Is Christianity Blind to Suffering?             

CICCU Lunchtime Talk October 2010

Introduction 

When I was 21, I was pretty sure I had some good answers to questions of suffering. Philosophical and intellectual ones anyway. 20 years on and I am really not so sure. I can still have a thoughtful philosophical discussion, but somehow with some more experience that seems less relevant and maybe less helpful. In recent years I have been bereaved and spent time with the recently bereaved including widows in their 20s. Close friends have suffered dementia, eating disorders and suicidal depression. I have seen orphans with AIDS in central Asia, had colleagues involved in the fight against human trafficking, had the privilege of spending time with torture victims and seen the bureaucratic institutionalised evil at Auschwitz. Looking at piles of suitcases, children’s toys and canisters of Zyklon B starts to unravel neat theoretical philosophizing about suffering like little else can.

So, my title is “Is Christianity blind to suffering?” That could be read two ways – do Christians ignore suffering? Or do Christians avoid the intellectual consequences of the existence of suffering in order to make our  worldview work? I don’t intend to go for the first question. Even cursory research will show you that after government agencies Christians are responsible for a vastly disproportionate amount of suffering relief and compassion work around the world and that most do it for its own sake because they believe that God is the God of compassion rather than as an excuse to proselytise. No reasonable person thinks that Christians ignore suffering or aren’t wholeheartedly committed to helping those who suffer.

So what about the second question? Clearly Christians think that our worldview ought to make us get our hands dirty in the middle of suffering – even if we don’t necessarily have lots of answers to philosophical questions. The most common question I get asked in universities is some variation on  “ surely the existence of suffering demonstrates that God can’t exist, because the God Christians claim to believe in simply wouldn’t let it happen. Suffering shows he is either unloving or incapable of stopping it.” Aside from the fact that the question is logically faulty, it makes a critical category mistake  – namely that it demands an intellectual answer rather than a moral answer. Funnily I have never met anyone who would or wouldn’t become a Christian based on whether they thought they had satisfying answers to that question. Almost all the people I meet around the world who have suffered most would consider the question largely irrelevant.

Hard Questions

If we want to pose hard questions to the Christian message about Jesus Christ, there are far better ones than that. I think the hardest one is “how can Christians possibly claim God is more wonderful rather than less because of the existence of suffering and evil?”

But personal questions are even more searching still:

• I was abused as a child – how could God let that happen?
• My baby was born severely crippled and will live her life in debilitating pain. Where is God you claim is loving in all of that?
• My friend was killed in a terrorist attack on the London tube. The people who did it used God as their justification. The God Christians claim to believe in could have prevented it but didn’t
• My unemployment led to my divorce. How can you say God cares?

Maybe you resonate with some of that. Nobody has all the answers to pain. Would that we did. There is a whole book about a suffering person in the Bible, a man called Job. He suffered terribly and some of his mates came round and gave him all their answers to why stuff was happening to him. And it was all useless and hurtful. The best thing they did was sit and weep silently with him. Don’t trust people who seem to offer panaceas without weeping. Still less those who suggest that the answer to grief is robust comprehension.

Reflection 1: God's Book is Honest About Suffering 

So I want to offer 3 reflections rather than answers. My first reflection is that God’s book, the Bible, is completely forthright about the pain and suffering that we meet in this world. Sometimes uncomfortably so. It addresses with honesty the fact that living in this world is painful. And it avoids offering solutions that are merely nicely wrapped up theory with no practical help. It doesn’t write off suffering as illusion like some eastern worldviews, or as the actions of a world goverened by blind, pitiless indifference as the New Atheists do.

They claim that this is simply the way the world is. The Bible could not disagree more. Oh, it is utterly sanguine about how it is. But teaches that it wasn’t always the way it is now, nor will be this way for ever.

Let me go straight to the place you expect a Christian speaker to go which is to the cross of Jesus Christ. Without the cross there is no Christianity. It is the central event of Christian belief that defines absolutely everything. The central event every Christian’s worldview is one of the most startling suffering. Christianity can’t be blind to suffering because of it.

We have to get our heads around the Bible’s teaching about Jesus being crucified because it is this that makes sense of how the Bible doesn’t turn its eyes from horror, and yet still insists that God is a God of love.

The consistent claim of the Bible is that the crucifixion of Jesus is precisely about God dealing with suffering and evil. It teaches that all suffering – the kind caused by people, but also natural disasters – is the result of moral evil and rebellion against God. It is a huge claim – the world is not as it should be, because the relationship between God our creator and the people he created is shattered. People carry the scars of it and Creation carries the scars of it. According to the Bible suffering is a massive demonstration that all is not right with the world. It should not be like this.

So this gulf between God and rebellious Mankind - the guilt of imperfect people in the face of God’s perfection - is the cause of suffering. The whole world is mucked up and tainted by that guilt. In a world in tune with the God of love there would be no greed. If everyone had a relationship with God as the best and most loving of fathers there would be no child abuse or domestic violence. That is what the cross is dealing with – the guilt that separates. It is where God himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, says “I will pay the cost of that. I will tear down the wall of guilt that separates you from me. I am instituting a way, through my suffering, this crucifixion, for the thing to start to be put right.” On the cross Jesus bore the weight of sin, decisively took it away and provided forgiveness for those who will receive it. It was the ultimate horror that speaks to human horror. He says “ultimately I am going to wipe away tears from the eyes of all who come to me because of that event.”

That’s the first reflection: when the Bible confronts the issue of suffering it doesn’t conclude either that God doesn’t exist or that he isn’t good. Instead it says “this loving Father has worked and will finally conclude the work of dealing with suffering by coming and suffering right in the middle of it with us. As he did so, Jesus suffered the shame of being thought illegitimate, the horror of being a refugee, homelessness in an occupied land, misunderstanding, betrayal and torture. Don’t tell me that God is ambivalent to suffering. He is neither aloof nor distant.

Reflection 2: We Need God When We Suffer

My second reflection is that while I think that is really, eternally true and wonderful, I find it really hard. Because we are not in the realm of theoretical problems here. We want real comfort. If you haven’t suffered much yet, one day you will. It is a terrible given in life. You will be bereaved, you will age and you will die. And I want to know if there is consolation that is going to bear the weight of my need during those events. Whatever shape that consolation takes it isn’t going to primarily rest on whether I understand why these things are happening to me. I want to know if there is hope, given what is coming to all of us.

What the Bible teaches is that we don’t need an answer – nice though they are – so much as we need God to be with us and close to us and pouring his love into our lives during those hard situations. Is he real, is the basic question? Will he carry me when I run out of myself? Maybe you have heard, some Christians say something like “become a Christian, come to Jesus Christ, and your life will be easier.” That is true in an eternal picture, but is extremely misleading in the here and now. What God offers you in the face of suffering is not to make it all go away, but confidence in an almighty Father who walks with us and carries us. He doesn’t just empathise from a distance – there, there. He loves and cares through it, even in the face of death.

Someone here is instantly thinking “Honeysett you are just using God as a crutch for the parts of life you can’t cope with. Yes, I am. It doesn’t mean I have conjured up an imaginary friend because I am so psychologically lacking. He is real alright. And he is a pretty good crutch because I am weak and helpless in the face of suffering. Anyone who tells me all macho and puffed up that they will never need such a crutch is kidding themselves. For the life of me I don’t think you have a better one than me.

Someone else is thinking that it would be much simpler if God just got rid of all the suffering. After all, he is God, so he could, right?

Let’s just prod that a bit. Imagine you are God just for a minute and you decide that all the suffering and evil is going to go. OK, which groups of people would you get rid of first? Nasty ones. Genocidal dictators, mass murderers. Dentists. But where would you stop? I bet you would stop before it got to you, wouldn’t you? But that doesn’t work, because you know you lie. You know that you think things that would shame you if they were public. The best of you, morally, are even more sensitively attuned to it. You know you wouldn’t pass the test. We aren’t neutral, we are part of the problem of suffering.  For a loving God to get rid of suffering is not as simple as we might think because it would mean getting rid of you and me as well. And while we all think it would be nice of him to sort out the whole world, it might not be so nice if he sorted out me.

What that reveals – and this is the heart of my second reflection and the reason it is so hard – is that we view ourselves through the wrong lens. “I am good and therefore suffering is an affront to all my goodness. And God not getting rid of it is an affront to my goodness.” The Bible’s view is different. Evil is not the terrible aberration we desperately wish to think. We shouldn’t look at the large scale examples – Auschwitz, Rwanda, 9/11, and think “that is abnormal.” We should think “in small scale that is what I am like except by the grace of God. And that is what I deserve, but by the grace of God.” We are not innocents.

It also reveals that we have a wrong framework on the world. Which is that normality = comfort. Every social institution is designed to make us feel that ease is our right. And therefore when suffering comes our instinctive reaction is that something is wrong. So we question how God dare let our normality get disrupted? Too often suffering raises objections to trusting God because our worldview was actually built on flawed foundations that don’t bear the weight of what the world is actually like.

In other parts of the world they start with a different framework – namely that the world is broken and therefore suffering and evil are an expected normality. That framework means that when suffering comes the foundations aren’t shaken, indeed they were built with the expectation that it would. Suffering only looks like a problem for God from a very comfortable Western point of view.

I met with some students who had been seriously tortured for being in a meeting just like this one. They said to me “when suffering comes to you westerners you talk about God, complain about God and then dismiss God because you don’t see intellectually how he can be caring or whether he can exist. All because of your framework. But we talk to God, complain to God and we worship in the face of suffering and evil. All because of our framework. We already know he exists and that he is good before that comes. We don’t have all the answers but we know him. We do not look for theoretical answers to practical problems.”

Reflection 3: Suffering Makes Us Long For Hope

Which leads me to my final reflection. What suffering should make us long for is hope. It shouldn’t surprise us to find that often people who suffer most in this world are the ones with keenest hope that God will sort it out in the end.

“Fine” you say. “That’s just pie in the sky when you die.” Unless its true, of course. Unless what the Bible teaches about God finally wrapping the world up when he has rescued many many people from guilt and sin is actually real.

My friends who were tortured didn’t like the pain. They are strongly earthed realists. They aren’t given to creating imaginary solutions to real pain in the hope that that will somehow comfort them enough. That is foolishness. No, if God isn’t actually going to do anything about it all finally, then there is no hope and you had better just insulate yourself from the real world as best you can. Don’t go creating phoney worldviews to do it. Just embrace the blind, pitiless indifference.

I believe, as do all Christians, that the hope of everything getting renewed, and suffering and evil being finally dealt, with is true, credible and that it is really going to happen. Our final answer is a person, a Lord who came from glory and endured horror, in order to eternally destroy horror. He laid down his life in the face of the Father’s judgement on guilt and the evils of people in order to give us unshakeable hope in a world that is shaken all the time.

Conclusion

I warned you I wasn’t going to give intellectual answers. I expect that will be unpalatable to some. What I want to give instead is a commendation. I want to commend Jesus Christ to you because I believe that he bears the weight of our need in times of deepest suffering. I believe that we can flee to him knowing that he understands when we don’t. Knowing that calamities are in his hand does not give me answers, but it gives me far more hope and strong reason to act with compassion than if they were random.

Suffering should make us long with hope for the world to be different. God does not applaud suffering. He is going to get rid of it. He has acted decisively in Jesus in the past to deal with the fundamental cause. He will act decisively in the future to put all things right. And in the present he offers you himself and his hope in the middle of it all. We find help, grace and strength from him. I am convinced that confidence in Jesus Christ really is stronger than death.

The correct, Christian response to suffering is to combine heart-wrenching weeping with practical love-of-God action with unbreakable confidence in the sovereignty of God. You will never do it until you discover that Jesus Christ is wonderful treasure and until you grasp that comfort is not normal in a fallen world.