In 1518, Martin Luther wrote an explanation of his 95 theses on indulgences and addressed it to Pope Leo X. Luther wanted the Holy Father to understand that much more was at stake than an academic dispute over what indulgences can and cannot do. His opponents were necessarily wrong about indulgences (and everything else) because they did not understand how God reveals himself to human beings. They knew God as glorious and powerful, and concluded that they would look for God in all that is triumphant and beautiful. Penalties for breaking church law are shameful and humiliating, so no wonder they loved the indulgences that promised to remove those penalties.
Luther knew that a glorious and powerful God means nothing to sinners like himself. He searched for a gracious God, and found one revealed in the crucified Jesus. His opponents, the “theologians of glory,” despised suffering and weakness, but Luther knew that God — the only God who can help us — can be found nowhere else.
Thus was born the “theology of the cross,” the concept that God’s actions to save us look like the very opposite of salvation, just as God’s mercy on display at the cross appeared as his wrath. We tend to say “God is at work in my life” when there is obvious success or progress; Luther recognized that God is most at work precisely when he seems the most absent.
Pastor Brad Gray’s new volume, Finding God in the Darkness (from 1517 Publishing) offers a reflection on the theology of the cross, with particular application to mental illness. As Christians, we frequently feel the urge to round off the edges of disappointing or terrifying seasons so that they fit into a clean narrative of God’s Wonderful Plan For My Life. But in this way we become like Luther’s opponents, who felt that the absence of discernible victory signaled the absence of Christ. By contrast, Brad stares down the barrenness and horror of mental suffering, convinced that it is here where we find Christ, not lose him.
Brad wrote this book as a response to the rapid collapse of his mother’s mental health in 2018. His mother, “the staid, sober-minded pastor’s wife of three decades,” entered into a state of mental darkness so deep that she could not recognize her own children. She described being pursued, accused, on trial. For months, nothing could snap her out of it.
There are nights we pass through which do not reconcile easily with the providential care of a loving God. It is not easy to understand why a committed believer should live in “nonsensical darkness,” as Brad memorably puts it, but it happens. As he notes in an early chapter, we can find a measure of comedic relief in the spectacle of our little plans butting up against Reality, but we cannot write off the universe as ultimately absurd and still remain Christians.
Brad explores the two biblical books most directly concerned with the problems of suffering (Job and Ecclesiastes), only to find that they do not even try to “justify the ways of God to man” as Milton once set out to do. While both books ultimately affirm the sovereignty of God, neither offers explanations of how our specific pain fits into any kind of master plan (and Job in particular seems to reject such explanations).
To be sure, there is a strong biblical tradition that suffering refines us (e.g., 1 Pet 1:7). But, as Brad notes, approaching these passages in the wrong way reduces them almost to the level of such (admittedly hilarious) platitudes as “Your setback is just the setup for your comeback!” Theologians of glory will only accept suffering if it makes them stronger in some recognizable fashion, like a quarterback working his way back from a fractured leg to lead his team to the Super Bowl. Suffering indeed refines us, but Brad’s insight is that what it refines primarily is our reliance upon, and therefore knowledge of, Christ. To bring together a couple of passages from different parts of the book: “[I]t is precisely in and through suffering that we obtain knowledge of who God is, what he is like, and what he values … suffering [is] fundamentally revelatory.”
The key issue now, as it was in the 16th century, is that of how and where God reveals himself. The reality is that success, glory, and power pull us away from the one place where a gracious God has revealed himself: the Man on the tree who became a curse for us. He alone can save us, and suffering alone brings us to him. “Suffering,” Brad writes, “becomes the primary paradigm for the knowledge of God himself.” The darkness simply extinguishes all other lights: “Salvation is for those who have no other option.”
None of which minimizes or relativizes suffering, and in particular mental illness. Brad has much wisdom to offer from a pastoral perspective on what not to say to those suffering from severe depression or anxiety (including a welcome passage about being careful with Romans 8:28). And he has the courage to describe how forcing a sick brain to engage in rigorous spiritual disciplines just makes the problem worse. From long personal experience, I have found depression and anxiety do not “strengthen” faith in the way that phrase is usually understood, i.e., they do not leave the sufferer with confident assurance that God is working all things together for good. What they do is make theologies of glory impossible. Either Christ is for you when you can literally do nothing, or he is not for you at all.
The theologian of the cross, says Luther, calls a thing what it is. He is freed from having to spin his experiences, from having to write a clean story of how he overcame adversity (with some help from God). I’m grateful to Brad for showing us a more honest, and ultimately more hopeful way of approaching our suffering — one that acknowledges the absurdity and chaos, but that finds, with Luther (and Paul), that it is in suffering that a gracious God reveals himself.
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Brilliant!