Deals With the Devil

In the classic stories, people who make deals with the devil get exactly what they want, but find out later that it’s actually a curse. Midas gets the golden touch but finds out he can’t eat gold. Faust gets the girl but destroys his chance at happiness with her.

This is how it is with oppression. People are fighting to build walls and maintain their positions of privilege in systems of oppression because they have bought into the lie that they have a good deal, as if they are winning something. Like it’s worth ingesting your daily dose of toxic masculinity so you can not go to the doctor and die earlier of heart disease? So you can have fewer friends than the women in your life do? Like it’s worth sucking down your daily dose of white supremacy so you can live in the prison capital of the world? So you can pay billions of dollars a year to disenfranchise people of their vote and maintain de facto segregation? Like it’s worth maintaining sex-negativity and purity culture in order to make LGBTQIA people feel like 2nd-class citizens? As if that’s not going to have an impact on straight folks’ ability to have intimacy and authentic relationships?

There is a cost to maintaining oppression for those who “benefit.” I am deeply suspicious of narratives that make it sound like oppressors are getting what they really want.

They are not. Most of those who think they are thriving are simply succeeding at distracting themselves from the poverty of the hell they are building for themselves. Sure, they may enjoy their net worth, their McVacations, their ability to get praise for mediocrity, and the constant simmer of jealousy or suspicion that someone, somewhere, is getting away with more than they have.

I am not a hellfire and brimstone preacher, but I do think hell is real, and I think a lot of people would prefer it to a heaven they had to share with those they’ve spent a lifetime avoiding or oppressing.

Only those who see through the lie can be free.

The Problem of God

In Christian theology, we often talk about “the problem of evil,” but I think atheists are often more honest in their assessment: The problem is God.

This is why I love Dr. Alyce McKenzie’s recent post, “There’s No Problem Bigger Than God.” It is one of the most succinct and eloquent essays on theodicy I have ever read.

Biblical literalists, of course, will not like it, because her analysis of Paul’s rhetoric points out how Paul was just as flummoxed as anyone by the problem of God’s will. She also indicates that Jesus, Paul, Job, Luke, Isaiah, and the author(s) of Exodus all have different perspectives on God’s will and the problem of evil. Even Jesus (gasp!) was not always theologically consistent.*  (*In the differing accounts in the gospels, anyway).

One of my favorite examples of the Bible’s diverse perspectives is the story of David’s census. People of his day believed that because King David counted the population of Israel, God punished him—and the nation—by sending a plague and killing a huge number of people. This story alone is difficult enough, because I can’t help but think about the current Ebola epidemic. Whose fault is this epidemic? What bad policy decision is God punishing? I don’t believe God acts so capriciously. This puts me at odds with a sizable number of Christians who do.

But although two different authors agreed that God punished bad policy decisions with plague, they disagreed about the cause of David’s disobedience. The author of 2 Samuel says that God incited David to count the people of Israel. The author of 1 Chronicles claims it was Satan. Of course, there are various kinds of intellectual acrobatics you can perform to resolve these dissonant explanations. But McKenzie hits the nail on the head: the Biblical authors are just as flummoxed by the relationship between God and evil as we are.

While recognizing that fact may be uncomfortable for many Christians, for others of us it is a great comfort. Seeking God or following Jesus does not mean living a life free from contradictions. The God who cries out, through Jesus, “Why have you forsaken me?” and who prays, “Not my will, but yours be done,” understands the problem of evil better than the platitudes on church marquees. The God who says, through Jesus, “Happy are those who mourn. Ecstatic are those who are poor,” forces us to confront the paradoxes of our lives and of human society.

If everything that happens is God’s will, then there is no point in praying, “Your will be done.” We pray for the kingdom and for God’s reign precisely because we live in a world where God’s will isn’t always done. The challenge for God-seekers and Jesus-followers is not to resolve the problem of God and evil so we can be intellectually comfortable. The challenge is to turn our discomfort into action, to reduce the distance between God’s kingdom and this hurting planet, and to bear the goodness of God to the world by actively resisting evil and injustice.