Christianity is full of paradoxes and mysteries that challenge the ability of rationally minded people to fully apprehend the faith intellectually in the same way they are able to do with social and professional pursuits. To many of these people, even the most thoughtful theological Orthodoxy falls short in providing a cohesive and logical world view that adequately addresses the intellectual challenges of suffering. Even with the most brilliant theological and apologetic explanations of the theodicy problem, there still seems to be a large intellectual chasm between a God that loves and a world that suffers.

Perhaps it is not a theoretical knowledge gap (epistēmē) that can be filled in with theology, but a practical knowledge gap (technē) that can be addressed by lived experience of being Christian (Orthopraxy). In this case, it is possible that if someone practices Christianity for long enough, the lived experience of the Sacraments will help to build a sacramental life that is able to comprehend suffering in a lived experiential sense that supersedes the intellect. This is what may be considered the long road to knowing Jesus and thereby knowing yada, “an intimate personal knowledge of and participation in God’s anguished love for God's people” (Katongole, Born From Lament, 163).

Suffering is an essential element of what it means to be human (Behr, Becoming Human), and it is impossible to make sense of why some people are subjected to more suffering than others and why some suffering is so seemingly unnecessary. For example, in the wake of Auschwitz, German theologians confronted the problem that so much human suffering happens at the hands of other humans. Within this stark reality, Metz explained how the dangerous memory of suffering becomes a paradoxical source of power (Metz, “The Dangerous Memory of Jesus Christ”), Söelle showed the benefits of suffering in helping people to be more sensitive to the suffering of others in a way that gives humanity hope, (Sölle. Suffering, 126) and Moltmann clarifies the distinction between a suffering victim and someone who accepts suffering actively for the sake of love (Moltmann, Jesus Christ for Today’s World, 44).

The work of these theologians is helpful to people who are suffering to give it meaning and to help them feel that what they are going through is not senseless suffering; nevertheless, choosing to withstand suffering requires a great deal of discernment. There are times to resist and times to escape suffering. Even the same Jesus who chose to willingly give himself up to death on the cross also escaped Herod as an infant (Matthew 2). Therefore, even if one accepts suffering as an existential reality, this does not mean that one must accept all suffering at all times, or put oneself in a position to continue to suffer in perpetuity.

The birth through lament spoken of by Emmanuel Katongole and the costly grace of Dietrich Bonhoeffer are callings to continue to serve and worship not “despite the struggle of being in a community” but “because of the struggle of being in a community.”

“I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a letter to Reinhold Niebuhr, Summer 19399 Being in community is a fundamental need that all humans have, and this need is fulfilled by religious communities for some (Matthews, Bonhoeffer, 17).

There is a joke that tells of two people of faith who were rescued from a desert island, and the rescuers saw they had built three houses of worship. When asked, the two people said “well, this is my house of worship, that is the other person’s house of worship, and that over there is the one that neither one of us would even think of going to” (Peck, The Different Drum). This folk wisdom disguised as humor exposes that even a community of two people can be broken up by disagreement, and that people seem to find some morbid comfort in “othering.” This is an unfortunate reality that creates the paradox of at once knowing the value of being in community and the challenges that inevitably transpire as a result of being in community. The two opposite extreme responses to these challenges are to walk away, or to pretend that everything is fine.

By staying in community while still keeping one’s eyes open to systemic injustices, there is an experience of personal and communal suffering that one chooses to accept for the sake of love. This kenotic response to suffering is what Oscar Romero called the “violence of love” and what Christopher Munzihirwa does not see as a terminal illness but instead as a cure for spiritual blindness (Katongole, Born From Lament, 177.). “Seeing” in this way does not happen if people ignore problems, nor does it happen automatically, nor does it happen by accident.

For suffering to have a therapeutic effect, it must be named and lamented with a prayerful invitation for God to give eyes with which to see that God is doing a “new thing” that will replace the “former things” (Isaiah 43:18-19) (Katongole, Born From Lament, 214). To do so, there must be a clear distinction made between the servants of God who commit offenses, and God who not only disapproves but is actively working to remedy such offenses. This is where it is important to remember that this knowledge of God does not come from an epistēmē that can be explained, or even a technē that can be demonstrated, but a yada that must be personally experienced for it to make sense that God “responds to evil through an excess of love” (Katongole, Born From Lament, 123).

The holocaust is one of the greatest horrors of modern history, and its Nazi perpetrators have made themselves synonymous with evildoers. Where does God stand in relation to these and other such atrocities? If we accept the reality that people see God through God’s servants, then we can see two potential icons of God in Nazi Germany. The first possibility is to see God to be as indifferent as the majority of Christian leaders, who have been regarded as complicit in enabling Hitler’s rise to power, since “there was very little active opposition to the Nazi persecution of the Jews or their persecution of political opponents” (Koehne. Central European History, 111). The second possibility is to see God as compassionate, literally co-suffering, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer was when he returned to Germany, “resolved to live in solidarity with his fellow Germans into an uncertain and threatening future” (12 John W. Matthews, “A Brief Biography,” 18). The Christian God of Orthodoxy is the one of Bonhoeffer who resists evil and does not shake its hand in pictures.

When Bonhoeffer went back to Germany to be part of the resistance against Hitler and the Nazis, he was not doing so out of obligation but out of the same excess of love that God pours out in response to suffering (Katongole, Born From Lament, 123). His friend, Eberhard Bethge, said of him that he did not believe “that everyone must act as he did, but from where he was standing, he could see no possibility of retreat into any sinless, righteous, pious refuge. The sin of respectable people reveals itself in flight from responsibility” (Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 11). Bonhoeffer knew Jesus and the Cross well enough to know in a yada sense what it means to carry his own cross. He could not separate being Christian from participating in the story of love that God reveals in Jesus Christ, and by doing so became another living icon of Christ in a world that teaches God’s love not theoretically as epistēmē, or practically as technē, but on a deeper spiritual knowing of love as yada.

Bonhoeffer tries to describe the experience of yada by explaining the meaning of costly grace, which he distinguishes from a cheap grace that takes the gift of God’s love without being willing to be transformed by it into someone who, albeit imperfectly, shares God’s love with others (Bonhoeffer, “Discipleship,” 459-469). The problem with his explanation is that it makes no rational sense when he says things like this grace “is costly, because it costs people their lives; it is grace, because it thereby makes them live” (Ibid, 461). This is the same type of paradox presented by Jesus in saying that “whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it” (Luke 9:24 NKJV; see also Matthew 16:25 and Mark 8:35). To try to understand this intellectually is to try to see with the wrong kind of eyes, resulting in a spiritual blindness that misses the meaning of what God is trying to communicate (Isaiah 6:10; John 12:40). Writing a chapter about costly grace is like painting a picture in musical notes. It may be beyond brilliant to do so, but only someone with the same synesthetic capacity would be able to decode and comprehend the message.

There is a temptation to say that if the only people who could understand are the people who already understand then it is not worth saying anything in the first place. This is not so. When John C. Ford writes against obliteration bombing the year before the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, he is aligning himself with a history of prophetic voices that speak to the hearts of those willing to listen, and is in no way deterred or lessened by the deafness of those who continue to do evil (Ford, “The Morality of Obliteration Bombing”). When Dietrich Bonhoeffer invites others to join him in answering the gracious call to follow Jesus, he is doing so in the same prophetic voice that does not pay any mind to detractors who see only foolishness in “the yoke of following Jesus Christ” (Bonhoeffer, “Discipleship,” 461.). With those with whom it resonates, there is a spiritual embrace that is borne out of the recognition that there is someone else who also knows the yada of the suffering love of Jesus.

This is why the “typically logical, unemotive” Bonhoeffer was so moved by his experience at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem that he said that he “was convinced that it was only among blacks who were oppressed that there could be any real religion in [the United States]” (Williams, Interpreting Bonhoeffer, 168). This is just one example of how it is possible to more clearly see one another through acts of worship that communicate a common experiential yada of the love of God.