The tough guy in the train was crying. Sometimes foul-mouthed and torn between anger and grief, the ex-soldier was telling me his story. He had clearly related it to others many times before, but that didn’t make his telling of it any easier. It was the early 2000s, and from what Dragan left unsaid, he hinted at his own guilt in participating in some dirty actions during the fighting in Croatia from 1991-2 and again in 1995. But he was now a mental wreck, and living on a state pension, though still, at that time, only in his late twenties. As he recounted the things he had seen during the fighting, he repeatedly wiped the tears from his eyes. Eventually he started to ramble and grew almost incoherent, as it became apparent exactly why he would never hold down a proper job — or lead a normal life — again.
I’ve seen and heard a lot in my travels in the Balkans. In the aftermath of the wars of the 1990s, I’ve been confronted any number of times by human pain at its most acute: grotesquely disfigured beggars, as often as not maimed by land mines; marginalized Gypsies, shunned by all and reduced to aggressive begging and petty crime; bereaved victims of ethnic war; devastated towns and cities.
I remember visiting Gašinci refugee camp in the company of friends who were bringing such minimal ‘aid’ as they could afford to Bosnian Muslim families. The filth and the hopelessness were terrible to witness. As we left our hosts in their hut after a couple of hours, I felt dirty — not from the camp, but because our words of consolation seemed so empty. I felt like what I was: a thinly disguised tourist visiting the bizarre and ghoulish ‘attraction’ that was their life, before returning to his own comfortable existence. Yet I could neither stay nor change places with them.
If my encounters with such suffering have been fleeting, and the demands upon me minimal, a member of my family was far more deeply involved. As a nurse who specialised in palliative care, she was looking after people who were dying, usually in their own homes. Not all of them were old; some had young families. Many were succumbing to cancer or to multiple sclerosis. Their deaths were neither easy nor quick. Through a period of intensive care, she forged close friendships with patients and their families, only to lose her new friends to death. Again and again and again. And then again.
Why does God permit all of this? Few questions touch each of us so nearly as this one. Few subjects stir deeper emotions within us than the topic of human pain: gnawing apprehension, inextinguishable grief, intractable bafflement. We feel resentment — whether muffled by an accompanying guilt, or open and angry. And fear. Even those of us who sincerely are unafraid of death certainly fear the suffering that precedes and attends it.
Furthermore, in the world as we find it, human pain confronts us at every turn. It is there every time we switch on the news. We see it in the deaths and serious illnesses, in the addictions, mental breakdowns and family break-ups of friends and those we love.
And Christians are by no means exempt. Even if we are among the ‘lucky’ ones — healthy, prosperous and with ‘normal’ families (however we choose to define those things) — we know that we are merely in remission. The death rate remains 100%. Our parents will eventually become ill, maybe over a long period, and then die. Eventually we ourselves will do the same. And any number of statistically less universal disasters may befall us long before that. It’s all so obvious, and yet it seems trite and in bad taste even to mention it.
That’s partly why we seldom confront this subject, except in its particular manifestations. I have to admit that I’m nervous even to write about this subject, partly for fear of incurring the wrath of my readers. After all, who am I to say anything about it? How can I know anything about your suffering? If the reader has experienced (or currently is experiencing) some terrible pain, ... well, who the heck am I to come along pontificating about it? On the other hand, how can you know how she feels? How can she possibly understand what he is going through?
And so we all shut up. And the central fact of our existence — its frailty and fragility — goes unmentioned, like a bad smell at a party.
Why does God permit suffering?
Why does God permit suffering? If He can stop it but doesn’t, how can He be loving? If He wants to stop it but can’t, how can He be all-powerful? Surely, He can’t be both all-loving and all-powerful?[1] Or perhaps He isn’t there at all?
Well, what will the Christian say? And at once there is a problem beyond that of the question itself: whatever you say will upset somebody. Those who wish to leave everything shrouded in ‘mystery’ (and clearly there isa lot of mystery here) will be offended, either at our presumption for daring to probe into ‘the things of God’, or else because they do not wish to have any ‘answers’ that might limit their freedom to rage against Him. Any attempt to answer the question of how a good God can allow suffering runs the risk of being thought offensive to piety, or else insensitive to human suffering.
One other thing should also be noted: every person reading these lines who says that they believe in God does so in spite of the Holocaust. They do so in spite of the vast oceans of pain to which we have just been drawing attention. What should we say of such readers who, at some future date, suffer personal tragedy or terrible loss and then find their faith reeling? I do not ask the question in respect of that future situation (who are we to heap judgment onto the already-afflicted?), but in respect of the faith they claim now. What is its status?
For if I ‘believe’ now, do I do so only because these fearful things have not (yet) devastated me and my little life? Is my ‘faith’ just an expression of the smugness-in-comfort of my own existence? ‘Yeah, yeah, the Holocaust. Yeah, yeah, the Ethiopian famine. But I’m all right and God’s in His heaven.’ No one actually says that, of course, even in private. But a lot that passes for ‘faith’ turns out, on closer inspection, to be a politer sort of determined naivety about the world. Ignorance and stupidity pass themselves off every day in the media as the moral superiors of intelligence and knowledge — because supposedly more egalitarian. The same attitude is spiritualised in church: ‘O! that’s too hard for me; I just follow the Lord. So don’t make my poor, spiritual head spin with the problem of suffering.’ If that’s it, such a faith is hardly worth having at all. For real Christianity embraces the real world — all of it.
Notwithstanding all of these caveats and considerations, we intend to take this bull by the horns. So here goes.
An omnipotent God?
It was C.S. Lewis who pointed out that, in any possible universe we may wish to imagine, if there were more than one being with freedom to act as he, she or it chose, then the possibility of suffering would exist. “If even a pebble lies where I want it to lie, it cannot, except by a coincidence, be where you want it to lie.”[2] The existence of more than one freely acting being implies the existence of “a relatively independent and ‘inexorable’ Nature” for them to act within.[3]
It is that last adjective which is the one to watch; if nature is, at least to some extent, ‘inexorable’, then dropped rocks will fall even if there is someone standing underneath, and to describe God as ‘all-powerful’ in some unthinking sense could be misleading. (You can see how, already, we are offending against certain kinds of piety!) But on closer examination, this turns out to be not so awkward; ‘God’s omnipotence’ surely applies only to that which is intrinsically possible. To go further, and to say that God can do something intrinsically impossible, is not pious, but nonsense. As many have pointed out, a nonsensical sentence does not become sensible merely by inserting the words “God can” in front of it. And perhaps the idea that we can have a universe in which many free agents can freely act whilst nevertheless having a God who always stops anybody from hurting themselves or others is just such a nonsensical concept.
Nevertheless, the question has always been asked, and was asked frequently of the early Christians. The attempt to answer it resulted in a number of interesting heresies, including the idea that there were really two gods: an inferior one to take care of creating a material universe in which we suffer, and a superior deity to be loving and kind! Orthodoxy was defended by Christians like Irenæus, who linked the two halves of the equation in the only way possible, by pointing out that suffering is the result of human free will.[4]
To speak of human free will, however, means that we are not finished with qualifying what we mean by saying that God is all-powerful. So far, we have simply pointed out what divine omnipotence cannot mean: it cannot refer to things that are intrinsically impossible. In fact, however, we have to go further than this. Even though God is perfectly capable of doing anything that is intrinsically possible, in practice He has deliberately chosen not to exercise that power. This should not surprise those of us who know the gospel stories: what else was He doing when He chose to come into the world as a helpless baby, if not limiting His own omnipotence? What was Jesus doing when He went to the cross, knowing all along that He could have summoned legions of angels to His aid? Limiting His own omnipotence characterises all of God’s dealings with His creatures. As we shall see, there is a reason for it.
God could have made an automaton who did exactly as He willed and chose. In actual fact, however, in His love He has permitted us to do as we want. He has made us free. That includes the freedom to do wrong, together with all of the consequences of those wrong actions. This freedom we have exercised to the full, and the resultant sin that we have done is the cause of all the suffering we see around us.
It is the cause, not just of direct human actions, like warfare, violence, cruelty, human folly; that we could all understand and, in a sense, accept. But sin is the root cause also of so-called ‘natural’ disasters, like earthquakes, illness and freak accidents. And the reason for that is that nature itself is no longer a neutral field of action but a ‘fallen’ entity. This is part of what we mean when we say that we live in a fallen world. God said to Adam:
“Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”[5]
The scandalous price of love
Now at this point, of course, we start to offend, not false piety, but human pride. The points we have been making provoke the instant response: “Why didn’t God make us so that we couldn’t go wrong then? This freedom isn’t worth the price of all of the suffering that’s in the world!”
Of course, the objection is self-contradictory. The question is exactly the kind of questioning of God (which isn’t wrong in itself!) that freedom has made possible. Without that freedom, the very question couldn’t be asked.
If that sounds too pedantic, let’s move swiftly on to the much more important point that freedom is the precondition for love. If you love me and I love you, both of us have to be free to do so. Without that freedom, the very idea of love is nonsensical. You can’t love a machine unless you’re crazy, and (just in case you were thinking of all those people who spend Sundays fiddling with their cars on the front drive) you certainly can’t be loved by a machine, whether you’re crazy or not!
God has made us for love — to love Him, to be loved by Him, and to love one another. That cannot happen without freedom, including the freedom to do — and to inflict — wrong.
So: suffering is the price of freedom. And freedom is the price of love.
Is the trade-off worth it? Would we be better off trading, like Faust, our freedom and capacity to love in exchange for a life without pain? (Would that make us merely automata — and so not in a position to feel anything else either?) I’m not sure we can possibly be in a position to say. And I’m completely certain we’re not in a position actually to do it!
To ask not to have this freedom is not only to ask for a world without love, but also to ask to be less than we are. Scripture says that humanity is the pinnacle of God’s creation:
“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth....”[6]
and:
“What is man that you are mindful of him? ... You have made him a little lower than the angels and crowned him with glory and honor. You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet.”[7]
That sounds very fine but, as C.S. Lewis observed, the higher and better something is, the more badly wrong it can also be. Culinary considerations aside, a cow is a cow is a cow. A good dog can be much better than a cow, and a bad dog much worse. A small child can be much better than even the best dog — and also more wicked than even the worst dog (as we see in those appalling cases where children commit murder). An adult is capable of even better things — or even worse. A genius is capable of even more wonderful achievements than an ordinary person — or of even more appalling crimes. An angel best of all — or worst of all. (What, after all, is the devil?)[8]
So for God to give freedom to human beings to love — or to hate — is not the same as giving a cow the freedom to wander where it wants; the consequences are immeasurably greater. To ask for that freedom to be taken away is to ask to be very much less than human.
We of all people....
Although the question of how God can permit suffering (or allow the wicked to prosper, which is nearly the same thing) has always been asked, contemporary westerners have been asking it more insistently than perhaps any other generation in history. This might be thought surprising, for recent generations of westerners have assuredly suffered less (relatively and on the average) than any people who have ever lived.
That is, of course, a very tough thing to say when so many have, despite that average, nevertheless suffered greatly. And who the heck am I ... etc..
Nevertheless, the fact remains that we are the only people in history to be able to think of the death of babies and young children as an abnormal disaster, or who can expect to have all four grandparents — or even both parents — alive into our own adulthood. Universal literacy — or at least the opportunity of acquiring it — has been an extremely rare experience before the last century. The opportunity for foreign travel (except as part of military expeditions) was the preserve of the rich until as little as two generations ago. In all history, we alone have enjoyed anything approaching our present levels of material wealth and luxury.
The prosperity, safety, longevity, cleanliness and comfort of even a very moderately prosperous westerner today exceed anything the kings and emperors of past ages could have hoped for, and would have been beyond the wildest imaginings of all our ancestors. For the many people outside the West desperate to come here, our prosperity continues to defy belief. Such comparisons are no exaggeration; I have witnessed the astonishment of Belarussian teenagers visiting Britain, and looking around wide-eyed as if they had just arrived in a sort of Disneyland existence — which, in a sense, of course, they had.
But isn’t it strange that the question of how God can allow suffering bothers us more than it troubled people in so many other cultures whose life expectancy was so much less than ours, whose standard of living was so much lower, whose only painkiller was hard liquor? How did they respond to the question?
Usually, their attitude was: ‘these things (suffering) being so, how can I be right with God?’ They knew that, despite their suffering, it was they themselves, not God, who needed ‘justifying’. We have no such awareness. The question of why this is so would require a chapter — or perhaps a book — in itself. Here it is sufficient to note that it is so. Our upbringing and the (false) axioms that lie at the heart of the contemporary western consciousness have made us self-directed, rather than other-directed. If we are told that something is a moral obligation, we do not tend to obey, but to ask ‘Who said so?’ ‘Why should I?’ If there is a problem (such as suffering in the world), then this is not a reality with which we have to come to terms; rather, it is God who has a lot of explaining to do to us!
The novelist Thomas Hardy, that mainstay of school and college literature curricula until recently, divided his energies more or less equally between dismissing the possibility of God and then summoning Him back into existence in order to blame Him for all the evils of the world. A century later, his contemptible, hypocritical and intellectually bankrupt attitude has become the common currency of modern parlance. That is what is meant, I take it, when studiously agnostic news reporters, in a fit of sudden piety, describe earthquakes, volcanoes and freak accidents — but never sunshine, harvest and beautiful landscapes — as ‘acts of God’.
We are a strange case. If the first-century Jews to whom Jesus was speaking about this matter of suffering had a misunderstanding at all — and they did — it was the false assumption that those who suffered were somehow especially guilty and so being punished by God:
“Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them — do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem?
I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish!”[9]
But a bunch of modern westerners would have been questioning God’s morality in allowing the incident to happen at all!
God and the apparent pointlessness of suffering
The conversation between Jesus and his audience about this recent local disaster has another point also. Suffering does not (usually) bear any direct relationship to the sinfulness of the sufferer. Of course, there may be some such connection. For example, it could be a sort of ‘built-in’ judgment. If some venereal disease is a result of a particular person’s promiscuous lifestyle (rather than, say, picked up from a promiscuous spouse), then it could be seen as a natural consequence, and so ‘built in’ to the fabric of the universe. Again, God sometimes intervenes directly to judge someone in this life for their misdeeds: one thinks of the sons of Eli the priest in 1 Samuel.
But mostly there is no such relationship. Most suffering is a result of the general sinfulness of humanity and of the Fall of creation that results from it.
To that extent, suffering is, in a sense, pointless. This may seem a shocking conclusion (shocking, that is, to both piety and to human dignity, especially to the dignity of the suffering). But what is the alternative, when the cause of misery lies in a phenomenon outside of our control?
There is a tendency of Christians to avoid or deny this point, and to take refuge in mysticism. So we say: ‘I don’t know why this young child died; these things are a mystery known only to the Lord; we just have to trust Him.’
Well, yes, but the implication is that God is some kind of cosmic sadist who has decided that that child there will die in a car crash now ... like this (fill in the gruesome details for yourself). That is not who God is!
If, on the one hand, God is not ‘the cosmic sadist’ making everything that happens happen, and if, on the other hand, we are not to ‘dive out’ into pastorally well-intentioned but nevertheless ineffectual mysticism at every appearance of horror, then we must conclude that suffering is indeed pointless pain. Pointless, that is, apart from a relationship with God. It’s just part of the way the world is. If that sounds just too hard to take, we should remember that the same thing could be said of life itself and every aspect of it; all is pointless and meaningless without a relationship with the Creator and Sustainer.
‘But for you who are in Christ, for you who know Me and love Me’, God says, ‘I work all things together for good to those who are called according to My purposes.’[10] Let there be no sentimental misunderstanding of that statement from Scripture: suffering is bad whoever you are, and always will be. But for the Christian, at least, it is no longer pointless; it is no longer ‘just the way things are’. God can and will use it for good.
The question is: will we let Him do that? Will we find out that ‘good’? Will we let go of the hedonistic pleasure-demanding lifestyle that our western culture has taught us to claim as our right, and let Him take even the painful things (not that we should deliberately seek them out, of course!) and let Him use even them?
The suffering of God
To understand this, we first need to see that God Himself suffers in and through our pain. God is not the ‘unmoved mover’, the god that is postulated by certain kinds of philosophy — some distant, passionless despot who coolly determines everything that happens in the world without being moved by it or swayed by it.
On the contrary, Scripture describes God as laughing, as being angry, as rejoicing, as changing His mind! And in the cross, God has embraced decisively, once and for all, suffering and pain. Jesus has come as a man and taken our sins (the cause of all suffering in the Fall) upon Himself. This entailed not only judgment upon sin so terrible we shudder to think of it, not only a love so immense we can never comprehend it, but also suffering so vast that we can never tell its depths. As we look at the cross, we know that God himself experiences and embraces suffering — all the suffering and pain of the world.
This point is brought out wonderfully in Helen Waddell’s novel, Peter Abelard. Written in 1933, it recounts the true story of the famous eleventh-century theologian, Abelard, who was captured by his enemies and castrated in revenge for his affair with Heloïse. In an episode situated some years later, Abelard is walking in the forest with his friend Thibault, when the two men hear a distant, terrible scream. They run in the direction of the cry and are surprised to find, not a human being, but a dying rabbit, caught in a trap. As they prise open the jaws of the trap the terrified creature gasps and dies. Abelard turns to his friend:
“‘Thibault,’ he said, ‘do you think there is a God at all? Whatever has come to me, I earned it. But what did this one do?’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Only — I think God is in it too.’
Abelard looked up sharply.
‘In it? Do you mean that it makes Him suffer, the way it does us?’
Again Thibault nodded.
‘Then why doesn’t He stop it?’
‘I don’t know,’ ... ‘But all the time God suffers. More than we do.’ ...
‘Thibault, do you mean Calvary?’
Thibault shook his head. ‘That was only a piece of it — the piece that we saw — in time. Like that.’ He pointed to a fallen tree beside them, sawn through the middle. ‘That dark ring there, it goes up and down the whole length of the tree. But you only see it where it is cut across. That is what Christ’s life was; the bit of God that we saw. And we think God is like that, because Christ was like that, kind and forgiving sins and healing people. We think God is like that for ever, because it happened once, with Christ. But not the pain. Not the agony at the last. We think that stopped.’”
Abelard, holding the dead rabbit, responds to this last speech with a question:
“‘You think that all this,’ he looked down at the little quiet body in his arms, ‘all the pain of the world, was Christ’s cross?’”, to which his friend replies in the affirmative and then adds “And it goes on.”[11]
The cross reveals to us God’s love, which we correctly conclude extends everywhere and throughout time. The sacrifice for sin is indeed “once and for all”[12], but its efficacy runs the full length of the “tree” which is world history. And concerning the suffering of Jesus, whether or not we agree with Helen Waddell that “it goes on”, we can at least see that it embraces all of our pain; it too runs all the length of the “tree”.
Christians called to participate in the sufferings of Christ
And Christians are called to participation in the sufferings of Christ. Paul insisted that “I am crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”.[13]
Now often Christians tend to understand this verse in a way that destroys at least a part of its obvious meaning; we are so taken up with the idea that Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us, that we see rather too much of the language of the New Testament as a sort of legal fiction. Our thinking often runs something along these lines: ‘I fell in Adam, so Adam’s sin somehow becomes mine, then Christ comes along and his righteousness somehow becomes mine, and his crucifixion somehow is mine as well.’
But the point of the original writers is that we acquire these things as we participate in them. And being “crucified with Christ” is, in part at least, not just a metaphor: we are called to share in Christ’s sufferings — He suffers in our bodies!
If that doesn’t sound like any theology you’re familiar with, try these verses for size:
“I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of His body, which is the church.”[14] Now, nothing is ‘lacking’ for the forgiveness of our sins, but Paul was suffering to “present everyone perfect in Christ”[15], which is what his particular part in the suffering was all about. His pain was being ‘worked by God for good’!
Secondly, Peter tells his readers:
“Dear friends, don’t be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ.”[16]
If he meant only a ‘theological’ sort of ‘participation’ (‘Christ suffered for my sins’), why is it discussed as being part of the “painful trial” which the believers were suffering at the time Peter was writing?
Paul saw the same linkage when he told the Roman Christians, “Now if we are children, then we are heirs — heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in His sufferings in order that we may also share in His glory.”[17] Christ suffered, and now reigns; if we wish to reign with Him, we will suffer. He told Timothy the same thing: “If we suffer, we shall also reign with Him”.[18] It was part of what Jesus meant by the command to “Follow Me”.
Finally, we read that God “comforts us in all our troubles.... For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.”[19]
The point is that we share in the sufferings of Christ, and Christ suffers in the sufferings of His people. That’s why Jesus, seen by Saul of Tarsus in a vision on the Damascus road, asks him, “why are you persecuting me?”[20] Saul was persecuting the Christians, and Jesus suffered in and with them.
That’s why Jesus says that even those who give one of his little ones a cup of water do it to Him.[21]
That’s why Jesus tells his disciples that “He who listens to you listens to Me; he who rejects you rejects Me.”[22]
Christians are the “in Christ” — Jesus tells his disciples, “Remain in Me and I will remain in you”.[23] That’s why Paul expressed the wish “to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like Him in His death”.[24]
What sort of ‘good’?
What sort of good is God wanting to bring out of the sufferings of His people? Some of us, alas, will be needing to ask the far more specific — and so urgent — question ‘What sort of good is God wanting to bring out of my suffering’?
First of all, it’s important that we ask the question this way round, rather than the more pointed or antagonistic question ‘What’s the purpose of this suffering?’ If we start on that tack, we will soon get indignant, and start asking (self-righteously) whether the purpose is ‘worth’ the suffering — and of course, if the suffering is ours we will probably conclude that it isn’t.
The suffering may not have a ‘purpose’ at all; it is something very bad. As we mentioned earlier, the whole point is that there is no ‘point’. Nevertheless, God will work even this, the hateful dross of human experience, for good if we let Him.
It may, perhaps, draw us closer to Him, refine us, make us more Christlike. Jesus told his disciples that He was the vine, that we should be in Him, and then said that even a branch that did bear fruit would be pruned, or “trimmed clean” by the Father, “so that it will be even more fruitful”.[25]
It may propel others into some kind of loving action, or draw a marriage (or some wider group of people) closer together.
Disconcertingly, and even more humbling to our dignity, it may even discipline us, as Hebrews describes. We are told there to “endure hardship as discipline ... so that we may share in his holiness”.[26]
All of this, of course, may be cool comfort to the person in despair at some profound loss or prolonged agony. I do not ‘feel good’ about pointing these things out. (And, to reiterate, none of them is the ‘purpose’ of the suffering. For most suffering has no purpose. Instead, these are things which, in spite of their vileness, God can turn to good if we consent.)
We all tend to defer, guiltily, to the judgment of the person who ‘knows what it’s like’ and is currently in the crucible of pain. This humility on our part is a good thing if it makes us slow to judge others, but it is no help in coming to a right understanding. The reason for this should be clear. The person who is currently in the grip of overwhelming passion is not, all other things being equal, the best judge of the boundaries of sexual propriety. The person who has only this moment been aggrieved by some monstrous injustice against themselves is unlikely to give us the most dispassionate view of what might form a truly just retribution against the offender. The starving man is not the best judge of kitchen hygiene.
In the same way, the points we are making here about suffering are proffered, not under any illusion that they will instantly recommend themselves to those who, at this very moment, are in the pit of grief and despair, but that we might be forearmed for (as we mentioned at the start of this piece) we are all only ‘in remission’. Our turn will come.
They are proffered also that we might understand the things which all of the generations who have preceded us understood very well, and which we alone have forgotten. What do we think lies behind those frequently encountered words on the old gravestones, or in ancient journals, “after a long illness, patiently born”? Why extol patience? Surely it is we, the TV and internet generation, who are easily bored, not they! A moment’s reflection, however, will bring the realisation: ‘patience’, obviously, is a reference to the manner of dealing with suffering in an age before painkillers. It is close to what our forebears often called ‘fortitude’: bravery of the long, slow, undramatic, un-cinematographic kind. Patience and fortitude are both forgotten virtues now — but we need them back.
Persecution
Up to this point, we have been arguing that Christians are not immune from suffering in the world at all but that, for believers, it need not be pointless pain, for we know that Christ suffers in and with us, and also that He will work together even the very worst things for good — if we let Him.
This, of course, is the very opposite of the ‘prosperity’, ‘health and wealth’ or ‘faith’ teachers who, far more in tune with the spirit of the age, are heavily into denial on this subject, and want to claim that a godly Christian should never be ill, or even poor. The New Testament indicates exactly the opposite. The writer to the Hebrews says that it is illegitimate sons who are never disciplined by their fathers, but that God “scourges every son He receives”.[27]
Furthermore, persecution was perhaps perceived as the prime, obvious source of pain that virtually defined the Christian community. Jesus tells His disciples, “As the Father sent Me, so I send you. I send you out as lambs among wolves” (Matt.10.16). He had been sent as a lamb — as the Lamb. And He sends us the same way: “If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also”.[28]
Most of those early Christian leaders suffered beatings and persecutions and martyrdom — not health and wealth — for the gospel, as well as ordinary illnesses along the way. It was the expectation. Because of it, Jesus gave a special blessing in the Sermon on the Mount:
“blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and slander you because of Me. Rejoice and be glad because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”[29]
As Jakob Hutter, a sixteenth-century Anabaptist leader, remarked, “Only of His own does Christ say that they will be crucified, persecuted, scourged, reviled, robbed, banished, tormented, and put to death.”[30] This has been part of the self-understanding of some sections of the church over the centuries. Another Anabaptist writer commented that “the whole volume of Holy Scriptures seems to be nothing else than a book of martyrs”.[31] If we remember Jesus’ remark about the canon of the Old Testament, which he defined as running from the first martyr, Abel, to the last, Zechariah[32], we can see that there is much to be said for this understanding!
Embracing the cross, despising the shame
The purpose of persecution in particular — and the danger of all suffering in general — is to reduce the one suffering to something less than human. “Behold I am a worm, and not a man, scorned by men and despised by the people.”[33] It defaces the image of the divine, reducing the sufferer (as we say) to ‘a shadow of his former self’.
But it need not do so. Jesus was not passive, but deliberately embraced the cross, “despising the shame”. In so doing He subverted the very purpose of his enemies. The intention of such a cruel death as crucifixion, as with the persecutions in the concentration camps, the gulags and the tortures inflicted on prisoners in Bosnia, was to reduce the victim to a zero, both in his own eyes and in those of others. Were that not the case, the efficiency of a swift execution would have suited the persecutors better.
But by embracing the suffering — neither striking back, nor ‘knuckling under’ — Jesus affirmed his personhood and his dignity in the very depths of pain and degradation itself. That was why the centurion, seeing a scene that was intended to bring humiliation to the sufferer, was yet forced to cry out “Surely this man was the Son of God!”[34]
Countless Christian martyrs since have done the same. They did not resist, nor did they go passively, but embraced suffering as Christ living out his life — and suffering in His body — through them.
But for all of us, whatever kind or degree of trials we are faced with, we can know that “our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us”.[35] This was no pious platitude. It was written to a community, some of whose members, just a few years later, would be tied to posts, covered with tar, and set alight to act as lamps at Nero’s evening garden parties.
How can a God who loves us permit suffering? The question presents itself as an interrogation of God’s morality. But we end in a different place — by asking what we will do. Will we shake our fist in God’s face? Will we be indifferent to the pain that is all around us? Will we sullenly resign ourselves to the bad things that come our way — as they surely will?
Or will we instead ‘despise the shame’ of our own sorrows; sacrificially give ourselves away to those around us who are enduring grief; participate in His sufferings, so that we may share in His resurrection?
Recommended reading:
C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
Greg Boyd, Satan and the Problem of Evil
T.J. Oord, The Uncontrolling Love of God, ch. 3
[1] This discussion goes back at least to early Christianity. The Church Father Tertullian summarised the argument of the Marcionite heretics — whom he strongly opposed — as running like this:
“If God is good, and prescient of the future, and able to avert evil, why did He permit man ... to be deceived by the devil, and fall from obedience of the law into death? For if He had been good, ... and prescient, ... and powerful enough to hinder its occurrence, that issue would never have come about.... Since, however, it has occurred, the contrary proposition is most certainly true, that God must be deemed neither good, nor prescient, nor powerful.”
(Tertullian, Against Marcion, II.5)
It is an issue peculiar to monotheism. Those who, like many of the heretics, or like the Manichees, believe in two gods, can say that one accounts for what is good; another for what is bad. That tends to leave them with good and evil as eternally co-existent principles. Christians, however, believe in the final (though not this-worldly) triumph of good. But that leaves us with the problem of explaining how and why, in the here and now, a good God can suffer evil to exist. Hence this paper.
[2] C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (Collins: Glasgow, 1981), pp.20-21.
[3] ibid., p.17.
[4] Irenæus, Against Heresies, chs. 37, 38.
[5] Gen. 3:17-19.
[6] Gen. 1:26.
[7] Ps. 8:4-6.
[8] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Collins: Glasgow, 1981), p.49.
[9] Lk. 13:4-5.
[10] paraphrase of Rom. 8:28.
[11] H. Waddell, Peter Abelard (Reprint Society, London, 1950), pp.268-270.
[12] Rom. 6:10; Heb. 7:27; 9:12, 26; 10:10.
[13] Gal. 2:20.
[14] Col. 1:24.
[15] Col. 1:28.
[16] 1 Pet. 4:12-13.
[17] Rom. 8:17.
[18] 2 Tim. 2:12 — AV.
[19] 2 Cor. 1:4-5.
[20] Acts 9:4.
[21] Matt. 10:40-42.
[22] Lk. 10:16.
[23] Jn. 15:4.
[24] Phil. 3:10.
[25] Jn.15:2.
[26] Heb. 12:4-11.
[27] Heb. 12:6.
[28] Jn. 15:20.
[29] Matt. 4:11-12.
[30] J. Hutter, Brotherly Faithfulness (Plough, Rifton, New York, 1979), p.58.
[31] T.J. van Braght, Martyrs Mirror (J.F. Sohm transl., Herald Press, Scottdale, Pennsylvania, 1950), p.13.
[32] Matt. 23:35.
[33] Ps. 22:6.
[34] Mk. 15:39.
[35] Rom.8:18.
Oh, thank you Dr. Pearse for this article. Very informative and provocative.
Thanks Meic. Really helpful