We live in a world haunted by sin and suffering. But it’s also one that points us to a glory beyond imagining.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
I rarely frequent the app formerly known as Twitter for long enough to be angered by anything, but I was last week.
A friend of mine posted a prayer request for her son, hospitalized for schizophrenia, with which he’s been grappling a long time. Most of the responses were what one would expect—expressions of love and concern.
One, though, was from a Christian man telling my friend that she could solve this problem quite easily: by taking away “secular” TV and music and video games. That response would be repulsive enough, but then I went and looked at some of this person’s other posts.
One of them, from sometime past, warned people about thinking about matters such as the Holocaust. He cited a famous Christian musician who went to Auschwitz and lost his faith in Christ. It’s better to think instead, this man recommended, about things that are lovely and pure.
Even Job’s friends had better counsel. Yes, many people have lost their faith—or never come to it—because they could not reconcile a good God with the atrocities and suffering they see in the world. Think of Dostoevsky’s chilling arguments from the mouth of Ivan Karamazov, for instance. The sort of willed ignorance to grave evil is hardly, though, a Christian response to such questions.
If this posture were just the ramblings of some random person online, I wouldn’t have given it much thought. But the sentiment expressed on that account—albeit crudely and rudely expressed—is one that many people unwittingly take: If I just remain very still and don’t think about what’s lurking out there, it will go away.
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