Naming the Silences (Academic Paperback)

169 Pages·2004·7.18 MB·English

by  Stanley Hauerwas

NAMING THE SILENCES
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NAMING THE SILENCES
God, Medicine, and the Problem of Suffering
STANLEY HAUERWAS
T&.T CLARK INTERNATIONAL
A Continuum imprint
LONDON • NEW YORK
Published by T&T Clark International
A Continuum imprint
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
15 East 26th Street, Suite 1703, New York, NY 10010
www.tandtclark.com
Copyright © Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 1990
Originally published in the USA by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand
Rapids
First published by T&T Clark Ltd under licence from Wm. B. Eerdmans in 1993
This edition published 2004
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0567040410 (paperback)
Printed on acid-free paper in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham,
Wilts
To
Kelli and Logan
For their courage, compassion, and grace
and to
Sarah Austin
who is the joy
I have been daily grateful for the friend who
remarked that grief isolates. He did not mean only
that I, grieving, am isolated from you, happy. He
meant also that shared grief isolates the sharers from
each other. Though united in that we are grieving,
we grieve differently. As each death has its own
character, so too each grief over a death has its own
character—its own escape. The dynamics of each
person's sorrow must be allowed to work themselves
out without judgment. I may find it strange that
you should be tearful today but dry-eyed yesterday
when my tears were yesterday. But my sorrow is not
your sorrow.
There’s something more: I must struggle so hard to
regain life that I cannot reach out to you. Nor you
to me. The one not grieving must touch us both. It's
when people are happy that they say, "Let's get
together.”
(Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son)
Contents
Preface ix
CHAPTER I
A Child’s Dying 1
CHAPTER II
Theology, Theodicy, and Medicine 39
CHAPTER III
Medicine as Theodicy 97
Index 153
C vii }
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Preface
I
should like to write a book to help people cope with
inexplicable pain and suffering—a book like Harold
Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People. To write
such a book one would have to be a poet, since only the
poets, poets like the Psalmist, know how to touch our souls
with words so that we may be comforted. I am not a poet,
but only a theologian. So even though this is a book about
theodicy, illness, and medicine, I cannot pretend that it can
help those who have had a spouse die unexpectedly, who
have experienced the death of a child, or who have gone
through some equally troubling event.
In this book I make no attempt to explain such evil or
to explain why a good and all-powerful God allows us to
undergo suffering for seemingly no reason. For a number of
reasons that I hope this book will make clear, I am profoundly
suspicious of all attempts such as Kushner’s to explain why
God allows us to experience pain and suffering; put even
more strongly, I hope to show why this way of putting the
question of suffering is a theological mistake. Even if I were
C ix ]