Monday, April 30, 2007
Opinion

Tragic theology

The days following tragedies...

A statue titled “Sacrifice” hangs off the War Memorial Chapel on the campus of Virginia Tech, where, a day earlier, 33 people were shot and killed.
CREDIT: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

By Mark Douglas

The days following tragedies like those last week in Blacksburg, Va., are both heady and dangerous for clergy. Churches have long been in the business of comforting those who mourn and sitting with those who struggle with questions, two of the important and underappreciated civic services that churches provide.
So, why is it that I get so edgy when I watch interviews with clergy?

In 1966, Philip Reiff published “The Triumph of the Therapeutic.” In it, he argued that many forms of psychotherapy are premised on the conviction that if we work hard enough at getting our heads right, we can be OK (as in “I’m OK; you’re OK”). More broadly, he suggested that these forms of psychotherapy have become a form of religious faith in a culture that is too shallow and too individualistic to address the problems that persons in that culture face. Unfortunately, much that passes for pastoral care from the church turns more on Reiff’s therapeutic culture than its own ecclesial one.

When clergy get asked the question about what this all means, they tend toward one of three therapeutic and tragic responses:

The tough-love approach: “God is punishing us” (or, more likely, punishing “them,” since one of our instinctive responses to disaster is to distance ourselves from it and those who suffer it). “This is the fault of Virginia Tech (and, by extension, the liberalism of higher education) for letting its students run too free.”

The big-picture approach: “This is all somehow a part of God’s plan”—as if a little creative destruction should be no big deal in the grand scheme of things and we just need to get over our various senses of loss, grief, anger, frustration and helplessness. Or a variant of that, “It’s because Cho Seung Hui suffered from mental illness.”

The God-feels-your-pain approach: “God is suffering with us in this”—which treats the importance of connection with others not only as what we need in the face of such questions, but as if it’s all we need to answer them. “Virginia Tech comes together.” “Churches ring their bells at noon on Friday as a sign of solidarity with those who are suffering.”

What makes these answers therapeutic is that they help at least some segments of the population figure out something to do with their grief—albeit in ways that can exacerbate others’ grief. What makes them tragic is that while they each contain enough truth to comfort some of us, they also carry within themselves the seeds of our undoing.
The tough-love answer emphasizes the importance of recognizing that actions have implications, but misses the infinitely more significant point: that the God worshipped by Christians is better described in terms of love and redemption than vengeance and destruction.

The big-picture answer calls us to situate tragedies in the far larger context of God’s activity on earth so as not to be overwhelmed by those tragedies, but misses both the existential reality of feeling overwhelmed and the pastoral sensitivity to recognize that maybe this isn’t the best time to defend God’s sovereignty.
And while the God-feels-your-pain answer at least gets the Christian sense of divine compassion right, it gives short-shrift to the deeper Christian claim that God is doing (and has done) something about suffering.

Moreover, they all share one deeply troubling characteristic: the therapeutic conviction described by Reiff that if we can get our heads right about this tragedy, we can solve it and thereby be OK again. Though there are better and worse responses to the questions that tragedies raise, the implicit notion that theology is essentially an answer-giving enterprise not only misses the way theology works but presumes that it ought to look like psychotherapy with a spiritual veneer.

Whatever else ministers might say to those who suffer after tragedies like those in Blacksburg, they ought not fall into the trap of answer-giving as a way of resolving grief, pain and anger. At such times, “I wish I understood” is a better response than “I think I know.” The cruel pretentiousness of the claim that we can discern some larger meaning in all this is exceeded only by the statement that there is none.

Mark Douglas is a professor of Christian ethics at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur. To read more of his writings on this topic, visitwww.atthispoint.net.

R, Zaslavsky/Space