Theological Journal - March 5 What's Joy Got To Do With It? (9)

Theological Journal – March 5                                                                                                                          What’s Joy Got To Do With It?

1.       Joy is not a sedative that insulates the church from its struggles or a consolation prize that salves the wounds it incurs for not “winning,”

This is the first item I raised for further comment yesterday. And this is the first part of a response to it.

Those of us who are temperamentally or due to experience (or both) particularly sensitive to the pain and suffering in the world tend, I think, to play joy and pain, happiness and suffering off against one another. The presence of the one surely rules out other, doesn’t it. This kind of dualism fueled much of the protest atheism of the late 19^th century.

But German theologian Jürgen Moltmann is correct, I believe, when he writes:

“On the other hand, joy in life and happiness is denigrated when people incline to pain and sorrow rather than to joy and laughter. Do we have a right to happiness when so many people despair because their life is full of pain and sorrow? They think that grief is deeper than joy, that pain weighs more heavily than happiness, and that suffering seems more a matter of course than laughter. Their life is more of a tragedy than a celebration. After two world wars and unspeakable war crimes Germans especially were more inclined to a tragic feeling for life, believing more in catastrophies than successes and progress. In that terrible 20th century, pessimism about the course of the world and a nihilistic view of human nature seemed more realistic than the idealism of the 19^th century . . . 

“But are joy and protest, happiness and pain, laughter and tears true alternatives? I don’t believe they are. The secret of life is love. In love we go out of ourselves and lay ourselves open to all the experiences of life. In the love of life we become happy and vulnerable at the same time. In love we can be happy and sad. In love we can laugh and weep. In love we can rejoice and must protest at the same time. The more deeply love draws us into life, the more alive and, simultaneously, the more capable of sorrow we become. That is the dialectic of the affirmed and loved life. We can’t have the first without the second. We can easily make the counter-proof: When we are wounded and resigned and withdraw love from life we lose interest in living and become apathetic. Then we no longer feel the disappointments, the injustice and pains, but we don’t really live anymore either. We are spiritually petrified, and our hearts turn to stone. Nothing touches us either, neither good nor evil, and that is the first step on the road to death. It is the death of the soul, which goes ahead of the death of a person . . . 

“Joy in life’s happiness motivates us to revolt against the life that is destroyed and against those who destroy life. And grief over life that is destroyed is nothing other than an ardent longing for life’s liberation to happiness and joy. Otherwise we would accept innocent suffering and destroyed life as our fate and destiny. Compassion is the other side of the living joy. We don’t accuse God because there is suffering in the world. Rather, we protest in the name of God against suffering and those who cause it.” 

So is Joy a sedative that insulates the church from its struggles or a consolation prize that salves the wounds it incurs for not “winning”? With Moltmann I say a loud and clear “No”!