Religion and Spirituality in Psychiatry

Theological Perspectives 27kind of harmony among the scriptural accountsof suffering, which consists in five parts:1 Su ffering is not part of God’s original or ultimateintention for any member of God’screation.2 The world as we experience it is not the worldGod ultimately intends. Humanity has willfullyalienated itself from God, from itself, andfrom the rest of creation, one typically inscrutableconsequence of which is suffering.3 God’s activity toward creation is nonethelessfundamentally redemptive. God is sovereignover history – including the history of everyperson – and will ultimately consummate historyto the benefit of God’s creatures.4 Christians therefore must cultivate an “apocalypticsensibility” with respect to suffering,knowing that suffering has the penultimate,rather than the ultimate, word in their lives.5 In the interim, suffering should not surpriseus; indeed, it is in a broken creation in somesense inevitable. As such, it is an opportunityfor Christians to serve those who suffer anda possible means by which God may furtherGod’s purposes in history.Any account of suffering in light of the biblicalnarrative must begin with the insistence thatsuffering is part neither of God’s original nor ultimateintention for the creation. Rather, creationexists as an expression of the fundamental goodnessof God, for God is, according to scripture,love (1 John 4:8). A central tenet of Christiantheology is that God is an aseity , which is to saythat God is fully sufficient in and of godself ( a se ).God alone is self-sufficient; creation is thereforecontingent, rather than necessary. All that is hasbeen brought into existence and continues to existby virtue of God’s generous, playful, and totallygratuitous creative act – the overflowing of God’simmeasurable love. All of creation, women andmen in particular, exist joyfully to participate inGod’s love, to be God’s friends.(29)That God is love, and that God intends ourflourishing and the flourishing of all creation,is to most of us far from self-evident. The worldis full of suffering, as observation and personalexperience plainly demonstrate. This antinomy,between the prevalence of suffering and the presumedgoodness of God, evokes the theodicyquestion in its traditional forms. Yet this is a mistakeprecisely because it presumes that the existenceof suffering is evidence of some defect inGod. In fact, it is possible to see the existence ofsuffering as a function of God’s regard for humanity.Insofar as humans are created in God’s imageand likeness, we possess a measure of freedom.It is by way of this freedom, Thomas Aquinasinsists, that God “moves” us, which is to say thatGod is fundamentally noncoercive with respectto the human will; God’s activity toward us is toentice us by attraction rather than to push us frombehind. Of course, the correlative to the humancapacity to choose God’s intention is the freedomto choose against God’s intention. Christian traditioncalls the free human opposition to God’sintention sin and suggests that it is sin that is thecause of various forms of suffering.This is not so simple a claim as it would firstseem, for “sin” here describes the state of a creationalienated from its Creator more than itdescribes any one person’s discrete acts of oppositionto God and God’s intention. The two are ofcourse not unrelated; as the biblical story of the“fall” indicates, creation’s alienation from Godhas its origins in specific acts of human disobedience.More, certain “sinful” choices are quiteobviously self-destructive and so contribute inrelatively straightforward ways to the suffering ofthe sinner and those around him. Yet the biblicalnarrative, from the book of Job to the teachingof Jesus, for the most part rejects the idea thata given instance of suffering in a person’s life isthe result of a particular sin or sins that personhas committed. Rather, the cumulative effect ofgenerations of human disobedience is portrayedas a kind of collective centrifugal force that flingsall of creation away from God toward disorderand chaos, such that even in the presence of thebest of human intentions, nothing works quitethe way it is supposed to.Thus, suffering is one of the most obviouseffects of sin, not in the sense that God punishes