The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus provocatively asked,  “Is [God] willing to prevent evil but not able?  Then he is impotent.  Is he able but not willing?  Then he is malevolent.  Is he both able and willing?  Whence then is evil?” (p. 85).

This is called “the argument against God from evil”.  It was often raised to disprove God’s existence.  Now a weaker claim is made:  “suffering is not proof but evidence that makes the existence of God less probable, although not impossible” (p. 89).  In any case, the problem of evil and suffering in the world drives many to question–and in some cases, outright reject–God’s existence.

Why does God allow evil?  Attempted answers are called “theodicies”.  One theodicy is “soul-making”.  “This view says that the evils of life can be justified if we recognize that the world was primarily created to be a place where people find God and grow spiritually into all they were designed to be” (p. 89).  This “answer” has two weaknesses.  One, many people with “bad souls” get little adversity while many with “good souls” get a lot.  Two, this view doesn’t explain why little children, infants or even animals suffer.

A second attempted answer is “the free will” theodicy.  Keller defines it: “God created us not to be robots or animals of instinct but free rational agents with the ability to choose and therefore to love.  But if God was able to make us choose the good freely, then he had to make us capable of also choosing evil.  So our free will can be abused and that is the reason for evil” (p. 90,91).  This theodicy also has weaknesses.  For one, it may explain evil that people do (moral evil) but doesn’t explain disasters and disease (natural evil).  For another, why couldn’t the all-powerful, sovereign God create humans capable of love but not such horrendous, suffering-causing evil?

Another (among many others) is the “punishment” theodicy.   It holds that because humanity rebelled against God in the beginning, all suffering is punishment for sin.  The randomness of suffering, however, makes this theodicy simplistic.

Theodicies such as these may help, but all fall short of satisfactorily explaining evil.  Keller writes, “It is very hard to insist that any of them show convincingly how God would be fully justified in permitting all the evil we see in the world . . .  Surely one of the messages [of the book of Job] . . .  is that it is both futile and inappropriate to assume that any human mind could comprehend all the reasons God might have for any instance of pain and sorrow, let alone for all evil” (p.95).

Therefore, instead of trying to explain why God allows suffering, Christians  recently have mounted a defense against the idea that the existence of evil doesn’t mean God must not exist.  Keller:  “If God has good reasons for allowing suffering and evil, then there is no contradiction between his existence and that of evil.  So in order for his case not to fail, the skeptic would have to reply that God could not possibly have any such reasons.  But it is very hard to prove that” (p. 97).  And since God is omniscient, why couldn’t he have good reasons to allow even the worst suffering, reasons we can’t think of?

In a world of complex and far-reaching cause-and-effect, human knowledge is too limited to trace out all reasons and causes for suffering.  Keller illustrates with “the butterfly effect”.  Scientists have learned that large systems—like weather—can be influenced by the tiniest changes.  “The classic example is the claim that a butterfly’s fluttering in China would be magnified through a ripple effect so as to determine the path of a hurricane in the South Pacific.”

What, Keller wonders, if every event in time had similar ripple effects.  If so, “ . . . . how . . . could any human being look at the tragic, seemingly ‘senseless’ death of a young person and have any idea of what the effects in history will be?” (p. 100,101).  We are simply not positioned to judge whether a particular evil is pointless and unnecessary.

The dynamic of all this intellectual reasoning fades in the face of what Keller calls the “visceral argument from evil.”  “Visceral” refers to deep inward feelings rather than the ideas of the intellect.  In his book, Night, Eli Weisel confesses how the fires of the furnaces in the Nazi death camp destroyed his faith in God.  “Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever . . . Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dusts” (p. 102).

Of course, not everyone who endures horrendous evil rejects God.  Keller argues that those who do reject God assume “that God, if he exists, has failed to do the right thing, that he has violated a moral standard”.  But, if God doesn’t exist, from where comes such strong moral feelings?

Some might claim those moral feelings are the genetic product of evolution.  Keller replies, “While that explanation may account for mere feelings, it can’t account for moral obligation.  What right have you to tell people they are obligated to stop certain behaviors if their feelings tell them those [behaviors] are right . . . ? (p. 104).

C.S. Lewis wrote, “In a word, unless we allow ultimate reality to be moral, we cannot morally condemn [something as evil]” (p. 105),  The moral God is the source of moral feeling and obligation!

In the throes of suffering we might shake our fist at the heavens and deny God’s existence.  But Keller concludes Chapter 4 this way:  “So abandoning belief in God doesn’t help with the problem of suffering at all and, as we will see, it removes many resources for facing it” (p. 107).

Each chapter in Walking with God through Pain and Suffering (https://www.amazon.com/Walking-God-through-Pain-Suffering/dp/1594634408/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485462207&sr=1-1&keywords=walking+with+god+through+pain+and+suffering+by+timothy
+keller)  concludes with an appropriate “Life Story.  This one is “Mary’s.”

Throughout her young adult years, Mary suffered beating, sexual abuse, severe health problems, a schizophrenic child and financial ruin. Her words are an inspiring climax to a chapter about “the argument against God from evil” and offer a wise, humble response to evil . . .

“What I discovered about heartaches and problems, especially the ones that are way beyond what we can handle, is that maybe those are the problems [God] does permit precisely because we cannot handle them or the pain and anxiety they cause.  But He can.  I think He wants us to realize that trusting Him to handle these situations is actually a gift.  His gift of peace to us in the midst of the craziness.  Problems don’t disappear and life continues, but He replaces the sting of those heartaches with hope . . . ” (p. 108,109).

O God, to us who suffer so deeply that we sometimes doubt your existence and for whom the intellectual reasons don’t remove the visceral pain, give Mary’s realization that trusting You to handle the situation is actually Your gift of peace and hope.  We are not intellectual giants, Father.  We’re just Your hurting children who need Your gracious gift.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

The secular worldview “dominates the elite institutions of Western society, [but] it is largely ignored by actual sufferers.”

Thus Timothy Keller begins Chapter Three of his excellent book (https://www.amazon.com/Walking-God-through-Pain-Suffering/dp/1594634408/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485184626&sr=8-1 keywords=walking+with+god+through+pain+and+suffering+by
+timothy+keller).

The December 2012 Newtown school shootings are a sad, but glaring, example of Keller’s point.  Every family who lost a child held a religious service.

Some atheists admit religion provides a needed sense of community in the face of horrific suffering.  But Keller counters, “Community among persons is forged only when there is something more important than one’s own interests to which all share a higher allegiance” (p. 66). Religious faith provides that “higher allegiance.”

“The Great Agnostic, Robert Green Ingersoll, standing at the graveside of a friend’s child, consoled, “They who stand with breaking hearts around this little grave, need have no fear.  The larger and noble faith in all that is, and is to be, tells us that death, even at its worst, is only perfect rest . . . The dead do not suffer” (p. 67).

Keller answers: “It makes little sense to point to a state in which we are stripped of all love and everything that gives meaning in life—and tell people they need not fear it” (p. 67).  So much for Ingersoll’s consolation!

Victor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist who survived Nazi death camps, saw how some of his fellow prisoners were able to endure the horror, while others couldn’t.  Frankl said the difference came down to “meaning.”  Keller comments: “to ‘live for meaning’ means not that you try to get something out of life but that life expects something from us.  In other words, you have meaning only when there is something in life more than your own personal freedom and happiness, something for which you are glad to sacrifice your happiness” (p. 70,71).

The only happiness secularism offers is here and now.  If we can’t find it here, we’ll never have it.

Secularism wasn’t king at America’s start.  We lived for God’s glory. Then, claims Andrew Delbanco in The Real American Dream:  A Meditation on Hope, 19th century Americans substituted the nation for God’s kingdom.  God became more remote and less majestic.  Later in the 20^th century, instant gratification became “the hallmark of the good life” (p. 75,76).  Victor Frankl’s observation is profound:  “ . . . people who . . . have nothing to die for . . . therefore have nothing to live for when life takes away their freedom” (p. 77).  When personal happiness is our only meaning, “suffering can lead very quickly to suicide,” warned Frankl (p. 77).

We Christians realize human suffering came because the creatures turned away from the Creator.  So it was through suffering that Jesus Christ came to rescue us for himself.  “And now it is how we suffer,” explains Keller, “that comprises one of the main ways we become great and Christ-like, holy and happy, and a crucial way we show the world the love and glory of our Savior” (p. 77,78).

Of course, we do all we can, like the secularists, to care for sufferers and lessen suffering.  But this line from The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien rings clearly true: “Always after a defeat and respite, [evil] takes another shape and grows again” (p. 80).  Suffering in this life will never be eradicated.

Secularism provides no solution.  It has no foundation for its views.  It offers no hope for everything we cherish about life.

Our only real hope lies in the words of the psalmist:  “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18).

I’ve reached 73 faster than I could ever run.  Wheelchair-bound, I recall being a child, parenting our children, pastoring for four decades, beach-walking with Lois and so much more.  With grateful joy, but also profound sadness, I reminisce.  I’ll never do it again.  Today I suffer the pains of aging and illness.

The secularist says, “Be happy with what you’ve had.  Enjoy the memories.  Soon suffering will end in the ‘perfect rest’ of death.”  But my heart refuses to be satisfied with that.  It cries for something more.  Something grounded, not in a wish or a philosophy, but in this historical, incredible truth:  Christ came and suffered for my sins, so I might be restored to my Creator.  Then, on the third day, he rose bodily from the grave.  The perfect, acceptable sacrifice for my sins and the powerful, life-giving resurrection for my death.  “Because I live, you also will live” (John 14:19).

A hole in ground to “rest”–that’s the best secularism can offer.  The resurrected Christ offers life “immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20).

This blog title is also the title of an excellent book by Timothy Keller, founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian church in New York City.

(Another pastor blessed with baldness!)

I’ve just finished reading it and want to do a “book report” (interspersed with my devotional commentaries), both to solidify what I’m learning and hopefully help you. Perhaps my writing will make you thirsty to read Keller’s . . .

https://www.amazon.com/Walking-God-through-Pain-Suffering/dp/1594634408/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1484677680&sr=1-6&keywords=timothy+keller

In Chapter One Keller justifies his book:  “Nothing is more important than to learn how to maintain a life of purpose in the midst of painful adversity.”  In the Epilogue he does it again:  “If we know the biblical theology of suffering and have our hearts and minds engaged by it, then when grief, pain and loss come, we will not be surprised and can respond in the various ways laid out in Scripture.”

I’d rather stick my head in the sand and presume Jesus gives his people “heaven on earth.”  But that’s only for dumb birds.  Nobody escapes suffering.  ” . . . through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22).  “Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you” (1 Peter 4:12).

I remember hearing a well-known TV evangelist say, “God will keep me healthy; I’m just going to die of old age.”  Not only presumptuous, that statement is foolish.  Old-age body parts wear out, and we suffer.  There’s no escape, unless Jesus returns first.

Nevertheless, our Western culture (sometimes including Christianity) does a poor job explaining suffering and preparing us for it.  Keller quotes Dr. Paul Brand, a pioneering orthopedic surgeon in the treatment of leprosy:  “In the United States . . . I encountered a society that seeks to avoid pain at all costs.  Patients lived at a greater comfort level than any I had previously treated (elsewhere in the world), but they seemed far less equipped to handle suffering and far more traumatized by it” (p.16).

In our secular culture, this world is all there is.  Therefore, suffering has no meaningful place.  It’s an enemy that interrupts our pleasure-seeking. This contrasts with every other culture which views suffering as punishment or test or opportunity.

But our culture says suffering is senseless.  In the view of Richard Dawkins’ (evolutionary biologist), “the reason people struggle so mightily in the face of suffering is because they will not accept it never has any purpose.”  Richard Shweder (cultural anthropologist) writes, “The sufferer is a victim, under attack from natural forces devoid of intentionality.”

Thus, the sufferer is not responsible for how he responds.  Keller writes, “The older view of suffering was that the pain is a symptom of a conflict between a person’s internal and external world.  It meant the sufferer’s behavior and thinking may need to be changed, or some significant circumstance in the environment had to be changed, or both.  The focus was not on the painful and uncomfortable feeling—it was on what the feelings told you about your life, and what should be done about it” (p. 25).

Suffering is sometimes caused by “unjust economic and social conditions, bad public policies, broken family patterns, or simply villainous evil parties” (p. 26).  Our response is anger.  Current events, right?

C.S. Lewis wrote:  “For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue . . . For [modernity] the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men, the solution is technique” (p. 26).

Christianity holds a radically different view of suffering, even while other cultures contain half-truths of it.  For example, a fatalistic culture demands stoic endurance;  Christians are encouraged “to express their grief with cries and questions” (p. 28).  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1; Matthew 27:46).

Karma-believers hold that the sufferer is being punished for past wrongs; Christians believe “suffering is often unjust and disproportionate.”  Job is the classic example and Jesus the supreme.

Moralists believe that suffering works off one’s sinful debt; Christians believe our sin-debt has been paid.  “ . . .  for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:23,24).  Therefore, suffering is not meritorious.

Christianity teaches that suffering has a purpose, “and, if faced rightly, it can drive us like a nail deep into the love of God and into more stability and spiritual power than you can imagine” (p. 30).

The key, then, is learning how to face suffering “rightly”.  This Keller (and I) will discuss in coming posts.  For now, let’s conclude Chapter One with these compelling words from Keller . . .

“While other worldviews led us to sit in the midst of life’s joys, foreseeing the coming sorrows, Christianity empowers its people to sit in the midst of this world’s sorrows, tasting the coming joy” (p. 31).