World of shadows
Alister McGrath reflects on how Martin Luther and CS Lewis dealt in their different ways with suffering and spiritual bewilderment
I began my life as a minister with a very academic approach to theology. The seeds of doubt about this approach were sown when I served as a curate in a suburb of Nottingham. Nothing demonstrates the futility of a purely academic theology so powerfully as parish ministry. Working with my congregation forced me to confront the shallowness of my understanding of theology at that time – it proved to be cerebral, dry and unrelated to the harsh realities of human experience; unable to cope with the fuzziness of doubt and the messiness of sin.
I began to realise that Luther’s “theology of the cross” – which I had studied at university – offers a way of placing suffering within a greater framework. For Luther, writing in the 16th century, the issue is not primarily how can we explain suffering – which is there, whether we like it or not – but how can we cope with it, and how can God use it to enable us to grow into stronger, better people.
Luther points to the tensions that arise when reason leads us in one direction, and our emotions in another. We find our faith being battered, because it has no firm foundation, no point of attachment to a deeper reality which is able to weather the storms of life. For Luther, the cross of Christ is a stabilising and integrating reality, the rock upon which our house of faith may be built.
Luther’s theology of the cross recognises the essential darkness in which faith finds itself. It invites us to envisage the Christian believer contemplating a darkened, misty landscape, where little can be seen for certain. Yet even in this dark and obscure world, there are things that we can hold onto – above all, the trustworthiness of the Christ who took upon himself suffering, dereliction and death. We may trust him, and entrust ourselves to him. The cross, like Mount Sinai, may be enfolded by clouds and darkness. Yet God remains present in this darkness, transcending both our capacity to discern him, and our willingness to trust him.
Luther was one of my theological lodestars. Another was the well-known 20th century writer CS Lewis, who I found to be an ongoing source of inspiration and enlightenment in many areas. His celebration of the reasonableness of faith was central to my vision of Christianity. But there were areas of his thought that my parish experience exposed as unsatisfactory. His book The Problem of Pain (1940) increasingly seemed to me to be rationally illuminating yet existentially deficient. Somehow, it failed to penetrate to the real issues underlying human suffering, appearing to suggest that the problem of pain could be sorted out by a good dose of rational reflection on the problem.
I was not the only one to come to such a conclusion. In 1961, a short work by N W Clerk appeared with the title A Grief Observed. The volume consists of the painful and brutally honest reflections of a man whose wife has died, slowly and in pain, from cancer. It includes a vivid depiction of his own reaction to her death, as well as some more theological reflections on the goodness of God. How can what has happened make sense, if God is good and loving?
In fact, NW Clerk was a pseudonym for none other than CS Lewis himself, a scholar noted for celebrating the rationality of the faith he now believed to be inadequate to sustain him. In The Problem of Pain, Lewis had argued that belief in God was consistent with the existence of suffering in the world. His neat theological slogans describing pain as God’s “megaphone to rouse a deaf world” seemed more than a little trite, simplistic, and above all inadequate in relation to the suffering and death of his wife, Joy. To read A Grief Observed is to realise how a rational faith can fall to pieces when it is confronted with suffering as a personal reality, rather than as a mild theoretical disturbance. The lesson I learned from reading this moving and disturbing book is that a theology that is untested against the harsh experience of the world will always be prone to doubt and despair.
This need not – indeed, I would suggest that it must not – cause us to abandon Lewis’s delight in the capacity of the Christian faith to make sense of things. Luther forces a correction of Lewis, not a rejection. Lewis is right: theology gives us a lens through which we can interpret the world, making sense of its ordering and its enigmas. But Luther is also right: theology enables us to journey through darkness and despair. Its lens may sometimes yield a picture that appears quite out of focus. But not being able to view a picture clearly, does not mean there is no picture to see.
For all their differences in historical context and outlook, Lewis and Luther both believed we dwell in a world of shadows, which will one day give way to the brilliance and clarity of heaven. For Lewis, these “shadowlands” are a reflection of the eternal world, whose light seeks to pierce, illuminate, and perfect our own. For Luther, the shadows are those of suffering and the apparent absence of God within the world, which are brought into focus and seen in their proper context through the cross of Christ. The Christ who was crucified is the one who is with us until the end of the age (Matthew 28:20). Both Lewis and Luther were totally persuaded of the penultimacy of the present – in other words, that what we now know and experience is not the last word. That word is spoken by God, a reassurance of both his presence and power: “Behold, I make all things new” (Revelation 21:5).
Alister McGrath is professor of theology, ministry and education at Kingís College London. His most recent book is Mere Theology: Christian Faith and the Discipleship of the Mind (SPCK, £9.99)
This article appeared in the September 2010 issue of Reform.
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