The Dish 

On the one hand, there’s the perennial temptation to try to explain the ways of God to men, to produce a philosophical or theological argument that somehow squares the existence of an all-powerful, all-loving God with the tragedies and hardships, both great and small, we see and experience. Some of these arguments are more persuasive than others, but they tend to leave me cold. They often seem to rely, at least implicitly, on an understanding of the divine that makes God a bigger, more powerful version of ourselves – when we ask why God “allows” evil in the world, we impose a model of choice and decision onto God that’s extracted from our own experiences. God figures in these debates like a character in one of those ethics problems you encounter in an introductory philosophy course, which is exactly the kind of anthropomorphism classical theism strives to avoid. Note how Dawkins, in the quote above, writes that God “runs” the universe, as if God were a CEO or president. As Mihalyfy asks in his essay, “Of all people, who better than an astronaut to understand that there is not a physical God sitting up somewhere in the sky?”

 

The better question, then, is not why does God permit suffering, but how do we respond to it? What resources do we – whether religious or not – have to deal with suffering when it inevitably comes? The Christian answers by pointing to Jesus, the suffering servant. The Christian God is a God who suffered with us and for us in the person of Jesus, who knows in full what it means to experience pain, loneliness, anguish, and death. And, even more, in the mysterious accounts of Jesus’ resurrection, we are told that suffering does not have the final word. This does not really “make sense” of suffering, but it does make Christianity a faith that has solidarity with, and deep compassion for, those who suffer at its core. It means that Christians can say to sufferers that they are understood and loved in the midst of their suffering, not just by those around them, but by God – and that this understanding and love is not the mere whim or benevolence certain people might choose to exhibit, but acts of mercy that point to what is ultimately deepest and truest about our existence.