Why Is There Suffering?

Pick Your Own Theological Expedition

Bethany N. Sollereder

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780310109037
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

Your journey begins. The road before you is smooth and straight. You walk for some time, recalling your experiences that call into question the deep realities of life. Up ahead, you can see the road branching in three directions...

In Why Is There Suffering? you, reader, control the route you take through its "choose-your-own-path" chapters, asking questions and exploring different theological possibilities on the big topics of:

• God's existence
• God's nature
• The nature of suffering
• Evil
• Pain
• Final destiny

Taking an intentionally light-hearted approach to a heavy topic this book presents an illustrative introduction to the problem of suffering and the most commonly offered responses to it. Along the road, you'll face multiple possibilities regarding suffering and its theological explanations, and you'll make choices about which one you find most plausible, skipping to that section of the book. Each decision you make leads to further complexities and new choices that reveal how theological beliefs lead to certain conclusions.

This book does not offer final answers. Instead, it introduces the "theological" possibilities—both Christian and non-Christian—that you can explore and wrestle with to make informed decisions about your beliefs and clearly see the road you've taken to reach such beliefs.

You are, of course, in control of the paths you take through these pages. You decide which explanations work. You can always go back and see what would change if you'd taken a different path. And, who knows...you may find that certain pathways resonate with your experiences in ways you didn't expect.

CHAPTER 1

What Is God Like?

Your journey begins as you set out from home, the road running before you smooth and straight. You walk for some time, recalling the experiences that call into question the deep realities of life. Up ahead, you can see the road branching three different ways.

The heart of the theological problem with suffering stems from God being both powerful and loving. If God is perfectly powerful, then God should be able to prevent suffering. If God is perfectly loving, God should want to prevent suffering. The Christian tradition describes God as almighty and perfectly loving, yet we still suffer.

We don’t just suffer a little bit, either. For all its goodness and beauty, this is a tearstained existence. I don’t need to recount the horrors that exist in our world because you already know many of them. You’ve read about them, watched them, and experienced them yourself. Even without the horrors we see on television, there is enough trouble in our day-to-day lives to make us wonder what God is up to and how God could allow the evils we experience.

I remember once sitting in church when despair was sitting heavy on me and trying to sing along to the chorus, “You are so good, so good, so good to me.” The words felt hollow. God’s goodness certainly did not seem evident to me. Is God really good? It is an appropriate question to ask at the beginning of our adventure, and it is one many have asked as they contemplated suffering in the world.

There are three major approaches we could take to that question. First, there is the possibility that God is perfectly good. More than just good—God is love. God is the source of all life, and God’s love is the secret wellspring of all that is. The world is not just a creative project but is the offspring of God’s overflowing love. God’s perfect will of good for the world may be impeded by various factors (we will talk about those later), but God essentially desires the well-being of the world and all that is in it. The world is not perfect for one of two reasons: either God has been opposed by some other being (like Satan), or created beings themselves reject God’s plan.

Second, we might think God is not good or loving. Perhaps good and evil run through God equally, like the yin and yang concept of Chinese philosophy. Or, like the Force from Star Wars, God only seeks to keep balance in the universe. Perhaps God is entirely neutral—neither good nor evil in essence. God is, on this reading, only the empowering source of life. Maybe God is simply not interested in this world or its troubles; God created the world and set the heavenly spheres spinning, but now God is off somewhere doing other things. Perhaps God is busy creating new universes, and our troubles do not reach the divine attention. Whatever the reason, evil exists because God does not oppose it or doesn’t care.

The third option is that God simply does not exist. Therefore, the world is one that is indifferent to suffering because there is no loving or caring being to look out for us. There is not even a neutral being to ignore us. We simply are in this vast, beautiful, and terrifying cosmos, inhabiting a pale blue dot of a planet.

There is the agnostic approach, too—that we don’t know what God is like or if God exists. I won’t include that as an option because it cannot go beyond its initial statement of “there is not sufficient evidence to decide.” (I’ve only included options where people make claims about reality.) But an open-minded agnostic could read all the paths with some benefit, because being better informed about the options is never a bad thing. In other areas where there is not enough evidence to make a final decision—like whether gravity is quantum or classical—the lack of deciding evidence does not make being well-informed a less noble pursuit.

It’s time to decide: What do you believe God is like?

God is perfectly good and loves us. (Turn to p. 4 [ch. 2].)

God exists but doesn’t love us. (Turn to p. 36 [ch. 13].)

God does not exist. (Turn to p. 41 [ch. 15].)

CHAPTER 2

God Is Love

You take the road that veers off to the left, toward distant mountains. To your right, open plains show the wide, bright sky. Farther right, almost behind you, you can see the road rise up a hill, and at the top you see a bridge across a hidden canyon.

“God is love,” writes John in his letter (1 John 4:8). Christians look primarily to the Bible to understand what God is like, and the Bible describes God as full of unfailing love. In one way, that tells you all you need to know about God. Love captures all that is truly good, worthy, and right in the world. In another way, that might tell you very little. After all, love can mean all sorts of things. You can love a friend, but you can also love a hamburger. Your “love” for your hamburger will lead to you eating it, but hopefully that is not true of your friend!

Generally, when we say God is love—that God loves us—we mean that God wants the best for us. God wants things to go well with us. We could even add that God wants to be in a relationship with us, since knowing God is part of what is best for us.

So far so good.

But when we look around at the world, it doesn’t seem like what is best for us actually happens. We certainly don’t see a world where all people are in a loving relationship with God or with each other. Quite the contrary. So what has gone wrong?

There are four possible choices about God at this point.

First, you can say that God is indeed all-powerful and all-knowing, but there is confusion somewhere else in the picture. Maybe God has a plan to use evil for good. Maybe the reason God allows evil is simply too hard for us to understand, and our job is merely to hold on in faith. Whatever the case, the existence of evil does not indicate that something has gone wrong in God’s plan. All power and all knowledge sit with God eternally.

Second, you can say that, because God loves us, God gives us the freedom to choose actions that don’t lead to the best outcome for ourselves or others. We can even refuse relationship with God if we so choose. Love gives freedom, even when it hurts. Our freedom can disrupt God’s good plans for us.

Third, you can believe that God’s power is limited for some other reason. Maybe God isn’t all-powerful in the first place. God wants good to happen but doesn’t have the ability to bring about the best outcomes. Maybe God has an opponent (like Satan) who gets in the way and messes things up. Or perhaps it is not in God’s nature to coerce or control at all. God’s power is not the kind that controls stuff and causes things to happen; rather it empowers and allows others to cause things to happen.

Finally, there is the possibility that God doesn’t know the future. While traditional Christianity has usually said something like “God sees everything, past, present, and future,” what if, in order to have real relationship with people, God has given up that eternal vantage point? Just as Jesus became a human with all a human’s limitations, so God chose to experience time with us and therefore creates the future with us. When bad things happen, they are not part of God’s plan, but God will turn them into part of the plan by the end of time. Like Rumpelstiltskin, God can spin gold out of straw, so not knowing or planning the future is of little importance. It is more important to God that there is real give-and-take, real response in relationship with us.

The paths lie before you. Which way will you choose?

God is all-powerful and all-knowing, so either there is a plan or suffering is a mystery. (Turn to p. 7 [ch. 3].)

We have the freedom to disrupt God’s plan. (Turn to p. 17 [ch. 7].)

God’s power is limited. (Turn to p. 20 [ch. 8].)

God does not know the future. (Turn to p. 24 [ch. 9].)

CHAPTER 3

God Is All-Powerful
and All-Knowing

You’ve taken the path toward the high mountains, approaching the foothills. The mountains seem to call, enchanting and mysterious, wild and free, drawing you forward into the unknown. As you walk toward them, you notice a broad, smooth road extending to your right. It is the first paved surface you have seen. You stand at the beginning of the road, but the mountains still call. You pause to consider the next path.

God is all-powerful and all-knowing. God sees the end from the beginning, standing outside time and space. God knows exactly what you will do tomorrow in just the same way that God knows what you did yesterday.

In addition, God is all-powerful. Nothing happens without God’s express permission. God inspires every good action. When bad happens, it is not because things are outside of God’s control.

On one hand, this can be comforting. It means you can give up trying to control situations. You can rest in the knowledge that “underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deut 33:27). No matter how bad things get, God has things under control and knows exactly how they are going to turn out. You may feel out of control, but the universe never is.

On the other hand, it raises some difficult questions. If God is all-powerful—if the world proceeds according to plan—why did God include evil and suffering in the first place? If God is in control, even over our free choices and any demonic powers, why didn’t God create in a way that evil couldn’t happen? Or why not create in a way that there is far less evil? We...