lord told Moses, “and they are a stiff-necked people. Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation” (Exod. 32:9–10). Despite this offer, Moses argued with God, appealing to his nature and citing the promises made to the patriarchs (Exod. 32:11–14).

Moses did not really talk God out of doing anything. Rather, it was the opposite. By implying that Moses stood in his way, the Lord invited him to intercede. Moses stood between God and judgment once again when the people were on the threshold of Canaan and refused to go into the Land of Promise. As before, Moses reminded the Lord of what he had already revealed about himself, quoting God’s own words back to him and basing his appeal on the mercy that had been shown to Israel in the past (Num. 14:17–19).

Although he describes God’s anger as a kind of mask, Luther does not seem to have meant that it is merely feigned. Divine wrath is both real and dangerous to its objects. The thought of God’s anger is genuinely terrifying, even to those who are safe from it. Luther compared  this divine game to “a cat’s game which means death to the mouse.”[2] In 2 Corinthians 5:11, the apostle Paul similarly observes: “Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade others.” Yet, this fear was not the only driving force behind Paul’s ministry. Indeed, it quickly becomes apparent that it is not even the main driver. In verse 14, the apostle goes on to add, “For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died.”

Paul’s language in these verses echoes his conversion experience on the Damascus road, where a blazing encounter with the glory of Christ left the future apostle face down in the dirt (cf. Acts 9:4–19; 22:6–21). Although Paul’s fear was both real and warranted, it was not the reason Christ appeared to him in this way. The endgame was not to terrify but to commission. From this moment on, Paul’s relationship with Christ fundamentally changed along with his mission. The persecutor of Christ became an apostle, Christ’s ambassador, and a messenger of God’s reconciling love (2 Cor. 5:18–21).

 Fear and love, like wrath and reconciliation, do not seem like they should be compatible with one another. Scripture seems to say as much. “There is no fear in love,” 1 John 4:18 asserts. “But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” Yet John’s statement about the two mirrors not only Paul’s experience but reflects a kind of order of priority. The experience of fear serves the agenda of divine love.

There is probably no one in Scripture whose experience exemplifies Luther’s concept of ludus divinus more than the Old Testament patriarch Job. According to the first chapter of the book that bears his name, Job’s great trial is set in motion when God draws Satan’s attention to him. “Have you considered my servant Job?” the Lord asks. “There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil” (Job 1:8). Job is offered for consideration in a way that seems to portray him as God’s champion, without a peer among the Lord’s servants. The assertion itself appears as if it’s designed to invite a challenge. The God who already knows the answer to every question that he asks is playing a game.

Satan takes the bait and outlines the general terms of the contest in Job 1:10–11. “Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has? You have blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are spread throughout the land,” Satan declares. “But now stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face” (Job 1:10–11). God grants Satan’s terms. But the fact that he sets limits is an indication of who is really in control. “Very well, then, everything he has is in your power,” the Lord told him,  “but on the man himself do not lay a finger” (Job 1:12).

If this is a game, or at least a contest, what is Job’s role in it? Is he a player? Or is he being played with? All of this takes place out of Job’s hearing. He has no say in how the contest should take place. Neither does he have any idea that his life is the board upon which it is about to be played or that his children, his possessions, and even his health are its pieces. One is given the impression that the real contest that is about to unfold is between God and Satan. The fact that the Lord surrenders so easily to Satan’s conditions makes it clear that God is not only playing with Satan, he is playing him. The game is rigged in God’s favor, but Satan doesn’t realize it.

Job, on the other hand, does. It’s remarkable that despite the assortment of things that trigger his great suffering (the Sabeans, fire that falls from the sky, the Chaldeans, hurricane-force winds, festering sores on his skin, and even Satan himself), the only agent that Job really concerns himself with is God (Job 9:33–35). Job doesn’t exactly call God a bully, but the emotional tone of all his complaints can be roughly summarized as: “Pick on someone your own size” (cf. Job 9:1-12; 23:13–17). Yet, as unhappy as he is with his situation or with God, Job clings to faith. He expresses remarkable confidence in how God would dispose of his case if he were to be granted an audience with him. “Would He prosecute me forcefully?” Job speculates. “No, He will certainly pay attention to me. Then an upright man could reason with Him, and I would escape from my Judge forever” (Job 23:6–7).

Job had an intuitive sense that there was more behind these things than he was able to see. If this was some game, Job’s faith convinced him that he would prove the winner in the end. Yet Job also knew that this victory would not be due to his own strength or even his righteousness, which Scripture assures us was real (Job 1:1, 8). Job may be the hero of this story, but he is not the champion. The unexpected resilience of Job’s faith is ultimately traceable to his hope in another. Job was convinced that he was not to blame for the things that happened to him. But his trust was in a redeemer (Job 19:25).

What Job saw, though only through a cloud, we now understand with the kind of clarity that the incarnation of Jesus Christ alone can provide. Long after Job’s tortured bones had turned to dust, another player stepped onto the board. As Christopher Boyd Brown has observed, “When God plays his game with his saints, he does not simply set up a game for them to play (and lose) against terrible opponents—sin, death, and hell. Rather, God himself is in the game, in the incarnation. To play God’s game is to play with God, the incarnate God.”[3] Job might also add, to play God’s game is to be played by God and win.

[1] Vincent Kam, “Luther on God’s Play with His Saints,” Lutheran Quarterly, 34 no. 2 (2020), 139.

[2] Christopher Boyd Brown, “Deus Ludens: God at Play in Luther’s Theology,” Concordia Theological Quarterly, 81 no. 1–2 (January–April 2017), 163.

[3] Christopher Boyd Brown, Ibid., 166.

Love and Fear in the Year of the Plague

~ John Koessler ~ 7 Comments

A  popular meme I often see asserts that times of crisis reveal one’s true character. Posts like this are supposed to appeal to the better angels of our nature. Unfortunately, they have the opposite effect on me. It is not my better self that answers but the irritated version. Perhaps it’s the fault of the medium. Computer nerds invented social media as a forum for talking about girls, and it soon evolved into a helpful tool for posting photos of whatever you happen to be eating or drinking. In time social media acquired a personality. That personality proved to be much like some people’s mother-in-law. It developed the capacity to offer unsolicited advice in a moral tone that falls somewhere within a narrow band that ranges from gentle condescension to outright contempt. In other words, social media learned how to nag.

If it’s true that crisis reveals a person’s true character, it also seems to bring to light aspects of one’s personality. Like birth order, the interaction between social media and the global pandemic seems to separate people into distinct personality types. Here are a few that I’ve noticed since the COVID-19 crisis began:

Skeptics

Early on some questioned the seriousness of the threat. These were often conspiracy buffs, who viewed reports of the exponential danger posed by the corona virus as a smokescreen. They claimed that the crisis was manufactured. They said it was a ploy by the Democrats or the Republicans or the Russians or the Chinese or maybe even the Templars in their quest for world domination. I confess that I leaned toward this view, until the spread of the virus became too large to ignore.

Spiritual Directors

Others take a more spiritual approach. A lot of the posts that I read about the pandemic offer spiritual advice. They want me to view my confinement at home as a kind of monk’s cell. I get the feeling from these posts that I am supposed to view this whole disaster as a spiritual retreat. “It’s not a plague; it’s a blessing,” they seem to say. I’ve tried to write a few of these posts myself but find it hard to maintain the proper balance.  To be successful they require just the right mixture of cloying optimism mixed with spiritual condescension. When I can’t stand to read what I’ve written, I conclude that I have either failed miserably or hit the nail on the head.

Comedians

A lot of us are telling jokes and posting funny memes. I get it. When I am nervous, I gravitate toward humor. It can be a great relief. But it also leads me to make inappropriate comments at awkward moments. I wanted to be funny too, but all my jokes sound lame to me. Perhaps it is because there is a dark edge to most humor, and the ordinary news seems dark enough already. Besides, one can only listen to so many toilet paper jokes before they become tiresome.

Road Warriors

A few try to ignore the whole affair. They post what they have always posted, gracing the internet with their snapshots or railing against the same old causes. Of course, with the so many restaurants shut down, there are fewer pictures of hamburgers, which I suppose is a kind of blessing. But these have been replaced by photos of all the cute things that our children have been doing during the incarceration. To be fair, their parents probably would have posted those pictures anyway, whether there was a pandemic or not. I know I should be charmed by them, but their example of perfect parenting gets on my nerves and leaves me feeling like a failure. When it comes to road warriors, I can’t decide if their decision to act as if the virus doesn’t exist is brave or just a case of denial. I tried acting like there was no pandemic but couldn’t resist the urge to log into my retirement account to see how far it had fallen.

Disease as Dis-Ease

By now, you have probably figured out what took me longer to conclude. The problem really isn’t with the people who post such things. As an old girlfriend once said, “It’s not you; it’s me.” I am just nervous and sad. This is what often happens to people during a health crisis. There is a reason illness is called a disease. “Health, as we may remember from at least some of the days of our youth, is at once wholeness and a kind of unconsciousness,” Wendell Berry observes. “Disease (dis-ease), on the contrary, makes us conscious not only of the state of our health but of the division of our bodies and our world into parts.”

As Berry notes, there is more to disease than a disturbance of the body. It also disrupts our sense of community. Any family that has had to face a major illness knows that this is true. One member may be sick, but it is the whole family that is in upheaval. In our current crisis, the effect is exponential, like the spread of the virus itself. Not only is the nation on edge but the whole world. It doesn’t help matters that preventive measures require that we isolate.  Despite all the jokes about the COVID-19 quarantine being an introvert’s paradise, one of the ordinary conditions of health is the unconscious comfort that comes from participation in community life. The loss of that sense of community is more than an inconvenience, it is a grief.

Disease is more than a disturbance of the body. It also disrupts our sense of community.

What is more, it doesn’t take a government-enforced quarantine to divide our social world into parts. Separation and isolation are often part of the collateral damage that attends any sickness. Because healthy family members and friends feel uncomfortable in the presence of those who are ill, physical distance grows and along with it emotional distance. Healthy members may be less likely to hug or touch the one who is afflicted. The social compact of family life shatters further when shared stress boils over into anger. Fights break out as family members argue with doctors and nurses about the treatment or with each other. We are looking for someone to blame.

We are seeing the equivalent as government officials argue over the best way to approach this modern plague and as we scold one another on social media. Admittedly, the divide we are experiencing was not created by the conditions of quarantine or even by the virus itself. The fault lines were a preexisting condition. The arrival of COVID-19 has merely exacerbated them. What separates the current political climate from the one we were in only a few months ago is both the gravity and scope of the problem. This is combined with a shared sense of helplessness that is mixed with mistrust. We suspect that our future well-being is tied to the decisions our leaders are making. As someone said to me the other day, “If government exists for anything, surely it exists for something like this.” Yet we do not feel confident that our leaders always have our best interests in mind. More accurately, we do not feel convinced that the other party (or perhaps either party) has our best interests in view.

Our political mistrust complicates the problem by introducing a competitive dimension to the search for a solution. Not only do we worry about ourselves and those we love. We fear that the other side will co-opt the response to our national crisis and exploit it for their own purposes. There is even some measure of competitiveness in our spiritual interactions. Many of the posts I read on Facebook and Twitter seem to designed to show that the writer is above it all. Others seem preachy and smug. “I’ve got this,” they seem to say. “What is wrong with the rest of you?”

The World of Flesh and Blood

But outside the digital realm, in the world of flesh and blood, I find a different spirit. The experience of quarantine seems to have made us more aware of one another’s presence. Neighbors inquire after one another’s welfare. Those who seek respite from isolation in a brief walk appear to brighten when they see another living soul approach them on an otherwise empty street. I don’t mean to sentimentalize. There are still empty shelves in the grocery store from selfish hoarders. Hedonistic berserkers on beaches in Florida and California are intent on turning their tanned bodies into biological weapons. The coronavirus has not ushered in the Millenium. Far from it. But neither has it hurled us into the dystopian nightmare that many movies, television shows, and novels predicted. Our encounter with COVID-19 has battered the bulwarks of common civility, but it has not breached them.

Nor has our collective trauma yet matched the level of suffering that our parents and grand-parents experienced during the Great Depression. Despite the daily comparison we hear on the nightly business report, the distance between these two catastrophes is still quite vast, at least for the majority of people. We worry about how long the drive-through line at McDonald’s will take. They wondered whether they would eat at all. It is possible, of course, that our worst fears may yet come to pass, and that our misfortune will equal or even surpass theirs. But we should not rush to meet such troubles before their time has come due.

The problem we now face is not imaginary. The threat we feel is real, dangerous, and ongoing. All indications suggest that we will still be dealing with this virus and its collateral damage long after the initial quarantine has ended. But we are not the first to suffer such things. Many who have suffered the like have discovered that they did so under the eye of heaven.

The Comfort of Christ

One of these was Helmut Thielicke, a theologian and pastor who lived through the Nazi terror, and preached to his congregation as the allies bombed Stuttgart. During that time, Thielicke delivered a remarkable series of sermons based on the Lord’s Prayer. On more than one occasion, the church service was interrupted by the scream of air-raid sirens as terror rained down on them from the skies. As he watched his flock dwindle and its members succumb to the horrors of war, Thielicke reminded them that their only hope in such times was to look to Jesus.

“The sufferings of all the world converge in him, Thielicke said. “His eyes reach out to the farthest corner of the earth, wherever there is suffering. He hears the sobs of the lonely and those bereft of every tie of family and possessions. He is wounded by the dread of the dying and those in mortal peril. He hears the sighs of the prisoners behind their bars and electrically charged barbed wire. He bears upon his shoulders the cares that are cast upon him every hour and every minute from every square mile of the inhabited earth. He does not merely see this whole confused world situation in the large; he is not content with the divine perspective of a total view. No, he comes, as he did in the days when he walked the earth to the individual, to the nameless one who lives forsaken in some back alley. He knows the little cares of children and the grisly hallucinations of the insane that no word can describe and no heart can understand. Yes, he also knows the joy of life in a sparrow and the exultation and trembling fear of little creatures that live their lives far beneath the level where we human beings pursue our interests.”

As Thielicke notes, the comfort of Christ is not merely a comfort expressed from a distance. It is the comfort of one who has been tempted in every way, as we are but without sin (Hebrews 4:15). His comfort is that of a high priest who can sympathize with our weakness and who understands our failure. Even better, Jesus does more than provide us with a better moral example. He does not simply urge us on to better behavior from the throne of heaven. By taking our sin upon Himself, He puts us right (2 Corinthians 5:21). This fact places our current troubles in a very different light because it reminds us that the coronavirus, as destructive as it may be, is only a symptom of a more deadly condition.

I suppose the saying really is true. Times of crisis reveal our true character. They show us that no matter how good things seem, we are living in a world that is still in bondage to decay (Romans 8:21). Our response in such times shows that we are not as good as we would like to think. It shatters our denial by proving that our character is deeply flawed and our souls are broken because of sin. If COVID-19 were to disappear today, along with every other disease that afflicts the world, we would still be desperately sick. Because of this, to say that sin is the problem is not a contrivance. It is a diagnosis. And like every diagnosis of a deadly condition, it is hard to accept. To say that our only hope in such a time is to look to Jesus is not a cliché. It is simply the truth.