Part Five: Reasonable Hope

We finish our selected portions from the book Letters to a College Student with this passage:

Krystal, I know your “core doubts” (as you put them) do not come solely from philosophical reflection, or from reading that novel by Camus. None of us are “disembodied brains,” so to speak — when we think philosophical thoughts, we can only do so in the midst of the circumstances and struggles of our daily lives. And I know there is not a day that goes by that you do not miss your beloved grandmother, who loved you so much, and who was taken from you and your Mom in such a cruel way, through an extended period of physical deterioration and suffering. I am not denying the basis of your grief — I am just asking you to search your heart, and ask yourself: “Was the suffering and dying of my grandma really the full truth about the end of her story?” After all, she was a woman who deeply believed in God. She lived a life full of generosity and compassion for others, and constant prayer, and she struggled heroically in her final months to keep her belief and her prayer for others strong to the end. When she died, her hope was “full of immortality,” as the book of Wisdom says, and she looked forward to the day when she would be with us all again, in the nearer presence of God, where there is neither sorrow, nor crying, nor pain any longer. Would you say now that the beliefs on which she lived and died were tragically mistaken? Was her whole life, and her final hope, founded on sheer folly? Rather, doesn’t Philosophy indicate, in numerous ways, that your grandma was absolutely right?

Benjamin Franklin once summed up what decades of philosophical reflection had led him to believe about God and human life in these words:

Here is my Creed: I believe in One God, Creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable Service we render to him is doing good to his other Children. That the soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with Justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental Principles of all sound Religion.

To my mind, Franklin was entirely right. I know that this Philosophy does not answer every agonizing question that plagues us: for example, “Why did God permit this terrible suffering in this particular circumstance? Why doesn’t He do more to stop it?” The ancient philosopher Boethius wrote his greatest work after he had been condemned to death for a crime he did not commit. The result was his masterpiece, The Consolation of Philosophy. You see, Krystal, he didn’t claim that Philosophy alone could supply us with all the answers we seek. But it can supply us with some answers: with enough for “consolation” in the midst of affliction, light for the way, and a reasonable hope for our journey’s end.

Perhaps you will think to yourself: “But that’s not enough; it’s just not enough to answer all the questions that need answering — and the answers it gives are not enough fully to rescue the human race from evil and guilt, from suffering and death.” Well, if that’s your perspective, Krystal, I think you’re right: Philosophy alone [human reason alone] really isn’t enough… But it’s a great start — a big step in the right direction!

And maybe God has other ways of speaking to us than just through Philosophy.  I mean, why do we think that God is limited to revealing His nature, character, and purposes for human life solely through what we can demonstrate by our reason alone, reflecting on His creation. Maybe He has a lot more to say to us than Philosophy can contain. Maybe some of the most important things He has to tell us — even about suffering and evil in His world, and His response to them — could only be expressed to us in another way, in fact, in the form of a Cross.

But that, of course, is another story.

Meanwhile, don’t lose heart. Gerard Manley Hopkins summed up in a single poem, Krystal, just about everything that I’ve tried to share with you over the past year, and the ground of all our hope. He expressed it far better than I could ever do:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. 

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh morning at the brown brink eastward springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast, and with, ah! bright wings.

That’s the end of the last of the Letters to a College Student.

So, why did I begin a series of articles on “Why is there so much human suffering in God’s world” with what reason alone can tell us? Again, because I think, for starters, when one is facing a heavy cross to carry, it helps to know that our faith in God is not founded on fantasy, fairy-tales, or wishful thinking; rather, it has a solid rational basis. Reason can show us that there is a God who created all things, who gave us free-will, and who also gave us many gifts and helps to overcome all the bad effects of the misuse of human free-will. Moreover, reason can establish that there is hope for us: at least for a blessed immortality of soul at our journey’s end. I think it is good to know, when things get dark, and we do not feel God present at all, and cannot see how His providence is at work, that He must be present and at work through it all, because even reason says so, because that is the objective truth, whether we feel it so or not.

Robert Stackpole, STD

Mere Christian Fellowship

Next time: The More We Need to Know