4 The cross, suffering and theological bewilderment: reflections on Martin Luther and C. S. Lewis
The cross, suffering and theological bewilderment: reflections on Martin Luther and C. S. Lewis
How do we make sense of things? This is one of the oldest and most basic questions of human existence. We quite naturally try to identify patterns in the rich fabric of nature, to offer explanations for what happens around us, to find a deeper order of things that will help us understand our lives. This is more than a quest for truth; it is fundamentally a search for meaning and significance.1
Many discover that the Christian faith makes sense of life. I became a Christian at the age of 18 while studying chemistry at Oxford University (for the story of how I came to faith, see Chapter 7). My conversion related to my perception that Christianity offered a more comprehensive, coherent and compelling account of reality than the atheism I had embraced in my earlier teenage years. It seemed to me to possess a double rationality: Christianity made sense in itself, and it made sense of everything else as well. While fully conceding the inevitable limits of arguments from history, experience and reason, I saw these as convergent pointers to the greater reality of God. They couldn’t ‘prove’ the existence of God with the total certainty that some might like, but if the God of the Christian faith possessed the profundity, wonder and sheer glory that the New Testament suggested, there was no doubt that he had a deeply embedded capacity to make sense of the riddles of life.
C. S. Lewis was one of the figures who helped me most reflect on the rationality of the Christian faith. Although it is still fashionable in academic circles to question Lewis’s credentials as a theological thinker, I must confess that what I found, and continue to find in his writings, makes it impossible for me to endorse that judgement.
The first part of my pilgrimage took the form of an exploration of the new intellectual landscape that the Christian faith made possible. Lewis affirmed the intellectual capaciousness of the Christian faith, arguing that it was on the one hand well grounded, and on the other enriching and enabling. His writings illustrate the intellectual and imaginative implications of the transformation of humanity through faith, embracing the human mind as much as the heart and soul.
Lewis helped me to appreciate that embracing the Christian faith did not entail committing intellectual suicide. In no way does the gospel demand the displacement or degradation of the human mind; rather, human reason is illuminated and energized through faith so it may transcend its natural limitations. There is evidence that Lewis himself became weary of his apologetic ministry later in life, finding it draining of his own faith.2 Yet his writings encouraged me (and many others!) to take such a ‘discipleship of the mind’ with the greatest seriousness.
Realizing that studying Christian theology in some depth would be an essential part of my journey of faith, I moved from Oxford to Cambridge University in 1978, in order to focus on the theological writings of the early sixteenth century. I began a detailed study of the great German reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546). Although my theological research concentrated on understanding the development of Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith, especially when set in its historical context, I devoured his early writings, whether they dealt specifically with this topic or not. In the spring of 1979 I came across Luther’s ‘theology of the cross’, which he developed over the period 1517–21.3 It became clear to me that the emergence of this theology was closely linked with the shaping of his distinctive theology of justification.
But I found the core ideas of the theology of the cross deeply puzzling. One of Luther’s bolder statements in particular left me all at sea: ‘Living, even dying and being damned, make a theologian, not understanding, reading or speculating.’4 This seemed to me to verge on the nonsensical. What was theology if it was not about reading books and trying to make sense of things? Luther seemed to be pointing towards a theological trajectory that bore little relation to that which I knew and valued.
As I read on, I came across other terse statements emphasizing the centrality of the cross of Christ to faith. ‘The cross alone is our theology.’5 ‘The cross puts everything to the test.’6 I could certainly make some degree of sense of these. Like many young theologians, I had spent much time reflecting on ‘theories of the atonement’, and had quite well-developed views about how best to understand the meaning of the cross.
Yet Luther’s words seemed to go far beyond any such theory of the manner in which the salvation of the world was achieved. They suggested that the cross of Christ was a key to Christian existence – to our knowledge of God, and the dynamics of the Christian life. A ‘theology of the cross’ was about seeing the cross of Christ as a lens through which we should view reality.
I found myself being bombarded with ideas that challenged both my existing understanding of faith and the role of theology in articulating that faith: we cannot grasp God fully; we are walking in the dark rather than in the light; our grip on reality is only partial and deeply ambivalent; we are assaulted by temptation, doubt and despair. Above all, Luther stressed that the cross offers us the most secure standpoint from which to view and cope with these deep ambiguities within the natural order, human culture and our own experience. ‘The one who perceives the visible rearward parts of God as seen in suffering and the cross deserves to be called a theologian.’7 Luther’s controlling image here is that of Moses being denied a clear and direct vision of a glorious God, and having to content himself with an indirect vision of a God disappearing into the shadows (Exodus 33.18–23). If Luther was right, any idea about theology offering us clear and precise ideas would have to be modified significantly. Where C. S. Lewis spoke of the light of the gospel illuminating reality, comparing God to an intellectual sun, Luther spoke instead of the ‘darkness of faith’.
I wish I could say that I walked away from my engagement with Luther inspired by his theology of the cross, and that he opened a new chapter in my own theological development. But historical accuracy will not allow me to do this. While I gained a very good understanding of the historical process by which Luther had arrived at his ideas, it remained unclear to me why these were of such importance. The simple truth is that I was not ready for them.
Why not? As I look back on my own life around that time, I can identify two main reasons why this was the case. First, because my early vision of the Christian faith was rather cerebral and academic; while I had come to appreciate the rational resilience of Christianity, I had thus far failed to fathom its relational and existential depths.
Second, I was still quite deeply influenced by an idea that can be traced back to Descartes, and which played a leading role in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment – that our experience of reality can be expressed using ‘clear and distinct’ language.8 Reality was not ‘fuzzy’ or ambiguous; any view of reality would thus be able to give a ‘clear and distinct’ account of things. It was a view which allowed little place for complexity, ambivalence or doubt. To me, these were the symptoms of sloppy, inexact or muddled thinking.
At this early stage in my development, I therefore regarded it as self-evident that theology aimed for conceptual precision – a precision, I may add, which I believed I had found (though in different ways) in both Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics and Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae. I did not find it in Luther. I judged him to be at fault in this matter and thus welcomed the attempts of later Lutheran writers to systematize his ideas, iron out his conceptual wrinkles and bring methodological order to his often impulsive writings.
The seeds of doubt about my early approach to theology were sown during the years 1980–3, when I served as a curate in the parish church of St Leonard in Wollaton, a suburb of Nottingham. Nothing demonstrates the futility of a purely academic approach to 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. Where, I wondered, could I find a theology that connected up with the big questions of living, dying, doubt and despair that I was encountering? With the corrupting influence of power and the destructive effects of the human quest for status and influence? With the damaging impact of low self-esteem? With the limitations of human nature to grasp and comprehend things?
I began to realize that Luther’s ‘theology of the cross’ offers a way of placing suffering within a greater framework. For Luther, 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,9 and how can God use it to enable us to grow into stronger, better people?10
A similar approach emerges in the writings of Simone Weil (1909–43). Weil, who discovered Christianity relatively late in her short life, was fully aware of the brutalizing impact of evil. She doubted whether it was ever possible to offer a rational explanation for its presence, or a means of evading it. Yet for Weil, ‘The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.’11 Divine wisdom is known through human misery (malheur) rather than through pleasure. Indeed, ‘all pleasure-seeking is the search for an artificial paradise’,12 which discloses ‘nothing except the experience that it is vain’. Only the contemplation of our ‘limitations and our misery’ raises us up to a higher plane.
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 stabilizing and integrating reality, the rock upon which our house of faith may be built. The cross is a definitive disclosure of the despair that results when reason and emotions pull in separate directions; when God is believed to be present, but not experienced as present. By seeing the cross as a paradigm of the ‘darkness of faith’, we can cope with the ambiguities and contradictions of our experience of the world, which often threaten to lead us away from God as much as to disclose him.
Luther’s theology of the cross poses a significant challenge to theologically inflated accounts of reality which hold that we can see further and more clearly than our situation permits.13 This resonates with a theme which runs through much postmodern writing, namely that we cannot hope to achieve ‘totalization’ – that is, to gain a comprehensive grasp of the deep structures of reality.14 Any theory – whether religious, scientific or secular – has a limited capacity to represent the totality of things15 and will thus find itself in tension with what is experienced of the world. That’s just the way things are. The problems begin when we think it ought to be otherwise, and so reject the worldview because it cannot accommodate the totality of experience. We must settle for the best fit, not the perfect fit.
This is why Luther insists upon a perpetual return to the foot of the cross, the source of true theology. In the physical brutality, the aesthetic ugliness, the conceptual fuzziness and the spiritual messiness of the crucifixion of Christ, we find a reassertion and reassurance of the hidden presence and activity of God in this puzzling, disturbing and often overwhelming world.16 Just as God spoke to Job from the whirlwind, so Luther insists that God speaks to us from the cross to proclaim his presence. He is truly present in this scene of hopelessness and helplessness, even if we find it difficult to articulate this using the neat categories of our theology.
Luther’s theology of the cross recognizes 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 on to – 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’s point is that we do not walk alone, but in the presence of the one who was crucified for us, and who will never abandon us, having already journeyed through the valley of the shadow of death.
The ‘Word of the Cross’, according to Luther, does not destroy or even totally dispel this spiritual darkness; nevertheless, it reveals it for what it truly is and provides enough light for us to make our way within it, one step at a time. Indeed, there are times when Luther seems to think of Christ as a candle, projecting a flickering circle of light, allowing us to find our bearings and our way. Beyond that candle, all is dark and unknown. Yet we cannot make the candle burn brighter. We must trust the one who holds it, and leads us in the gloom. ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it’ (John 1.5).
When I left Wollaton to return to Oxford in the summer of 1983, I had finally grasped why Luther’s theology of the cross was so important. I had come to appreciate the weakness and vulnerability of any theology that failed to secure a synergy of reason and feeling. Spending time with the bereaved on the eve of funerals forced me to realize the emotional and relational shallowness of what were otherwise well-argued theological ideas.
I continued to read Lewis, finding him an ongoing source of inspiration and enlightenment in many areas. But there were shadowlands, areas of his thought which now left me dissatisfied. His The Problem of Pain (1940) 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 began to have doubts about its pastoral value and spiritual insight. It was fine for university discussion groups; it was not much use when I was trying to say something helpful to someone who had been bereaved.
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?
Clerk realizes that his rational, cerebral faith has taken something of a battering. The ideas that had once proved anchors to his life have turned out to be inadequate in the face of catastrophe: ‘Nothing will shake a man – or at any rate a man like me – out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover himself.’ The slow death of Clerk’s wife does not lead him to unbelief; it does, however, reveal the precarious nature of a faith based only on ideas, and disconnected from the harsh realities of life and the emotional responses these engender.
Now ‘N. W. Clerk’ was a pseudonym for none other than C. S. Lewis himself, noted for celebrating the rationality of faith that 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, dispersed throughout the book, describing pain as God’s ‘megaphone to rouse a deaf world’,17 seem more than a little trite, simplistic, and above all inadequate in relation to the suffering and death of his wife, Joy. To its critics, Lewis’s approach in The Problem of Pain reduces evil and suffering to abstract ideas which require to be fitted into the jigsaw puzzle of faith. To read A Grief Observed is to realize 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. Previously Lewis’s theology had engaged with the surface of human life, not its depths. And Lewis, we now know, recognized this.18 ‘Where is God? Go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double-bolting on the inside. After that, silence.’
Lewis made it clear that Joy’s death served to crush all that was self-confidently rationalist in his faith. It is little wonder that his authentic and moving account of the impact of bereavement has secured such a wide readership, given its accurate description of the emotional turmoil that results from a loved one’s death. But the work is also significant for exposing the vulnerability and fragility of a rational faith that is rooted only in the mind. While Lewis undoubtedly recovered his faith after he lost his wife, A Grief Observed suggests that the cool, rational approach he once set out in The Problem of Pain has been abandoned. For example, Lewis discloses his belief that God has taught him to love Joy truly by taking her painfully from him, thus helping him to see that, because their love had achieved its earthly limit, it was ready for its heavenly fulfilment.
Lewis’s readers, whether critics or friends, have noted such shifts in thought, and pondered their significance. John Beversluis’s assessment of the changes evident in A Grief Observed emphasizes Lewis’s realization of the existential inadequacy of his earlier views.19
A Grief Observed is a harrowing book not just because it deals with suffering, death, and a tottering faith, but because it reveals that Lewis’s faith was rediscovered at the enormous cost of leaving unanswered and unanswerable the very questions he had all along insisted must be answered, the very questions that had proven fatal to his earlier faith.
Beversluis is generally thought to overstate his case at this point; it is, however, very difficult to avoid coming to some such conclusion on the basis of a fair reading of A Grief Observed, especially if it is set alongside the corresponding passages of The Problem of Pain.20
The lesson that 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. Lewis’s cri de coeur helped me appreciate what Luther was getting at. As Luther himself pointed out, experience is ultimately what makes a real theologian.21 Luther’s theology of the cross is perhaps best seen as a critical theology – one which demands that we recognize the limitations under which faith exists in this world. No conceptual matrix, religious or secular, can fully cope with the immensity and complexity of our experience. Life is indeed a mystery, something that cannot be contained within a constraining theoretical cage.
This need not – indeed, I would suggest that it must not – cause us to abandon the joyful exuberance of Lewis’s delight in the capacity of the Christian faith to make sense of things. Luther forces a correction of Lewis, not his rejection. Lewis’s emphasis upon the sense-making capacity of faith can perhaps too easily be misunderstood to mean that the Christian sun illuminates every aspect of the landscape so that no shadows remain. Luther reminds us that many aspects of that landscape remain shrouded in darkness, and that many find themselves called to walk in those shadowlands. Lewis is right: theology gives us a lens through which we can interpret the world, making sense of its ordering and its enigmas. 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, Lewis and Luther both believed that 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 is spoken by God, a reassurance of both his presence and power: ‘Behold, I make all things new’ (Revelation 21.5).