Too-Late Post #2: John Piper and suffering

Easily the best picture of Piper on the internet.

Too-Late Post #2 is too late because John Piper was in Sydney on the 31st of August, at the Sydney Entertainment Centre, where he said some things that I was going to blog about but didn't, and now it's halfway through October and I'm only just getting around to it. Anyway, here goes.

John Piper is a great speaker. He's so good, in fact, that after about five minutes of him speaking I totally forgot everything that John Lennox, the previous speaker, had said, which was a shame because I like and agree with Lennox more than I like and agree with Piper. (I also, apparently, like and agree with the heavy use of commas and long sentences.) His theme was the 'unwasted life', and while I broadly agreed with the thrust of his argument there were some things around the edges that I found troubling. Later, in the obligatory Anglican cross-examine-the-speaker's-sermon-because-he-or-she-is-not-God session, I found I had difficulty articulating exactly what those troubles were. This is my attempt to do so more successfully.

By the 'unwasted life' Piper means a life which values Jesus so supremely that you use everything else in your life to show that those things are not your supreme treasure. It's an awkward formulation (Piper probably said it better), but the thrust is that 1) Jesus is what life's about, and 2) you use and pursue other things not as ends in themselves but to illustrate 1). Got money? Be so generous with it that it's obvious that money is not your supreme treasure. Got spare time? Use it in such a way that shows you value Jesus more than spare time.

Now any moderately orthodox Christian, including me, is going to have a hard time disagreeing with any of this. The issue for me came in Piper's explanation of why Jesus should be one's supreme treasure. It's tied into his idea of Christian hedonism, the catchphrase of which is 'Jesus is most magnified in me when I am most satisfied in him', and which argues (I think) that being delighted in God is part of one's Christian duty. Why should we be delighted in God? Well, because of this:

“Every single breath I take is an absolutely free gift of God and my life hangs by a slender thread of divine kindness and it could be cut at any moment, with no wrong to me at all, or you – none ... We need to get our expectations right with God. We always have our fist up in his face when something goes wrong, instead of being stunned when something goes right."

Basically, Piper reckons anything short of your immediate and instantaneous death is by default worthy of celebration, simply because of the fact that God could kill you right now, and be well within his rights to do so. And as far as it goes he's right, kinda; God doesn't owe us anything that we might demand things from him. I just have a niggling feeling that it's a strange view of suffering. Theists have been wrestling with the problem of evil forever; there's even a branch of theology called theodicy which is devoted to dealing with it. Piper's theodicy is simple: suffering exists? So what? What did you expect? Pain and suffering is your default and expectation and anything more is just an unexpected and totally unmerited blessing that God has seen fit to bestow on you.

Again, it's not exactly heresy or anything, it just niggles me. Isn't that a particularly bleak view of God's creation? Doesn't it normalise suffering in a universe that was created without suffering and will eventually be recreated without it? Doesn't it cast aspersions on God's character?

I don't know, I feel like I've used a lot of words to say not a lot. Maybe a concrete example might help to close: Piper said that when he was diagnosed with cancer, he went home and prayed 'God, please don't let me waste this gift.' Now, it's great that he was able to see benefit in suffering. But all I could think at the time was John Piper, cancer is not a gift. Cancer is an evil product of a fallen world. Cancer is one of God's enemies, and when pain and suffering are finally destroyed on the last day cancer will go with them into the abyss so that Christ's victory will be complete. I'm not saying that it's impossible to be blessed through suffering; it is a testament to God's power and grace that he is able to bend even his enemies to do his will in sometimes small but often immense and profound ways. But, seeing the world as a place where cancer is normal and not getting cancer is a blessing is, I think, totally wrong-headed.

I have friends who've lost family members to cancer, and if any of them turn up and call me an idiot I'll immediately retract all of this stuff. But at the moment I'm pretty convinced: cancer is not a gift. I think that's the problem I have with John Piper.