Dorothee Sölle (1929–2003) was a German Lutheran activist, theologian, and academic. Her most well-known work on the problem of pain is Suffering, in which she develops a theology of the cross involving three distinct dimensions of affliction. The first dimension is physical pain. Sölle regards physical suffering to be the least consequential of the three because, once it is gone, it can be forgotten. The second is psychological suffering—the feeling of “imprisonment in pain,” or of being “empty,” or poured out. The final and worst is social degradation, in which the sufferer is abandoned or, in many cases, ridiculed, hated, and blamed for her state of suffering. According to Sölle, Christianity’s response to each of these forms of suffering has too often taken the form of theological sadism, serving only to worsen the affliction of the sufferer.
Dimensions of Affliction
In a certain sense all affliction has an anachronistic character: tuberculosis among the Indians in Argentina as well as the landscape of Vietnam, made to look as barren as the moon. It is not our time, this time of affliction—it can’t be true! “Our senses attach all the scorn, all the revulsion, all the hatred that our reason attaches to crime, to affliction” [says Simone Weil]. Gratuitous solidarity with the afflicted changes nothing; precise knowledge that such suffering could be avoided becomes our defense against addressing it. Only our own physical experience and our own experience of social helplessness and threat compel us “to recognize the presence of affliction.” Our experience of anachronistic suffering, that objectively need no longer exist, alters even our understanding of time. It strips us of all superiority that grows out of feeling of progress and puts us in the same time-frame with the one who is suffering anachronistically. We can only help sufferers by stepping into their time-frame. Otherwise we would only offer condescending charity that reaches down from on high.
The recognition of the three dimensions of suffering—physical, psychological, and social—is fundamental for probing the problem more deeply. The unity of the three dimensions can be demonstrated by means of many texts and testimonies, best perhaps by means of those psalms that belong to the genre of so-called individual psalms of lament (for example, Pss. 16, 22, 73, 88, 116). The elements of lament keep recurring: illness and physical pain in which people find themselves crushed and dried up; physical and psychological symptoms of dissolution which are often depicted with words like “pour out, empty”; abandonment by friends, neighbors, and intimates; imprisonment in pain so that one no longer has time or place to experience personal or corporate salvation; being in the sphere of death, in its grasp. Suffering, as it appears in the lament, threatens every dimension of life: time to await what is promised, freedom of movement and opportunity for development, vital association with others, food and health and living space as one’s share of the land of promise. This kind of suffering has social dimensions—isolation, loneliness, ostracism—as well as physical…
The story of Jesus’ passion is in this sense a narrative about suffering. It is falsified whenever it is robbed of one of its dimensions, as has happened in various epochs of church history and art history. It is the story of a man whose goal is shattered. But this despair over his own cause would be incomplete—and below the level of other human suffering—without the physical and social experience the story describes. Without blood, sweat, and tears, without the threat and experience of torture, it would remain on a purely spiritual level. And the disintegration of his company of followers is part of this experience of suffering, for Jesus is denied, betrayed, and abandoned by his friends.
Unconditional Submission
In Christian literature on suffering these three dimensions, especially the social one, are more or less suppressed. Religious pamphlets on suffering proceed from several common fundamental motifs:
Affliction comes from God’s hand. The connection between sin and sickness is recognized far too little. Sin is the deepest and most essential root of sickness. The person who is sick fails to recognize this essential cause of sickness and attributes his suffering to “external circumstances, to natural causes.” Full health will be realized in the age to come. Sickness is a splendid opportunity to grow and mature inwardly. Don’t you feel how God is at work in you precisely while you are sick? The grace that is operative as one suffers is more valuable than physical healing. Affliction is a means of training used by God’s salutary love.
It is possible to summarize two tendencies that appear in the material presented in this study. One is the vindication of divine power through human powerlessness…
Corresponding to this tendency is the other, on the human side, to push for a willingness to suffer, which is called for as a universal Christian attitude… Why God sends affliction is no longer asked. It is sufficient to know he causes it. In this way one represses all other causes of suffering, particularly the social causes, and doesn’t deal rationally with the actual causes…
Often, however, this purely individualistic view sidesteps reality because it overlooks other people involved in the situation. However we understand Christ’s injunction, “Do not resist evil” (Matt. 5:39), it is not intended to apply to evil that is destroying others. Jesus criticized with extreme harshness those who make others suffer and lead astray “the little ones”; a millstone is to be hung around their necks (Matt. 18:6). It is really not enough for a person to transform his own suffering “into a positive element of his own self-fulfillment…”
Almost all Christian interpretations, however, ignore the distinction between suffering that we can and cannot end. And, by referring to the universality of sin, they deny the distinction, in a marriage involving guilt, for instance, between the guilty and the innocent party.
To that extent the Christian interpretations of suffering sketched here amount to a recommendation of masochism…
There have been innumerable religious attempts to explain suffering. The difficulty here lies less in the existential interpretation that people give to their pain than in the later theological systematization, which has no use for suffering that hasn’t been named and pigeonholed. Thus, for example, in the Old Testament suffering is divided into “suffering that punishes, trains, tests and serves.” The fact that in some Old Testament passages it is Yahweh himself who injured, wounded, imperiled, and caused illness is systematized into the proposition that all pain comes from God. In late Judaism an expiatory force is ascribed to suffering, which helps people obtain forgiveness for their sins. A distinction is made between cultic means of atonement, such as sacrifice, attendance at the temple, and blood-offerings, and noncultic means, such as repentance, suffering, and death. Suffering, and here one speaks principally of sickness, poverty, and childlessness, is considered to have greater expiatory force than sacrifice, because suffering affects the person himself in a direct way and not just his property and possessions. Suffering imparts to the pious person the sure hope that his guilt is thereby atoned for and that in the life to come he will receive only reward for his good deeds. The ungodly, on the other hand, who are already rewarded here for their few good deeds, have only punishment to await beyond the grave. Thereby the old doctrine of retribution—sin is followed by suffering—has been reversed: atonement results from suffering. To be sure, the structure of a calculable equalization is retained, in fact sharpened.
But these divisions and interpretations, as well as others, fall to pieces in the face of actual experiences. Affliction strikes even the pious. How can it be punishment in that case? The training value of suffering is negligible. The reaction to the real or imagined creator of suffering is pictured in the Old Testament itself as wrath, ill temper. Suffering produces fruits like curses, imprecations, and prayers for vengeance more readily than reform and insight. Suffering causes people to experience helplessness and fear; indeed intense pain cripples all power to resist and frequently leads to despair. It is precisely the Old Testament that corrects again and again theological theories based on the premise that God sends suffering. “For affliction does not come from the dust, nor does trouble sprout from the ground; much more people bring trouble on themselves as the sparks fly upward” (Job 5:6f.)…
Theological Sadism
It is not difficult to criticize Christian masochism, since it has so many features that merit criticism: the low value it places on human strength; its veneration of one who is neither good nor logical but only extremely powerful; its viewing of suffering exclusively from the perspective of endurance; and its consequent lack of sensitivity for the suffering of others.
Nevertheless this masochism of the pious is not the worst thing imaginable. For it offered a kind of help for people, as an existential stance, just in those periods in which the possibilities for lessening suffering were not highly developed. Libidinal impulses are, to be sure, perverted by this stance, but they are not destroyed.
The picture changes as soon as theologians, in a kind of overly-rigorous application of the masochistic approach, sketch in as a companion piece a sadistic God. The libidinal and flexible impulses of pious sufferers are now sadistically fixed by the theologians, who make the wrath of God their essential motif. The God who produces suffering and causes affliction becomes the glorious theme of a theology that directs our attention to the God who demands the impossible and tortures people… The existential experience developed in mysticism that God is with those who suffer is replaced by a theological system preoccupied with judgment day. The situation is not viewed from the standpoint of the sufferer; rather it is through God’s eyes that things are seen and, above all, judged…
The justice of the modern objection against this God is shown by suffering, the suffering of the innocent. And it must be added that in comparison with the enormity of human suffering, all are “innocent.” There is misery that totally exceeds every form of guilt; for all guilt put together it would be “too much.”…
Any attempt to look upon suffering as caused directly or indirectly by God stands in danger of regarding him as sadistic. Therefore it also seems to me problematic to ask, “What is the cause of the suffering of the God who suffers with imprisoned, persecuted and murdered Israel,” or whether Christ suffered merely because of “human injustice and human wickedness.” Jürgen Moltmann has repeated the attempt to show that Jesus suffers “at God’s hands, that God causes suffering and crucifies—at least in the case of this one person. On the one hand, Moltmann has carved out the figure of the “crucified God,” the “suffering, poor, defenseless Christ,” and criticized the ancient ideal of an apathetic God by portraying God as the “God of the poor, the peasants and the slaves,” who suffers “in us, where love suffers.” But this intention, this passion for suffering, is weakened and softened through the theological system that transmits it. God is not understood only or even primarily as the loving and suffering Christ. He is simultaneously supposed to occupy the position of the ruling, omnipotent Father. Moltmann attempts to develop a “theology of the cross” from the perspective of the one who originates and causes suffering. This correlates with an understanding of suffering as a process within the Trinity, whereby “one of the persons of the Trinity” underwent suffering while another person of the Trinity was the very one who caused it. An example of this kind of theology is instructive: What happened here is what Abraham did not need to do to Isaac (cf. Rom. 8:32): Christ was quite deliberately abandoned by the Father to the fate of death: God subjected him to the power of corruption, whether this be called man or death. To express the idea in its most acute form, one might say in the words of the dogma of the early church: the first person of the Trinity casts out and annihilates the second…
[T]heological sadism… school[s] people in thought patterns that regard sadistic behavior as normal, in which one worships, honors, and loves a being whose “radicality,” “intentionality,” and “greatest sharpness” is that he slays. The ultimate conclusion of theological sadism is worshiping the executioner.
Dorothee Sölle, Suffering, trans. Everett R. Kalin (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975), 15-23, 25-7.