Wandering In Darkness: Eleonore Stump on Suffering, Evil, and Personal Encounter

The Table Audio w/ Evan Rosa

“The heart of Christianity is personal relationship, persons sharing love with each other. And so for Christians, the greatest thing for human being is not character development. It's loving personal relationship. The idea in the Christian tradition is that something about suffering enables you—doesn't make you, but it enables you—to open and open and open and open more deeply to God. When you are more open to God, you are also more open to other people. So that the best thing for human beings in the world is personal relationship. And that's the thing that suffering enables you to have more of.” Eleonore Stump is an exemplar of faith seeking understanding, fides quaerens intellectum. She's a philosopher in the Thomist tradition, which she brings fiercely and beautifully to bear in her incisive philosophical commentary and analysis on difficult matters.

She is the Robert J. Henle Professor of Philosophy at St. Louis University, where she's taught since 1992. She's also an honorary professor at Wuhan University and the Logos Institute at University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She's a professorial fellow at Australian Catholic University. She's published extensively in philosophy of religion, contemporary metaphysics, and medieval philosophy. Her books include a major study of Thomas Aquinas. Her extensive treatment of the problem of evil, Wandering in Darkness, is the focal piece for this interview. Her most recent work on the atonement of Christ came out just last year.

Show Notes

• 3:22—The problem of suffering in the West: "If there is some sort of supernatural entity that watches over human beings, if that entity or entities has care for human beings, and has power and mind, why do we suffer the way we do? What's wrong with our world that it looks like this?"
• 6:07—Suffering and the desires of the heart. “Another way to think about suffering, and it's an age‑old way that is very wise, is to see suffering as a function of what we care about. We care about our own flourishing as the human beings that we are and the things that get in the way of that flourishing, those are the things that cause us suffering.”
• 7:59—A different take on the problem of suffering. “[I]t's what we care about that makes suffering. Therefore, the question is really something like this. If there is an all powerful, all knowing, all good, perfectly loving God, why wouldn't He want you to have what is good for you and what you care about? That's how you would feel toward your own child. Why wouldn't the Deity think that about his children?”
• 8:43—The starting point for the project of theodicy.
• 9:32—Early Christians and the magnificence of being allowed to suffer.
• 11:12—Suffering and the shaping of character. “It's tied to the fact that you know that the children who grow up in highly protective, over protective rich cuddled surrounding where they never face suffering and they never face challenges, you know they're not going come out very well.”
• 12:22—Ad Break: “Charting a Course Through Grief” A free 8-week ecourse with a variety helpful resources on grief.
• 14:35—Loving personal relationship as the purpose of suffering. “The heart of Christianity is personal relationship, persons sharing love with each other. For a Christian, the greatest thing for a human being is not character development, but it's loving personal relationship. The idea in the Christian tradition is that something about suffering enables you, it doesn't make you, but it enables you to open and open and open and open more deeply to God. When you are more open to God, you're also more open to other people, so that the best thing for human beings in the world is personal relationship. That's the thing that suffering enables you to have more of. That's the idea. Of course, it's just an enabling, it doesn't guarantee it. You can become bitter and hateful in suffering also.”
• 15:55—On suffering as a means to human flourishing but in itself: a poison. “The morally sufficient reason for God to allow suffering has to do with the goods that suffering brings, but those goods, closer personal relationship with a loving God and with each other, that doesn't make suffering any less awful and you must never get confused and think it does.”
• 17:40—600 pages on the Problem of Evil in 60 seconds.
• 18:28—Reaching out to others, vulnerability, and the horror of suffering. “The whole Earth is soaked with the tears of the suffering. That is a horrible fact.”
• 19:55—We are both sufferers and perpetrators of suffering. “We perpetrate such ghastly suffering on one another. That's part of the story. That's part of the vulnerability we have to recognize too. We are prone to do these things to one another. That kind of recognition is also important for the problem of suffering.”
• 21:10—Narrative, the details of human life, and the failure of philosophy to answer the problem of suffering. “It is important to understand that suffering has got a lot more human detail, a lot more human complexity to it than something as simple as intrinsic individual valuable characteristics of a person. It's also important to see the details of what a trade could be in any individual life, what you lose in suffering. Think about it this way. In suffering, you lose something that you care about. And if God is going to be justified in allowing that suffering, it has to be that somehow, you get more of what you care about than you would if you hadn't suffered.”
• 25:07—Ad break: “Seeking Christian Wisdom for Life’s Biggest Questions” via Biola LEARN (15% off your next course)
• 26:48—On the suffering of God. “When the Biblical text said, "Jesus weeps." Who's weeping? We have only one candidate. The person of the incarnate Christ is weeping. That person is divine. That's God weeping.”
• 30:22—Being face-to-face with God in uniting relationship. “Union is a matter of being in a position, you might say, to share attention with God, to share face‑to‑face interaction with God.”
• 34:32—On art and suffering. “There is grace though, and wonder on the way. Only they are hard to see, hard to embrace for those compelled to wander in darkness.”

Credits

• Hosted and produced by Evan Rosa
• A Resource of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought, which is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Production and Engineering by the Narrativo Group. More info at Narrativogroup.com
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Kaleb Cohen
• Follow: @EvanSubRosa / @BiolaCCT / cct.biola.edu