Not long ago a pastor was lamenting the moral and theological collapse of his denomination. His one hope in what seemed an otherwise hopeless situation was to retire and get on the pension plan before the bottom fell out of things.
Whether or not we think this attitude admirable, each of us can recognize ourselves in the pastor’s attempt to shield himself from uncertainties, dangers, and suffering. Avoidance of suffering is as natural as it is advisable, unless, of course, avoidance comes at the expense of morality and personal integrity. But advisable or not, suffering is not always escapable. And neither is the question why suffering befalls us.
I make no claim to having anything original to say on this subject. I have, however, been helped by what C.S. Lewis has to say about it, and I should like to review the main thesis of his chief work on the subject, The Problem of Pain.
Lewis observes that all religions have at least two things in common: the sense of the numinous, and consciousness of a moral law. By numinous he refers to the sense of awe, mystery, and even dread that people feel for powers that lie beyond everyday experience. Imagine yourself walking alone unarmed through a woods in which you suspect there are grizzly bears, and you have some inking of how primitive man in particular felt about the supernatural.
Consciousness of the moral law is more obvious. It is essentially what Lewis calls the rules of fair play that are universally recognized and approved.
Surprisingly, in many if not most religions the numinous and the moral exist independently of each other in the form of non-moral religion and non-religious morality. The Jews, however, understood them to be combined, for God is “the righteous Lord.” Indeed this very God, according to Christians, became an actual human being in Jesus of Nazareth. Now, it is the very goodness of God, especially as it is manifested in the Incarnation, that makes pain and suffering so intolerable, “for pain would be no problem unless, side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteous and loving.”
This brings us to the problem of theodicy, an experience (if not a word) that we all know. “‘If God were good,’ says Lewis, ‘He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty, He would be able to do what he wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.’ This is the problem of pain, in its simplest form.” People often impugn God by saying that if he were all powerful or truly loving he would not allow certain things to happen. Lewis reminds us, however, that the fixed nature of the world is precisely what makes human freedom and human life possible. If the world were like a chess game in which every bad move could be revoked, there would be no game. “Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you will find that you have excluded life itself.”
The first order of business in thinking about theodicy lies in reconsidering the meaning of terms like “goodness” and “love.” Lewis begins with the premise that “if God is wiser than we His judgments will differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil.” Above all, God’s love is not to be confused with mere kindness or niceness. God’s job is not simply to keep his creatures happy or contented; he wills to see them changed, ultimately into his own likeness. “It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms; with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness.”
There are many kinds of love, according to Lewis. Love of animals is one kind, which itself illustrates divine love, for a master tames a dog that he may love it, not that it may love him; and that it may serve him, not that he may serve it. A higher form is the love of parent for child, with authoritative love on the parental side, and obedient love on the child’s. The highest form of love is conjugal love, which in Scripture symbolizes Christ’s love for the church. This most perfect form of love, ironically, causes the most pain, for “it demands the perfecting of the beloved; that mere ‘kindness’ which tolerates anything except suffering in its object is at the opposite pole from Love.” True love wills the perfecting of the beloved, and this intensifies the problem of suffering. We were, after all, not made simply that we might love God, but above all that he might love us. “To ask that God should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God; because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labour to make us lovable.”
This results in quite an amazing paradox, for when we suffer we often accuse God of too little love. The truth is actually the reverse; our pain in such instances is the result of “a love that will not let us go,” to quote the hymnist. God “intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.”
If divine benevolence needs rethinking, so does the state of humanity, and especially human wickedness. True love, we noted is willing to cause pain to the beloved in order to make it more lovable. But moderns do not think themselves unlovable, and in their natural state they do not think themselves wicked. There are two principal reasons why we no longer accept the traditional Christian analysis that humanity has abused its free will and become very bad. One, according to Lewis, is that in the past hundred years kindness has eclipsed all other virtues and become virtually the sole norm of morality. “Most of us do not feel anything except kindness to be really good and cruelty to be really bad.” A terrible irony results, however, for we are an increasingly cruel people. This is so because “every vice leads to cruelty. Even a good emotion, pity, if not controlled by charity and justice, leads through anger to cruelty.”
A second reason we no longer think ourselves bad is due to the dismantling of guilt and shame in our day. Until recent times, guilt was like the red light on the dashboard of a car, warning of a malfunction in the engine. But modern psychology has taught us to view guilt and shame as “repressive.” Former generations considered cowardice, unchastity, deception, greed and so forth to be despicable, but today we are encouraged to “get them out into the open” on the ground that they are not shameful but natural. A generation that denies its evil, of course, will misjudge the wrath of God against evil as something barbarous.
A recovery of the sense of sin is thus essential for apprehending the gospel. Christian evangelists and apologists must today establish the first condition—the sinfulness of humanity—before they can turn to its antidote in the cross of Christ. Lewis enumerates eight further reasons why people today do not think themselves bad. These include false comparisons (“I’m not as bad as so-and-so”), emphasizing social evils and minimizing individual sins, shifting responsibility for personal sins to social causes, and “safety in numbers” mentality (“Surely God won’t send the whole world to hell”).
If truth be told—and the gospel tells it—the human creature is a rebel in the universe, in revolt against his or her rightful Lord and Master. We have, by our misuse of the God-given gift of freedom, elevated self in place of God and ruined an innate divine likeness, spoiled a supernatural consciousness that could prevail over our bodily needs and the material world around us in a way comparable to the powers that Jesus possessed. One of the costs of our revolt was the forfeiture of this special charism of consciousness and a devolvement to a baser animal status. In this state, souls become wicked, and they use the possibilities inherent in freedom to inflict pain on others and hurt them. The vast majority of the suffering in the world is due to this misuse of human freedom and has nothing to do with God’s will. But not all of it is, believes Lewis. God can and does use pain as a physician uses medicine, as a remedial and corrective good to bring the human creature back into relationship with his or her Creator, where the creature will itself become good, happy, and fulfilled.
The first answer to the question why redemption is painful is a simple one: it is a painful process—the Bible calls it a mortification (Colossians 3:5)—for a habitually swollen and defiant will to humble itself and surrender to God. But what might cause a human will to surrender? Certainly not blissfulness. Pain is a tool of God reminding us that all is not well. “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” Lewis makes no apologies for the severity of the medicine—a severity necessitated by human wickedness, however, and not by divine malevolence. “Pain is a terrible instrument: it may lead to final and unrepentant rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of the rebel soul.”
Second, pain also reminds us that what we “have” is not our own and not enough for us. Sometimes God must take things from us—perhaps even loved ones—to shatter the illusion of self-sufficiency, and to serve notice that our comfortable possessions and allegiances are insufficient for our eternal destiny.
Third, pain is the inevitable consequence of choosing God’s will over our own. When a fallen creature wills to love and obey a holy God, it is doing something contrary to its nature, cutting across the grain as old as DNA itself. Lewis calls repentance and obedience a movement “full speed astern,” the undoing of the rebellion of the first Adam for the salvation of the Last Adam.
In short, the world is “a vale of soul-making,” according to Lewis, and necessarily so, since tribulation is the only way, despite its disagreeableness, that a loving Creator can remind sovereign rebel wills that their final good is not in themselves but in God alone, and through that pain draw them, if possible, to himself. Only empty hands can be filled; God must relieve us of our own treasures in order to give us the supreme treasure of Jesus Christ.
Suffering thus has the potential of reducing the rebel will and restoring it to reliance on God. And, despite its unpleasantness, it appears to be doing its job. It will not cease until “God sees the world to be either redeemed or no further redeemable.” This not only banishes utopian promises and ideals; it is a healthy reminder that trials and tribulations are not an alien intrusion in life, but a necessary and constant part of life, coaxing and prodding us away from our illusion of self-sufficiency—even wrenching it from us when necessary—to restore us to our rightful image and good.
C. S. Lewis saw the world as a place of longing. It could not be otherwise for creatures who have fallen from a pristine state and still carry, despite their feverous attempts to erase it, the residual memory of paradise. All true joys in life hold the promise of greater and final joy to come, but all worldly joys are equally transitory, lest we settle for appetizers instead of feasting at the banquet prepared for us. Lewis was utterly convinced that human life was an either-or. Either God will make us fully like himself as fit partners for eternity, or we will retain management of our souls for eternity in hell. In The Great Divorce he put it unforgettably, “There are only two kinds of people in the end; those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’” “All that you are, sins apart, is destined, if you will let God have His good way, to utter satisfaction,” says Lewis in The Problem of Pain.
C.S. Lewis believed that God alone could fulfill the deep longing of his creatures, and that when he did life would be full, good, and happy. The terrible necessity of tribulation is God’s last resort to restore the rebel will to the divine image, to bring those whom he loves “further up and further in.”
This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Jul/Aug 1996).
