Dear Theophilus, 

I was wondering how long it would take you to raise the question of suffering and pain and the existence of God. This whole question is often dealt with under the title of theodicy.

I think that it does not take much acumen to see that we all suffer, that we are all sitting on the bench of mourners which includes all of humanity. You state that you find it impossible to believe in God in view of all the suffering that is experienced by humans and other forms of life. The question of suffering and the way life treats good and bad people comes to the fore in the Judaic tradition in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C. It is then that the idea that good people inherit rewards becomes challenged in books such as the Book of Job.

Atheists have often criticized believers saying that the world proves that there is no God. If God is all-powerful and all-good, as theists claim, then why is there suffering and pain and evil in the world? Either God can stop evil and he won't or he wants to stop evil and he can't. But there is a curious twist of logic here. Suffering and pain cannot really challenge the existence of God but only challenge the type of God that exists. Your statement therefore, that you find it hard to believe in a God because of all the suffering there is in the world, is really illogical. What we will find is that in raising the issue of theodicy, another agenda lurks in the background and what I will try to do is to bring this agenda into the open.

Theodicy is closely connected to power and one of the reasons why we explore this area is to gain power and control. An all-powerful God legitimizes man's subjugation of the world and this includes controlling and eliminating pain and suffering. But, sometimes, it is important not to have an answer to the question of evil because this tends to lessen the need for a community. Christians have not had an answer to the problem of evil because their only "answer" is a community which absorbs and destroys evil. Euthanasia and abortion and other ethical problems have arisen because we have lost the sense of community and try to solve these "problems" through medical technologies. The righteousness of God is not solely goodness nor power; there is another factor, agape, which is love not based on any merit. It is this love which seeks a way around sheer justice. When Abraham discusses the fate of Sodom God talks of finding 50 just men. God agrees to spare Sodom if that is the case. Abraham then asks: what if there are 40? or 30? or 20? or 10 just men? In each case God agrees to save Sodom. It is this love which is to be expressed through community and which, in a way, answers the problem of evil.

Do you notice how you are less troubled by people being killed in say, a hurricane, as opposed to by some disease? Why is this so? The answer to this lies in the early chapters of the Book of Genesis. Man sets himself up as a god, that is totally autonomous and independent, and it is the idea of sickness which challenges the idea of the godhood of man. What very often bothers us about pain and suffering is its perceived absurdity. Being able to assign causes points to a regain of the control that we crave. For us, medicine has became the epitome of rationality embodying reason, science and almost unlimited human potential. Medicine also has caused suffering to become more individual as the patient very often becomes isolated from the community. Ironically, for medicine illness is pointless, something that is there merely to be removed and it plays no role in life or growth or meaning.

The answer to the problem of theodicy is not so much to explain away evil as to describe what God is like. God is not merely the God of power and goodness, but the God of creation. Since creation is "pointless" in the sense that God was not compelled to create, then the basis of creation is not necessity but love. What this tells us is that explaining creation through some kind of logical consideration of nature or what we observe in nature is going to fail in trying to explain evil. Sometimes through well meaning intentions we try to incorporate evil and suffering into God's plans in that He uses evil to further His cause. If suffering is somehow in God's secret plans, then we come to the conclusion that you and many others seem to have come to, that God is really a torturer. As a writer once wrote - God is used to justify the injustices of the world by saying to bear the pain now for some reward in the future. Many have rebelled against this type of bargaining and, I think, rightly so. I must make something abundantly clear to you - suffering is not God's doing. Some suffering arises from our choices (you smoke and you get lung cancer), some from the sheer randomness and freedom of creation (you don't smoke and you get lung cancer and some smoke and don't get lung cancer). We cannot have a neat and tidy theory and explanation of evil. Our attempts at explaining evil are sometimes more of a hindrance and nuisance, especially to those who are suffering, since pain has a way of taking command of center stage and pushes everything else aside as we see illustrated in the Book of Job.

But, just as our dealing with evil has to do with what kind of God created the world, we must also consider the world and creation in order to get insights into pain and suffering. There are two important phases to creation - working and waiting. The latter is important and has become an important part of Judaic teaching in the concept of the Sabbath. Creation also has a "power" over its Creator in that the Creator is willing to abide by the rules of creation. And thirdly, the Creator loves the world and through this love He gives the world value and meaning.

You have probably heard the recommendation to read the Bible and I think you mentioned that you tried and got bogged down. You couldn't see much point in reading those old stories about people who lived a long time ago and who really have no connection with you. When we talk about community we think about a group of people helping each other and relating to each other. But there is more to community than that. A community is bound together by a common story. It is the narrative, the story that embodies the meaning of life and, at the same time, makes sense out of our suffering and pain. Unfortunately we have lost this common story and we make up for this vacuum with television and film. These two show the power of story for human life but these stories are often disjointed and don't answer our deep needs. That is why we often hear the encouragement to read the Bible. What we see there is a story with a large panoramic view of life, so large that we too can fit into it and find our meaning there. We see in the Bible a community with a common narrative that grants meaning to the disjointed segments of our lives showing that mere chronicity, which is simply linear time without taking into account a wider panorama, is not the true background for human life. One of the main themes of this story is the presence of pain and suffering in human lives. One of the things that becomes quite obvious in the Biblical stories is that evil and suffering are not just passively accepted. Complaining and bitterness are expressed, along with lamentations, but this takes place within a specific context and that is of worship. Do not stifle the cry of protest, we are told. When you cry out you identify what is wrong and unjust. The lament arises showing that the world isn't as it should be, it is incongruous when we look at what we know of God. But what we are shown, particularly in the New Testament, is that God is with us in our suffering. The ultimate goal of suffering is revelation of God who is everywhere, even in pain. Ultimately, the problem of evil arises because we look for a god in philosophical discussions who stands apart from a community of people at worship.

Bar-Abbas

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