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.

C. S. Lewis struggled to reconcile his Christian faith with the existence of pain and suffering.

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I a m not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man’s life. I was happy before I met H. (This is how Lewis refers to his wife Helen Joy Davidman Lewis in his book.) I’ve plenty of what are called ‘resources.’ People get over these things. Come, I shan’t do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all the ‘commonsense’ vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace."

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Attenborough's film Shadowlands is based on Lewis' A Grief Observed

In Shadowlands we see Lewis grappling with the untimely death of his wife Joy Davidman.

"On the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. Maudlin tears. I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it—that disgusts me. And even while I’m doing it I know it leads me to misrepresent H. herself. Give that mood its head and in a few minutes I shall have substituted for the real woman a mere doll to be blubbered over. Thank God the memory of her is still too strong (will it always be too strong?) to let me get away with it."

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Lewis’ words for Joy’s Memorial Plaque
Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hope that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In Lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.

Gibson Assaults Our Modern Sensibilities

“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” H. Richard A. Neibuhr Professor Neibuhr was just one in series of great minds to lament the success of the Protestant purification of the world, isolating moderns from the ugly underbelly of life. In an effort to remake the world anew, the great Protestant project to purify our homes, our lives, our jobs, even our loved ones has largely worked. The world today enjoys less violence and suffering than it did 500 years ago. If you don’t agree read some history. But it has come at a cost. Our lives are a bit too planned, too predicable, too punctual, too pretty, and too polite. Paradoxically, we are not all that comfortable in this perfect world.

Christ’s death confronts us with the brutal capacity within our human condition and nature.

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