Kathryn Crawford
Dr. Morgan
BIBT 332
March 9, 2023
ITA #1: The Problem of Suffering
Posing the Problem: Why do we see suffering as a problem that should be avoided at all costs?
As human beings, we enjoy our comforts. The habits, people, things, and environments
we choose to surround ourselves with each day contribute, whether largely or merely an ounce,
to us living within the bounds we have deemed for ourselves “comfortable”. By doing so, we
tend to avoid anything we view as unpleasant because that would force us to be uncomfortable.
However, in life, we often face situations and realities that we would not choose for ourselves:
broken hearts, strained relationships, sickness, and even death, to only name a few. For those of
us who believe in a God full of goodness, power, and grace, we struggle to comprehend why He
would ever subject his beloved sons and daughters to suffering if He has the ultimate power to
make everything right. Why, then, does suffering exist? Where does it come from? How are we
supposed to engage with it? These are all questions Lewis seeks to answer in a variety of ways
throughout his work. The following quotes and subsequent analysis aim to uncover how Lewis
approaches this problem of suffering.
Lewis’s Arguments on Suffering
ARGUMENT 1
Quote: “The world is a dance in which good, descending from God, is disturbed by evil arising from creatures,
and the resulting conflict is resolved by God’s own assumption of the suffering nature which evil produces”
The Problem of Pain p.79
Analysis: Things are not perfect in the world, and Lewis addresses that here. Lewis mentions in a previous
passage the existence of free will, which gives man the opportunity to love God in a meaningful way and also
choose things that go against God. This freedom opens the possibility of a disturbance in this relationship that
would result in suffering. However, borrowing from Hebrews, we do not have a great high priest that cannot
sympathize with our suffering. God became approachable and reachable, assuming the “suffering nature,” that
is, the human nature, which experiences a proneness to evil (temptation), but never produced evil when he
assumed it. He showed us that our suffering is not something that produces evil. Rather, he demonstrated that
they are two separate things. Christ’s life inverts our expectations: the potential for suffering exists because of
the presence of evil in the world, and not the other way around. Based on other arguments by Lewis, it is the
fact that there is a broken relationship between creation and its Creator, and the existence of our free will, that
created the opportunity for evil to “arise from creatures,” which then subjects us to suffering. From our
humanity, we suffer, making it possible for God to suffer (and do so perfectly) when he became man.
ARGUMENT 2
Quote: “When souls become wicked they will certainly use this possibility to hurt one another…it is men, not
God…by human avarice or human stupidity…that we have poverty and overwork.” The Problem of Pain p.86
Analysis: In God’s omnipotence, he can do anything that is intrinsically possible by His nature but never act in
a way that is self-contradictory. God never loses his goodness, even when man is suffering. Thus, we can
observe, according to Lewis, that goodness and suffering do not contradict one another. He solidifies this
argument with the aforementioned quote, noting that it is the free will of humans that causes us to hurt one
another and impose suffering in the world God created for us. God, being all-powerful, completely good, but
never self-contradictory, cannot interfere with the consequence of the free will he lovingly gave man. It is
humans who have produced ways in which we might inflict pain on one another, whether it be bombs or
slavery. It is our selfishness and stupidity, saying to God that we can do what we wish, that produces such pain.
But God, in his goodness, would not ultimately leave us to our own devices. Respecting the boundary of will
He imposed between Himself and His creation, God would eventually send the perfect penitent for us to believe
in, and freely choose, so that we might reconcile the broken relationship that often makes us believe we are
right or justified in our actions. This argument made by Lewis is quite simple, and when boiled down to the
bare bones, states that we cannot blame God for what man does to his fellow man because we have been given
the freedom of will by God. Blaming our sin and the subsequent evils and hurt on God will not hold up. But
that does not mean there isn’t the possibility of healing and redemption. We just have to be the ones to choose it
for ourselves, demonstrating the love and desire for our Creator just as he demonstrated that for us. I believe
that this is the most straightforward and useful argument presented by Lewis on pain, as it takes small steps
toward the conclusion that love and pain can coexist under the power and goodness of God.
ARGUMENT 3
Quote: “He has his wish—to lie wholly in the self and to make the best of what he finds there. And what he
finds there is hell.” The Problem of Pain p. 125
Analysis: God’s gift of free will to man gives us the opportunity to choose Him, engaging in an affection that
could never be demonstrated if otherwise designed, programmed, or forced to do so. As stated, this will allow
us to choose things other than God, resulting in our choice to afflict others by imposing pain and suffering. But
what destination does this path lead towards? Many argue that if God were good, then he would never willingly
send someone to suffer for eternity in hell. While Lewis argues against the notion of “duration” in hell (being
subject to a set time of punishment), he, more importantly, addresses how one might end up in such a place. He
argues that hell is a consequence of our will, a self-chosen end. If our salvation depends on the choice to love
God forever, there must be some result for choosing the alternative. God gives us every last chance to choose
him, but he cannot force us to do so because then our love, adoration, and relationship would lose meaning.
Those who choose to not pursue this relationship choose finality that is void of God, which we have deemed
hell. Hell may or may not be a fiery, Dante-esque place, but we can be for certain that it is a permanent
separation, denying oneself of the very relationship we were designed to have for eternity.
ARGUMENT 4
Quote: “God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want.” The Problem of Pain p. 30
Analysis: Lewis readily defends the notion that our free will gives us the chance to choose things other than
God and that those will invoke unpleasant consequences, hence the existence of suffering. Yet, we still try to
put the blame on someone or something whenever things become uncomfortable, most logically because we
could hardly attribute personal suffering to our own doing. Lewis approaches this idea by wrestling with the
fact that we expect good things from a “good” God, and cannot grasp why He would ever let us experience
anything else. When God recognizes our needs, it is His goodness that meets us. We think we want comfort, for
nothing to ache or hurt, and for our souls to be well. But how might our souls be well without the One who
makes them complete? We need a relationship with God for sustained life, goodness, and love. Humans exist to
love God and be loved by Him, but if everything was as we wanted, there would be no need to turn to a loving
and merciful God. So in reality, it is His goodness and love that allows us to suffer, and that choice to blame
him arises from the truth that we cannot see fully the grace and joy that will come as a reward for choosing God
above all else. Our view of goodness and comfort are intertwined, inclining us to expect the good, thinking that
is what we are owed. We must, according to Lewis, know God, then love Him, and not be offended by the
copious amounts of love that we cannot comprehend.
ARGUMENT 5
Quote: “Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore, only the life I have lived. Twice in that
life, I’ve been given the choice. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.” The Shadowlands
Analysis: As Lewis grapples for himself with the burden of pain and loss in his life, he makes this claim.
Though he has been teaching about pain and suffering for many years, his childhood experiences in this area
once caused him to fall away from the faith. As a strong Christian, he now wrestles with what it looks like to
deal with this grief in a new manner. If love leads to hurt, Lewis can only respond with his experiences, raw
and vulnerable at the time. He mentions the two times he has faced this dilemma of love and pain, as mentioned
above. The loss of his mother and the loss of Joy, while both profound and world-shattering, had to have
different effects based on his beliefs, but that was a choice he had to willingly make. God’s perfect love did not
come without a cost. That cost was the pain and suffering of the cross. The joy we experience now because of
Christ can only be gleaned from that burdensome choice made 2000 years ago. Since everything must have a
cost, the type of love Lewis experienced so truly cannot come without pain, so he chooses to make sense of it
by embracing the knowledge that pain is one of the greatest expressions of such deep love.
ARGUMENT 6
Quote: “Isn’t God supposed to be good? Isn’t God supposed to love us? And does God want us to suffer? What
if the answer to that question is yes? ‘Cause I’m not sure that God particularly wants us to be happy. I think he
wants us to be able to love and be loved. He wants us to grow up. I suggest to you that he makes us the gift of
suffering.” The Shadowlands
Analysis: Wrestling with the age-old question of why a good God would ever allow us to suffer if he truly did
love his creation, Lewis comes to a challenging and sobering resolution: happiness and love do not always
coincide. As an alternative, he suggests that God sees fit for us to love and be loved. If that is the most
important and pressing matter, then suffering must be an essential part, as Christ on the cross suffered as the
ultimate act of God’s love and mercy towards us. The gift of suffering, as Lewis argues, exists because love
could not be the same without it. In other words, Lewis stands firm on the ground that man was created to be
loved by God, and that part of that love will ultimately require us to grow up and recognize that it involved
suffering.
THESIS AND CONCLUSION
From Lewis, one can make the rational argument that pain and suffering come out of love and the existence of
free will. God, creating us in his image and wanting a relationship with His creation, gave us the opportunity to
choose that relationship with Him. The disturbance of that relationship because of our human “suffering” nature
means we are prone to experience evil and that evil will have consequences. Those consequences result in the
hurting of our fellow man. The ultimate consequence of deciding something other than God appears in the
notion of hell, a forever separation from God and that relationship. We blame God when things hurt, not
embracing the fact that it is His love and goodness that allows us to suffer. The ultimate expression of his love
was exposed through the sacrifice on the cross, demonstrating to us that perfect love is not without suffering,
but that suffering might even be necessary to realize the power of His love and goodness. When Lewis
experienced this in his own life, he faced the choice of seeing his suffering as a gift that came out of his ability
to love or something terrible from a supposedly good God. Having chosen the latter option once in his life, he
realized it did not lead to a life of fulfillment. Embracing the pain now as a consequence of the happiness in the
past was the only option.
PERSONAL RESPONSE
Personally, I like to believe I am good at venturing out of my comfort zone. I am a person who consistently
seeks out challenges and ways to push myself beyond what I normally find comfortable because I recognize
that is where I grow the most. However, when it comes to pain and suffering, I am not quite as quick to
embrace the discomfort. I, like every other person, enjoy the feeling of happiness, contentment, and love. There
are times in which I have struggled and suffered, but I recognize that those times are the ones where my faith
has flourished. In a sense, I already do see the value of suffering and view it as a form of God’s love for me.
But I have not experienced loss in a way that has broken me so deeply that I do not know how to respond. My
heart breaks for the suffering around me and I do find myself mourning losses I have not yet experienced. I ask
myself why people better than me go through trials and pain. Even close family members, whom I consider
much kinder, wiser, and more faithful than myself, have gone through things that have left me questioning the
goodness of God. So, in a way, understanding Lewis’s reasoning for pain helps me rationalize those
experiences for myself. But the most important reason for my developing a concrete perspective on this issue
comes from a question I have been asked many times as a small group leader and in high school ministry. Time
and time again, I encounter girls who have experienced something heartbreaking or traumatic, looking for
answers to justify their anger with God. I have done my best to answer these inquiries, but now feel
emboldened and have a higher sense of confidence to approach these situations gently and lovingly.