As a lifelong minister and seminary professor, Al Truesdale has written more than a dozen books and spent his career teaching the philosophy of religion and Christian ethics. But there is one topic he’s been hesitant to face head on—tragedy.
So difficult, in fact, that many theologians avoid it. For example, he points to Karl Barth’s masterful work “Church Dogmatics.” Throughout its many volumes, Truesdale says he recalls Barth only mentioning tragedy once.
Tragedy was front and center in Truedale’s earliest days of ministry. Fresh out of college after earning his undergraduate degree in religion from Trevecca in 1964, he was just weeks into working as a young pastor when a family in his church lost their oldest son to suicide. Soon after, a young soldier from his congregation—a family’s only son—was killed in the Vietnam War.
Unequipped with answers, he says he simply acted as Ezekiel did with the dazed Babylonian exiles: “For days, I sat where the people sat,” he recalls, referencing Ezekiel 3:15.
After pastoring for three years, Truesdale went on to attend Nazarene Theological Seminary (NTS) and Emory University. He became a professor at NTS in 1978. Suffering in its various forms—from the mistreatment of vulnerable children to the collective ongoing misery faced in nations like Haiti—have haunted him. He attempted to deal with the problem of evil in his book, “If God is God, Then Why: Letters from Oklahoma City” published in 1996.
Last year, Truesdale, now 83, decided to address the tough but critical topic of tragedy in his book “Lord of the Tragic: The God Who Suffers With Us.”
In the following Q&A, he explains what’s crucial for believers to understand about tragedy, the role lament plays in suffering and how Christians can experience hope as they walk through pain together.
Many Christians allow a Greek understanding of tragedy to shape their faith. We hear people talk about their lives being controlled by inevitability or a sense of fate. In Greek culture, tragedy was largely the outworking of fate. It was the result of someone who set out to do good but then was overwhelmed by fate and consequently acted in a way opposite of what was intended. The three goddesses of fate in Greek culture determined people’s lives.
For Christians, our faith teaches the opposite. We’re not controlled by fate. Our lives are nurtured by the God of sovereign love who grants us finite freedom to exercise His will within the contours of His plans and wisdom. Despair or resignation don’t have the defining word in our lives—God’s suffering and enabling presence with us through tragedy and the promise of a redeemed future with Him do. This is the core difference between the pagan and the Christian. Nevertheless, tragedy must be addressed full-faced and honestly.
Partly through the expression of lament, which happens when the people who worship God fear there has been a failure of His covenantal faithfulness. The God who has promised to be faithful appears to have left his children behind. God is charged with being asleep or abandoning his people. In Scripture, cries of lament are actually expressions of worship; they call for God to be faithful as promised. Lament expresses confidence in God at a time when God doesn’t seem to deserve it.
Therein lies the real confrontation with the harsh reality of tragedy. If there was no God such as Scripture affirms, then there would be no such thing as tragedy, only misfortune. There would be nothing to revolt, complain or lament against—just harsh reality and bitter disappointment. In the Christian context, tragedy is a reality because we do believe in the God of providential love, but we nevertheless experience apparent disruption or disorder in what we believe about God and our reasons for worshiping Him.
Tragedy as experienced by Christians can lead to an affirmation of our faith—an affirmation that understands afresh that God loves us and suffers with us. We rebel against tragedy because we believe there is a God who we would expect to behave differently.
Encourage them to do what God’s people in the Bible do: freely express their lament. We often wrongly tell people not to complain against God. We excuse Him. We say things like, “Everything happens for a reason,” “God knows what He’s doing” or “Things aren’t as bad as they appear to be.” We come up with lame excuses or answers that do not address the suffering people actually encounter or express what the Scriptures teach about God.
In doing so, we fail to see how lament can be an expression of worship. That’s nonsense, and it’s not what Scripture models or instructs us to do. I tell those who are experiencing tragedy, “Let it rip.” Articulate your complaint as bitterly as you choose, because the bitterness or depth of your complaint is an appeal for God to be who we believe Him to be.
The Hebrew word “chesed” in Scripture describes the kind of incredible, steadfast love God has for His people. In the Old Testament, as the children of Israel suffered under Pharaoh, God did more than hear their cries. The Hebrew context reveals He actually suffered redemptively with His people.
Chesed is not a love that cuts and runs in times of crisis. It’s a love that absolutely stays with the agenda. In the New Testament, this chesed love becomes incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ. Philippians 2 describes the self-emptying love of God as Christ laid aside his own splendor and took up human form. This God, the all-powerful creator of the heavens and the earth, actually submitted Himself to the very real sufferings that humans experience. On the cross, Jesus felt forsaken and experienced the abandonment that humans experience in their own tragedies.
If our Lord’s death on the cross had been the final word, then we’d have to eliminate the word “hope” from the Christian faith. But that's why we put so much hope in the resurrection of Christ. The last word is in a Christian’s life not despair or defeat. God brings hope, peace, love and His presence in spite of tragedy.
A Christian understanding of tragedy has to embody a full-orbed articulation of the incarnation, Christ’s sufferings, His resurrection and the promise of our own resurrection. In the Christian faith, we don’t walk away from tragedy. We just know it doesn’t have the final word in our lives.
The knowledge that God suffers with us. This demonstrates He is not just the God of raw power but the God of suffering love. God’s power is shown not by coercion or sovereign control but by His self-imposed vulnerability. In our theology, the apparently weak God—vulnerable by choice—is the truly strong God. It’s one thing to be vulnerable when you don’t have any other choice. But for God to be vulnerable and susceptible to suffering, disappointment and frustrated hopes is something He imposes upon Himself. He does this in divine love and in covenantal faithfulness. It expresses itself as unfailing fidelity.