Dear Concerned Citizen,

If God is all powerful why doesn’t He protect His children from needless suffering and death?

There have been many suggested answers to this question.

We’ve all heard them. We’ve said them ourselves. Many are true.

• God is disciplining us, even perfecting us when we suffer.
• Grief puts us in touch with powerful, often unmanageable emotions. It gives us the energy necessary to make changes in our lives to better ourselves and others.
• Suffering often brings us together, reminding us of the importance of having other people in our lives.
• Can we say we are really living if we do not share in the complexities of life, even the unpleasant ones?
• Can we say that we love if our love never requires sacrifice?
• Christ suffered, why shouldn’t we?
• Suffering is how we show the depth of our love for God and for others.

But what about the needless death of innocents like Melina?

• The fall of man from God’s Grace has expelled all of us from Eden’s paradise.
• We are vulnerable and naked in a red in tooth and claw world.
• The Evil One is responsible for all unjust destruction.
• The world must be redeemed through the hard work of God’s children and our work has just begun.
• Death may be a blessing beyond our wildest hopes.
• Maybe now the Indian Ocean will finally get a tsunami warning center.
• Perhaps Melina’s death may act as a transformational event in the spiritual life of her family?

Christian doctrine has provided hundreds of answers to these two difficult questions. But are these answers sufficient in a modern world where God’s ultimate moral authority is more often challenged than accepted?

In fact, the problem of pain and the death of innocents has caused many to lose their faith. Perhaps the most famous is Darwin. Shortly after going public with his theory of evolution, a theory that attempts to give suffering and death a utilitarian purpose as an aid to the survival of the fittest, Darwin wrote to a friend:

There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the (parasitic wasp) with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that the cat should play with mice.”

C. S. Lewis’ faith was also tried by the horror of grief. As the world’s foremost Christian apologist, Lewis tackled one difficult theological issue after another in numerous books. He begins his first, The Problem of Pain, with “Not many years ago when I was an atheist…” indicating that belief had elevated his ability to accept life’s tragedies.

Lewis suggests that free souls are free only if there is the possibility of suffering because free souls may decide to hurt each other.

Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you will find that you have excluded life itself.

But there remains a contradiction between a suffering world and a God that is good. Lewis tries to resolve this by asserting that God’s idea of goodness is different than our various ideas of goodness. We don’t want God to be our Father. We want Him to be our grandfather, whose only wish is our contentment. Lewis believed that love is more than kindness. God’s intention is to make us wholly lovable. We are creatures who suffer because we are in need of alteration.

Lewis later turns from this corrective use of suffering and points out that the problem of pain is especially difficult for perfectionistic moderns. “All of the great religions were first preached, and long practiced, in a world without chloroform.” Like Nietzsche before him in The Birth of Tragedy, Lewis reminds us that the ancients accepted human heartbreak as part of life.

In The Problem of Pain Lewis explains suffering intellectually.

Twenty years after writing The Problem of Pain Lewis experienced pain emotionally when his marriage to Joy Davidman, the American poet, was cut short by cancer. Two years before his own death, Lewis fell into despair and nearly lost his faith.

Before his wife died, Lewis viewed suffering much like we do- on the evening news. We watch it and theorize about what possible use it could have or why it persists and what we should do about it. We toss out answers like the ones above, some of them convincing but none of them fully satisfying. We fail to get our heads around it. Words fail us.

We remain fascinated by calamity, wondering if it will be our turn next and how we will respond. We slow down to view car wrecks, both repelled and spellbound by human suffering.

With the death of his wife, Lewis was transformed from a spectator of suffering to someone crushed by despair. In A Grief Observed, a book he did not want published using his name, he was no longer a spectator like we are often spectators, hypothesizing doctrine as we watch tsunami carnage on T. V.

Instead, Lewis became the Australian man whose six-month old baby had been swept from his arms.

Grief overwhelmed him. He still believed in God, but he “was in danger of coming to believe such terrible things about him.” God must be a “Cosmic Sadist”, even a "spiteful imbecile". He had not realized this before because only now, with the death of his beloved Joy, had the stakes been raised “horrible high”.

Pain and death were no longer parlor games for Lewis. They were now gut-wrenching personal experiences.

Lewis was losing control of his world.

These experiences remind us of our limited place in the world. Any attempt to fully manage them, especially with words, becomes a Tower of Babel as we try to reach ultimate understanding through our own effort. We simply must live through it. Ultimately, God is the Creator of our world. We are not. Ultimate Understanding reaches us.

In a strange and ironic way the problem of pain shows us that God is beyond our construction. God is not the God we define, He is the One we worship. He reveals Himself to us. He is that He is.

This was Lewis’ conclusion as well as he rediscovered his faith after his loss:

"Nothing will shake a man--or at any rate a man like me--out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself."

Perhaps such experiences are so essential to what it means to be created human, so primitive to being a creature of a Creator, that it is only through these experiences; the pain of emotional grief, the joy of spiritual awe, the ecstasy of sexual union, the intimacy of covenantal love; all diminished when reduced to words, that we come to know our place in the world. Perhaps our problem with pain is the same as our problem with love or with the birth of a child or with spiritual transcendence -- we do not master them by putting words to them. They are beyond words. These experiences are always more than we could have managed, imagined or described.

We do not begin to understand them and we kid ourselves when we think we do.

Try as we can, and it is good to do so, at the end we can not fully understand the problem of pain or the death of an innocent. We do not have God’s eyes.

How can we worship a God who allows Melina’s family to suffer such terrible anguish? How can we worship a God who allows so many innocent lives to aimlessly perish?

Because He is God.

Perhaps this is why Golgotha remains such a profound mystery, one beyond description. Perhaps it is why it remains so relevant even to a modern world.