First-, Second-, and N-Order Complaint People

(Just an interlude to my Satan and Theodicy series. This interlude will be relevant later in that series.)

As I've reflected on how people deal with theodicy issues in the church I've come up with a personal formulation to describe what I see in church. I call it First-, Second-, and N-Order Complaint.

Everyone, at some point, confronts the issues of theodicy. We all suffer and at some point we need to understand WHY? Believers are particularly keen to hit upon a suite of answers that fit with notions of a loving and all-powerful God.

Sometimes these questions are acute and personal (e.g., personal trauma). Sometimes the questions are historical (e.g., the Holocaust). Sometimes existential (e.g., pain in the human condition).

As the first round of theodicy questions I call these initial questions FIRST-ORDER COMPLAINT.

Whenever I've seen these questions raised in a church or classroom you tend to get a standard, well-worn suite of responses. Call these FIRST-ORDER RESPONSES. Some examples:

1. Free will: Lots of human pain is self-inflicted, God isn't to blame.

2. The Fall: After Eden, the earth is cursed. Thus, the Katrina's and tsunami's of life are our lot, the burden of the Fall brought about, again, by humans.

3. The Symmetry of the Nervous System: God wants relationship and love. A loving companion requires a certain kind of experiential capacity, namely a capacity for love. However, such a capacity demands its shadow side: The capacity to suffer.

4. Satan: As in the book of Job, Satan "attacks" us to test and tempt us.

There may be more, but these four first-order responses tend to come up most often.

Okay, at this point in the conversation people start to sort themselves into two different groups. One group is generally satisfied with these first-order responses. They see the first-order responses as, generally speaking, adequate. These people seem to be quickly satiated, theologically speaking.

However, there is a second group (and I am among them) that looks over the first-order responses and is partly or wholly unsatisfied. The first-order responses strike these people as inadequate. All these responses do is succeed in creating another round of questions. This second round of questions, in response to the first round, I call SECOND-ORDER COMPLAINT. Here are some examples of second-order complaint (numbered consistently with the list above):

1. True, humans do hurt themselves. But much if not most of our of suffering comes not from human hands.

2. Is God just and loving if he visits the sins of Adam upon generations of innocent people?

3. Isn't God selfish in desiring this for himself, particularly given the pain we are subjected to, in order to satisfy HIS NEED to love something?

4. Why would God give Satan such scope? Why doesn't God restrict Satan, making Satan pick on people (angels?) his own size? Why would God allow us to be terrorized by a renegade spiritual agent?

Note that second-order questions are more difficult. They are bothersome. Why? Because second-order complaint starts to move pass issues of suffering and begins to ask questions about GOD, about his character and goodness. And it is for this reason that most church going folk don't want to move on to this round of complaint. These questions are a little too bold. You can question why there is pain, but you can't question God. For some, that goes too far.

In short, when I sit in these conversations I see two kinds of people emerge: a FIRST-ORDER COMPLAINT GROUP and a SECOND-ORDER COMPLAINT GROUP. They appear to differ on how adequate they think conventional theodicy responses are as well as in their comfort level in questioning God's goodness.

(Psychological aside: These groups also appear to be different in what psychologists have called NEED FOR COGNITION. High NFC is associated with a need to understand and to solve outstanding intellectual puzzles. Basically, High NFC people think. They like to think. They need to think. Low NFC don't have this inner desire to deeply understand. They don't find thinking all that rewarding.

Note that NFC is different from intelligence. I know a lot of people who are extraordinarily intelligent but low of NFC.

Basically, I think a lot of church conversations get interpersonally sticky due to the competing motives of High versus Low NFC people. Low NFC people don't want to push Sunday School conversations too deeply. They find those conversation unrewarding and unsettling. By contrast, High NFC people want to push the conversation to the next level, to a deeper level.

In my experience, the church is generally a Low NFC kinda place.)

There are responses that can be offered at the second level of complaint. We can call these SECOND-ORDER RESPONSES. However, and I bet you guessed this, the process can continue. We can have another wave of THIRD-ORDER COMPLAINT with THIRD-ORDER RESPONSES. And forth-order. And fifth-order. And so on.

Thus, what I call N-ORDER COMPLAINT, is round upon round of complaint-response.

Some people stop at first-order complaint. Others at second-order. And still others (again, me among them) never stop complaining. We are N-ORDER COMPLAINT PEOPLE. For us, complaint is just a regular feature of the faith experience.

In other writings of mine (see Winter Christianity in my blogbook "Freud's Ghost" or the Summer and Winter Christians article on my ACU webpage), I've used a seasonal metaphor to describe these kinds of believers. I've called them Summer and Winter Christians. Summer Christians tend to have rosy pictures of God. Winter Christians, due to their complaint, have more ambivalent pictures. Schematically:

Summer Christians = FIRST-ORDER COMPLAINT people

Spring/Autumn Christians = SECOND-ORDER COMPLAINT people

Winter Christians = N-ORDER COMPLAINT people

What are you?

(BTW, if you haven't noticed, this blog is a kind of a support-group for N-ORDER COMPLAINT people. I suspect that I tend to quickly lose any FIRST-ORDER COMPLAINT readers.)


Happy Thanksgiving! I'll be back next week.