Images of cruelty, full of horror, faces engraved by war. Bodies in bags, children with a plain look. Pictures from Ukraine for weeks. And a question. God exists;
It is an ancient question that philosophers, theologians, countless believers, and many others have tried to approach, often in vain. How is it possible for a God, whom Christianity describes as loving and generous, to allow evil and suffering? These days the focus is on Ukraine, where more and more atrocities are coming to light during this aggressive Russian war. Evil in this case can be identified very clearly. It’s Russia because it started him. What is the meaning of this war and the crimes committed?
“The dead in the hands of God”
Christians face a dilemma. In the New Testament he writes that God is love. Apply; Does a whimsical God sit upstairs with the remote control in his hand and direct helpless people around the world like little robots? Or is he not so strong after all? So what is the point of praying in his name? Thomas Hike, an Old Testament professor at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, thinks the question of why God allows a war like this in Ukraine is inappropriate. “God is asking us much bigger questions.
In the case of Ukraine for the attitude of the West. From a human point of view, the death of people is an endless terrible tragedy, an irreplaceable loss. But I know that the dead are in the hands of God. On the contrary, for the mourners and the suffering, it is a loud accusation of the sluggishness of politics and the economy at the highest level. “The hunger for cheaper energy seems to have been stronger than the willingness to move on to an energy transition and not be dependent on Russia.”
Why suffering and injustice?
The Old Testament in particular is imbued with the question, why should there be suffering and injustice? It fuels an ongoing discussion. Wars of great peoples against small ones, oppression, struggles, this is constantly the “panorama” of the Old Testament. “The Bible does not offer a specific answer or solution, it only encourages the need for everyone to turn to God and seek righteousness,” says the German professor. “The basic hope that the Bible gives us is that God will let everything go well, in any way. And if not in this life, then in the next. It should not be a cheap consolation, but it should give us hope, now. How deeply rooted this hope was in humanity is shown by the fact that the stories, prayers and commandments of the Old Testament were copied over and over again. It was an extremely long and complicated process at that time. “We just stole something that was valuable and important to someone.”
Special prayer for the victims of the war in Ukraine
New Testament expert Thomas Zeding focuses in an article in Christ in der Gegenwart last March on the question, “Why suffer in suffering?” Are those who suffer ultimately to blame in any form? Are we dealing with a punishing God? Is guilt passed on to the next generations? “The abolition of the theodicy, according to which God punishes in his judgment the unbelievers, the careless, the irrational, as seen from their sufferings, is the first step, which must be done again and again,” says Zedig. . “Because the prejudice that the victims themselves are to blame for their suffering is deeply rooted in people and cultural memory.
“Jesus himself harshly criticized this apparent mechanism.” The well-known Catholic theologian Johann Batiste Mets, who died in 2019, in his text “The Mysticism of the Open Eye”, stressed that the first look of Jesus does not fall on sin, but on suffering. Mets, who returned to his comrades-in-arms as a sixteen-year-old soldier in World War II but found them all dead, was intensely concerned with the issue of human suffering and the big question of how theology could exist after Auschwitz. And his answer? Christianity needs a mysticism of painfully “open eyes” to suffering. The essence of Christianity is compassion.
In the divine services, in the services of Holy Week and the Resurrection, such questions about human suffering are at the center. At the Cross raised by the Son of God according to tradition, who suffered and testified. Due to the war in Ukraine, the Conference of German Bishops announced a new prayer-supplication for the Good Friday Service. We read:
We are omnipotent, eternal God,
You are stronger than the oppressors of this world,
Save all the victims of this injustice and war today,
Change the hearts of those who do evil,
And let peace prevail.
Amen.
source: DW
Source: News Beast
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