The Problem of the Good

F. LeRon Shultz has given me some new language to refer to a collection of problems we encounter all around us, "The Problem of the Good". In Reforming the Doctrine of God he writes:

Framing the issue simply as the "problem of evil" misses the broader biblical understanding of human and divine agency. Already in the story of the Garden of Eden, eating from the forbidden tree signifies the acquisition of "the knowledge of good and evil" (Gen. 2:17). The problem in Jesus' ministry is not merely the evils that threaten the poor but the goods (wealth, oppressive power) that seduce the rich. To those who had been crushed by the evils of social injustice, Jesus brought healing and wholeness. The resistance to divine agency in the ministry of Jesus was strongest among those who had the "goods" of earthly life. This means that Christian theology must also speak of "the problem of the good."

It seems to me that the "problem of the good" manifests itself in several ways. Early on, Moses warns of the problem of prosperity in Deuteronomy 8 — the danger that when we have lived in prosperity we will forget God who brought us out of the land of bondage. When one compares the vitality of the Christian church in the two-thirds world to that of the developed world, it is hard not to concur with Moses' warning about prosperity.

There is another problem that Joseph Ratzinger helped raise my awareness to, although it had been pushed much closer to the surface by numerous other writers, including Isaiah. At one point in his book Jesus of Nazareth, the current pope is examining the prayer Jesus taught his disciples, and notes that the entire prayer is in the plural: "Our Father, ... give us this day our daily bread ... " If we, together in community, pray for daily bread, and God gives that sufficient bread into the hands of a few, then He has fully answered our communal prayer. But if the few retain the good gift of God for themselves, then the intent of our communal prayer is not achieved. And as prosperous North Americans who have cupboards full, we may need to ask whether the good bread we have filled our stomachs and our cupboards with was not in fact the bread we were given to answer the prayer of our poor brothers.

So the "problem of the good" warns us who live in prosperity that not only must we guard against forgetting God, but even when we recognize our goods as coming from God and give Him heartfelt thanks, we are not finished. Rather we ought also to ask whether the prosperity we experience and thank God for is indeed our own to enjoy, or that which belongs to our poorer brother or sister.

But there is yet another aspect of the "problem of the good" that afflicts us — an aspect that arises in the context of our pursuit of the good, even our pursuit of the good on behalf of the other. How often have we tried to do good to another — to express our love or support, perhaps — but the means we choose to do that good do not deliver the desired result — our actions or words, understood in the context of the other's personal history and pain, bring pain rather than comfort, discouragement rather than support, anger rather than peace. And yet our intent was to do good and our actions, too, in another context, were good.

This problem of our pursuit of the good arises particularly in the context of church leadership. Many good things, good aspirations, become problematic without our notice. Our pursuit of "excellence", for example, can exclude from service many whom God has placed in our midst for our mutual growth and encouragement, not to mention those for whom service would have been the means for their own healing or salvation — people we exclude because they or their skills do not yet measure up to our ideal of "excellence". Our employment of the best current thinking on strategic planning, or vision casting, or leadership dynamics, or whatever valuable skill or technique we choose to use in our pursuit of the good can so easily blind us to the gifts that God has placed among us in our community — gifts that thus go unutilized, or worse, are suppressed and damaged.

Jesus pointed this problem of the good out to the scribes and teachers of the law. For all their study of God's word, and their application of it to the lives of the people, the end result was not the good they sought. Rather Jesus' evaluation was that they had merely laid on the people crushing burdens, and had not lifted a finger to ease the load. We see this too in our churches today, and on the blogosphere — people who are so intent on pursuing the good of biblical study and solid doctrine that they place crushing burdens on the weak and refuse to help lift the load — even to the extent of railing against any who would try to ease the burden of this poor, burdens sinners.

I, and others, have written elsewhere of the dangers of allowing our vision of the good to become our supreme objective, indeed our God. In Life Together Bonhoeffer writes of how "God hates visionary men", because in their pursuit of their vision of what Christian community ought to be, they actually destroy the community that God has called together. Gordon MacDonald wrote recently in an ill-titled piece The Dangers of Missionalism of the dangers of a belief that our worth as persons is derived from the accomplishment of some great work, some great good.

A worst case scenario from a generation ago might be Jim Jones and his horrific ending in Guyana. The mission became all-consuming, and it turned dark. Not only did the leader go down, but most of his followers self-destructed, too.

Time and time again we see the ill-fated effects of the pursuit of the good, by pastors, by elders, by church members, by denominations and denominational leaders, by people of all sorts within the church (and without). So much so that one current DMin student is doing her dissertation on the experience of individuals who have encountered significant stress, grief and pain as a result of church leaders' pursuit of the good, as they understood it.

But perhaps the biggest problem we encounter with this whole matter comes when we fail to understand that we are working with the "problem of the good", categorize it instead as the "problem of evil", and end up demonizing those whose actions have brought us pain, grief, distress and oppression. Because then we ourselves end up becoming the "evil" against which we fight — ourselves becoming the perpetrators of violence, cruelty and oppression.

The problem of the good is a big problem indeed.