The Problem of Pain...

I was talking to somebody about suffering the other day, and could not help but be taken by how much they cared for the plight of human beings, particularly in terms of moral and natural evil. With regards to moral evil, we talked about how a God of love could allow murderer's to get away with so much? Why did a group of people loot shops and set cars on fire in the centre of London? Why are corrupt governments who filter aid money given by other countries for their own means allowed to prosper, amongst other things. Then we moved on to natural evil (or evil which seems to have no moral cause), which in terms of a Theodicy (a defence of the Christian faith in light of suffering) is so much harder to live with.. And we asked how do we really explain an Earthquake which has taken the lives of so many people? Can we really postulate a loving God when there are so many young children starving in Africa? And as if I wasn't already overcome by how much suffering we all observe everyday, I was hit with a rather simple, yet profound question. Why doesn't God just stop suffering? Isn't he able to do that? Well, it was hard to answer my friend then, and even with hindsight it still is. But while I write this I am reminding of a quote by CS Lewis, in his book the Problem of Pain and it goes as follows:

Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free will involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.

So there comes a sense that this is the way it has to be, both in terms of moral and natural evil. There cannot be free will without a form of spontaneity, and you cannot have meaning to one extreme (Evil) without also having the other (Altruism). So as rational free human agents, we have the ability to bring innumerable good to the world, and as well as unspeakable evil. And in terms of some natural evil we could contend the same, there has been major destruction in the way the earth has formed (particularly in regards to the tectonic plates), but we also see great beauty in them.

But in regards to the original question, this doesn't seem enough, and I am so very aware of that. So there has to be an element of mystery, which as well as reason becomes the essence of faith. And the living hope (1 Peter 1:3) that underpins this comes from what I am now calling the Jesus movement, where God became flesh and came into time and space to reconcile and repair our world. Consequently Jesus' death on the cross began the dynamic process of what we call Redemption. Nonetheless, this doesn't mean that we don't live in a tension of anguish and hope, which seems to be accentuated every time we hear of a another disaster on the television.

Consequently doing this is hard, and it always reminds of Samwise the Brave's speech to Frodo at the end of the Twin Towers, when everything was falling down and there was no hope.

Please allow to repeat the lines again:

Samwise to Frodo:

It's like in the great story's Mr Frodo, the ones that really matter. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn't want to know the end, because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much has happened? But in the end it is only a passing thing, a shadow, even darkness must pass and the day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine the clearer, those are the story's that stay with you, that meant something even if your too small to understand why.

Scripture talks about that brighter day in Revelation 21, with heaven becoming earth..