Suffering Religion

201 Pages·2002·1.2 MB·English

by  Robert Gibbs

Suffering Religion
Suffering besets us in diverse ways. Is any speaking about suffering too complicit
with suffering? Is it the task of religion to justify our pain, or even to deny it? Or
does religion offer images, theories and practices that understand God to sufferwith
humanity? Does God choose to suffer? Can theology arm us to resist suffering?
In a diverse and innovative selection of new essays by cutting-edge theo-
logians, scholars of religion, and philosophers, Suffering Religion examines one
of the most primitive but challenging questions to define human experience—
why do we suffer? As a theme uniting very different religious and cultural tradi-
tions, the problem of suffering addresses issues of passivity, the vulnerability of
embodiment, the generosity of love and thecomplexity of gendered desire. Inter-
disciplinary studies bring different kinds of interpretations to meet and enrich
each other. Can the notion of goodness retain meaning in the face of real afflic-
tion, or is pain itself in conflict with meaning?
Themes covered include:
• philosophy’s own failure to treat suffering seriously, with special reference
to the Jewish tradition;
• Martin Buber’s celebrated interpretations of scriptural suffering;
• suffering in Kristevan psychoanalysis, focusing on the Christian theology of
the cross;
• the pain of childbirth in a home setting as a religiously significant choice;
• God’s primal suffering in the kabbalistic tradition;
• incarnation as a gracious willingness to suffer.
With contributions by the editors and Graham Ward, Pamela E. Klassen, Steven
Kepnes, and Cleo McNelly Kearns, Suffering Religion brings together the most
exciting and provocative new discourses in a significant but often neglected field
of study.
Robert Gibbs is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, and the
author of Why Ethics? Signs of Responsibilities (2000). Elliot R. Wolfson is the
Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, and Director of
the Program in Religious Studies at New York University. He has written extens-
ively on Jewish mysticism, and has won American Academy of Religion and
National Jewish Book awards for Through the Speculum That Shines: Vision
and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (1994).
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Suffering Religion
Edited by Robert Gibbs and
Elliot R. Wolfson
London and New York
First published 2002
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
Selection and editorial matter © 2002 Robert Gibbs and Elliot R. Wolfson
Individual contributions © individual contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguingi n PublicationD ata
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Suffering religion / edited by Robert Gibbs & Elliot R. Wolfson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–415–26611–4 (hbk) — ISBN 0–415–26612–2 (pbk.)
1. Suffering—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. Suffering—Religious aspects—
Judaism. I. Gibbs, Robert, 1958– II. Wolfson, Elliot R.
BT732.7.S84 2002
291.2′118—dc21 2001058876
ISBN 0-203-16598-5 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-26060-0 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0–415–26611–4 (hbk)
ISBN 0–415–26612–2 (pbk)
Contents
Contributors vii
Introduction: the study of religion 1
ROBERT GIBBS AND ELLIOT R. WOLFSON
1 Unjustifiable suffering 13
ROBERT GIBBS
2 Rereading Job as textual theodicy 36
STEVEN KEPNES
3 Suffering in theory 56
CLEO McNELLY KEARNS
4 The scandal of pain in childbirth 73
PAMELA E. KLASSEN
5 Divine suffering and the hermeneutics of reading:
philosophical reflections on Lurianic mythology 101
ELLIOT R. WOLFSON
6 Suffering and incarnation 163
GRAHAM WARD
Epilogue: theology and religious studies 181
ROBERT GIBBS AND ELLIOT R. WOLFSON
Index 187
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Contributors
Cleo McNelly Kearns writes on theology, literature and literary theory.
She is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion,
Princeton. She is the author of T.S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: a study
in poetry and belief (1987) and has contributed essays on theological
implications of postmodern critical theory to many periodicals and an-
thologies. She is working on a book on the figure of the Virgin Mary in
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Steven Kepnes is the William Finard Chair of Jewish Studies at Colgate
University. He is the author of Reasoning After Revelation: Dialogues
In Postmodern Jewish Philosophy (with Peter Ochs and Robert Gibbs),
Interpreting Judaism in a Postmodern Age, and The Text as Thou:
Martin Buber’s Hermeneutics and Narrative Theology. He is the former
editor of the Judaism section of Religious Studies Review and currently
serves as the co-chair of the Society of Textual Reasoning and co-editor
of the Journal of Textual Reasoning.
Pamela E. Klassen is Assistant Professor in the Department and Centre
for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. She is the author
of Going by the Moon and the Stars: Stories of Two Russian Mennonite
Women (1994) and Blessed Events; Religion and Home Birth in America
(2001).
Graham Ward is Professor of Contextual Theology and Ethics at the
University of Manchester. He is the author of Barth, Derrida, and the
Language of Theology (1995) and Cities of God (2000) and is editor of
the Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology (2001).
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Introduction 1
Introduction
The study of religion
Robert Gibbs and Elliot R. Wolfson
Responding to suffering
To live in our time is to endure images and stories of horrifyingsuffering.
Sometimes apocalyptic, sometimes catastrophic, sometimesunimaginable
—our world almost deadens us with the suffering of humanity. It is no
special virtue that leads scholars to reflect on such suffering: one caneasily
see that suffering demands responses, and that those who receive that
demand as calling for interpretation, for understanding, for a search for
meaning, will turn their minds to the pains endured by others.Underneath
a vast range of academic inquiry today is a serious, if veiled, struggle to
respond to the unprecedented suffering of the twentieth century. Much
of medical science, of the social sciences, and of the humanities responds
to human suffering, and indeed, often responds to the specific historical
atrocities of our times. Who can study almost any facet of humanculture
and not sense the shadow of the widespread and organized violence of
our recent past? We are scholars in order to resist suffering and violence
and to respond for the suffering that has occurred and that threatens
us still.
Yet in this shared context, the study of religion seems to have a dis-
tinctive engagement with suffering, for religions have explored suffering
with a specific intensity and respect. To focus on religion is not to claim
a higher level of personal responsiveness to suffering, but rather to claim
a privilege for the field in which we work. That privilege is not exclusive
(other fields of inquiry are also valuable and valid), but appears in the
first instance as a quite blunt claim: religions have often taken suffering
seriously and have explored the very task of how to respond to suffering.
They provide practices and interpretations that explore why suffering
besets humanity and how we are to respond to suffering. Of course,
there are religions that deny the reality of suffering, and even more there
are interpreters of religion who might claim to discern such denial, but