Last Saturday afternoon, a gunman entered the School of Engineering at Brown University and killed two students, wounding nine others. Two days later, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named Nuno Gomes Loureiro was shot multiple times outside his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, and later died from his injuries.
Late last night, police announced that the suspect in both shootings had been found dead in a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire.
They identified the suspect as Claudio Neves Valente, 48, a Portuguese national. According to Brown University President Christina Paxson, Valente was enrolled at the Ivy League school from the autumn of 2000 to the following spring, studying for a PhD in physics. He had “no current active affiliation” with the university, she said.
Officials said they also believe Valente killed Prof. Loureiro. Both he and the suspect had studied at the same university in Portugal in the late 1990s, police said.
Initial findings indicated that Valente died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Police were unable to comment on how long he might have been inside the storage unit. No motive in the shootings has been revealed at this writing.
“His answer was faith in faith”
Frederick Buechner taught at Harvard Divinity School one semester, where he met a student who “said once that what he believed in was faith, and when I asked him faith in what, his answer was faith in faith.”
Buechner responded:
I don’t mean to disparage him—he was doing the best he could—but it struck me that having faith in faith was as barren as being in love with love or having money that you spend only on the accumulation of more money.
At the same time, I think I understand the student’s perspective.
Having “faith in faith” brings significant benefits to those who embrace it. They are able to connect in a way with transcendence beyond themselves. They are likely to engage in religious activities proven to enhance mental health, economic well-being, self-esteem, and empathy. They may be part of a community of like-minded individuals with whom they can share the challenges and joys of life.
And yet, when tragedies such as the shootings we’re discussing occur, they are untroubled by the painful questions such suffering inevitably poses for those who hold faith in Jesus.
A suffering child anywhere in the universe
Christians say their God is all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful—claims which pain and grief threaten every time they strike. If you knew these shootings would happen before they did and had the power to stop them, of course you would. Any moral person would do the same.
And yet the God of Christianity did not.
Atheism is a typical response to innocent suffering. As Sam Harris stated, a suffering child anywhere in the universe calls into question the existence of God.
But if you don’t want to go so far as to claim rather audaciously that God cannot exist, you can focus your faith on faith itself. You can believe in belief and practice religion to the degree that such practices meet your needs without needing to understand how the object of your faith could allow or cause the suffering and grief of our daily lives.
In fact, this is precisely what you might be doing right now.
An article I didn’t want to write
I intended to write a very different article this morning before news regarding the Brown shooting broke overnight. I didn’t want to have to think about this tragedy and did not want to talk about it with you so close to Christmas. I wanted to focus on something more uplifting and encouraging. And the compassion fatigue resulting from so much bad news in the news made it hard to want to focus yet again on the connection and collision of tragedy and biblical faith.
If you’re like me, you would rather not try to understand how to hold onto belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God in the face of innocent suffering. It’s not that you reject such faith. You would not go as far as Buechner’s student in claiming a mere “faith in faith.”
But you would like to leave the difficult questions regarding your faith to others and focus on the positives. You would rather I talk about the joys and traditions of Christmas, the inspirational and encouraging aspects of our shared religion. So would I.
However, this is only because I happen not to be facing such questions at the moment. The next time suffering and grief find me, I will once again echo the visceral cry of our Savior, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46, quoting Psalm 22:1).
“The suffering and the love are one”
So, today is not a day to ignore the hard question of innocent suffering. It is not a day to subconsciously embrace a “faith in faith” that leaves the heartbreaking perplexities of life to the side.
It is rather a day to admit that our finite minds cannot by definition understand the mind of an infinite Supreme Being (Isaiah 55:9). It is a day to be honest about our questions and struggles but then take them to the God who urges us to “argue together” with him (a literal translation of Isaiah 1:18).
It is a day to recognize that the greater our pain, the greater our need for a Great Physician. And it is a day to remember that faith in God, like all relationships, requires a commitment that transcends the evidence and becomes self-validating. In other words, the more we trust God when we do not understand him, the more we will eventually (and eternally) come to understand the God we trust (1 Corinthians 13:12).
Above all, it is a day to do the things faith in the God of Scripture calls us to do: Pray for the victims of these horrific shootings and all affected by them (cf. 1 Timothy 2:1). Trust tragedy when it strikes to the God who walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death (Psalm 23:4). And believe that he redeems all he allows and look for ways to be the hands and feet of Jesus in serving the suffering with practical compassion (cf. Romans 8:28; 1 Corinthians 12:27).
Such responses do not explain the unexplainable. But they offer something far better: the personal help and transcendent hope of a Savior who was born into our suffering at Christmas and has never left us.
To close with another reflection from Frederick Buechner:
“When someone we love suffers, we suffer with that person, and we would not have it otherwise, because the suffering and the love are one, just as it is with God’s love for us.”
Why do you need this reminder today?
Quote for the day:
“Because of Christ, our suffering is not useless. It is part of the total plan of God, who has chosen to redeem the world through the pathway of suffering.” —R. C. Sproul
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