Why Suffering

The problem of evil, and the answer Christianity actually gives.

The problem of evil is the strongest argument against the Christian God. I want to start there. Not because I am trying to soften the argument, but because I think the problem is real, and any treatment of it that does not concede that fact is dishonest from the start.

Here is the form of the argument. If God is all-powerful, he could prevent suffering. If God is all-good, he would prevent suffering. There is suffering. Therefore either God is not all-powerful, or not all-good, or not real.

I want to say what the Christian answer actually is, and then say what it is not.

What the answer is not

The Christian answer is not suffering is not real. It is not the suffering you see is a punishment for some specific sin you committed. It is not God allows suffering because he wants you to grow. It is not just have more faith and it will go away. It is not any of the things often said, glibly, by Christians who are nervous about silence.

The Christian answer is also not a complete explanation. It does not give you a line-by-line accounting of every specific instance of suffering — why this child, this earthquake, this cancer. The Christian tradition has, I think, been careful not to pretend it has that accounting. There is a great deal in the world the tradition is content to mark we do not know.

What the Christian answer does is more limited and, I think, more important: it tells you what kind of universe you are in, and where the suffering fits in the larger story.

The shape of the answer

The shape of the answer has, in classical Christian theology, four moves.

The world is not the way it was made. The Bible begins with a world that God called good. The world we live in now — the world with cancer and earthquakes and human cruelty — is, in the Christian reading, a broken version of the world that was. There has been a rupture. The technical word for the rupture is the fall. You can quarrel with the literal reading of Genesis 3 and still take the philosophical claim seriously: the world is not as it should be, and that wrongness is itself a moral judgment about a moral world.

Most worldviews do not, in fact, give you a way to say the world is not as it should be. On strict naturalism, the world is just as it is; talk of should is a category error. The Christian framework, almost uniquely, has the conceptual room to call the suffering of the world a wrongness — a violation of how things were meant to be.

Free will is real, and it costs. A very large portion of the suffering in the world is caused by human choice. War, abuse, exploitation, betrayal, cruelty. These are not nature’s doing. They are ours.

A God who made creatures capable of love had to make creatures capable of choice. And creatures capable of choice can, in fact, choose against love — and they do, constantly, in large and small ways. The cost of free creatures is the possibility of free creatures making each other suffer. The Christian view is that God could have made a world of perfectly safe, perfectly obedient creatures who loved no one, and instead made a world of creatures who can love and can wound. The wound is the price of the love.

Natural suffering — the suffering not caused by human choice — is more mysterious. Earthquakes, cancers in children, the predator and the prey. The Christian tradition has been, I think, properly humble about this. We do not have a clean theodicy for the microbiology of malaria. What we have is a frame: the world is fallen, the brokenness extends beyond human choice into the structure of the natural order itself, and the suffering of innocents within that broken order grieves God himself.

The frame is not a proof. It is the assertion that the suffering is not the design — that the design was good, and what we see is the design under damage.

The center of the Christian answer is the cross. This is, in the end, what makes the Christian answer different from every other answer to the problem of evil that has ever been offered.

Christianity does not say God explains your suffering. It says God joined you in it. The center of the Christian story is the death of God himself — the eternal Word, by whom all things were made, hanging on a Roman gibbet between two convicted criminals, asphyxiating in the heat. There is no other religion in the world that says anything close to this. Most religions explain suffering at a distance. Christianity says: the maker of the universe came into the suffering himself.

Whatever else this is, it is not glib. It is not suffering is no big deal. It is the claim that God knows, from inside, what every suffering human being knows from inside.

And — this is the second part — that he did this on purpose, to undo the brokenness from the inside. The cross is not just God in solidarity with the sufferers. The cross is God taking the rupture between us and him into his own body, and ending it. The resurrection is the receipt that it worked.

What this means in practice

If you are reading this in the middle of a personal grief — and many people who come to a page like this are — I want to say something plainly. The Christian answer is not designed to make the grief stop hurting. It is designed to put the grief in a story large enough that the grief is not the end of the story.

The story is this: the world is not what it was; what it was is coming again; in the meantime, God himself entered the brokenness; on the cross, the brokenness was paid for; in the resurrection, the remaking of the world began; and on the day Christ returns, every tear will be wiped away.¹

This is not a logical answer to the problem of evil. It is a story that has room for evil in it without giving evil the final word.

That, in the end, is what I am offering. Not an explanation. A larger story.

For the rest of the larger story — the historical case for the cross and the resurrection — start with the minimal facts. For the broader philosophical case, the moral argument and the hard problem of consciousness are the next pieces in this section.