For me, any discussion, and especially one about pain and suffering, must begin, end, and be suffused throughout with God. The God who was, who is, and who forever shall be. The God in whom we live and move and have our being. The God who is Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of all that is. This God must be our frame of reference for any attempt to understand what it means to be creatures in this world. For it is this God, complete in God self, who so desired to be in loving relationship with something wholly other that God created all that is and gives it space to be what it will be.

God, like a writer who creates characters for a play and then watches as they take on a life of their own, bending and turning in ways that the writer had not planned, gives to all creation the freedom to become. God chose to create something other than God self in order to be in relationship with it, therefore “freedom is integral to the whole conception of humanity in God’s intention” (John Douglas Hall, 70).

Additionally, God, who is all-powerful, chooses to restrain that power in order that creation in general and humanity in particular may also choose – to love God or to turn away from God. As Hall explains, “the freedom to love presupposes the freedom not to love…” (71). God acts to limit God’s own power because a truly loving relationship can only occur when the relationship is freely chosen. Without the freedom of choice, creation would see no value in the relationship because it did not have the opportunity to decide that it was something of value that needed to be chosen for itself.

This freedom requires an on-going decision to choose to love God. Each moment presents creation with another chance to decide for or against God and God’s offer of loving relationship together. Often what is chosen is the option against. In such instances, whether the choice is conscious or not, humanity acts in ways that separate it from God. This turning away is sin that opens the door to evil in the world.

Because God values this freely chosen loving relationship so highly, God has allowed for sin and evil to enter into God’s good creation. Sin comes from “the temptation…[to humanity] to have their being rather than having to receive it, daily…. It is the temptation to possess being rather than to trust the One who gives us our being, daily” (Hall, chapter 3 point B). Ultimately, sin is a “failure of trust” (Hall, chapter 3 point B). This need to control our lives leads humanity to act in ways that separate it from God and God’s love; ways that are harmful both to the individual committing the sin as well as to others around that individual.

With the entrance of sin and evil come also pain and suffering. All are part of existence in the created universe. But all pain and suffering are not equal. We must distinguish between that which is a natural part of being in the world, which actually works towards the building up of the creation, and that which is an aberration, which tears down and destroys creation.

The pain and suffering of the first sort is necessarily a part of the created universe because, “a world in which there can be no pain or suffering would also be one in which there can be no moral choices and hence no possibility of moral growth and development” (John Hick, 47). According to Hall, pain and suffering that have been present since the creation of the world include: loneliness, limitations, temptation, and anxiety as well as death that can sometimes serve life.

If we did not feel the pain from holding our hands to close to a flame, we would not know the danger of fire until it was too late to avoid it. This reality demonstrates a limitation of creation. The flame that can be good when it offers heat for warmth and for cooking can also be bad when it burns or even kills creation. Likewise, if we did not feel the pain caused by separation from people we would not know the value of being in relationship with others. This dynamic highlights the good that a small measure of loneliness can bring to humanity. As Hall argues, “Life…depends in some mysterious way upon the struggle to be” (60). The pain and struggle help us to know the joy and happiness that is possible in this world.

But not all pain and suffering belongs in the category of that which can help us grow and experience life more abundantly. Some is of a magnitude that it is incomprehensible and actually destroys life rather than builds it up. This type of pain and suffering is what Nicholas Wolterstorff calls “not friend, but enemy” (32) and “awful, demonic” (34). Pain and suffering of this sort is what Farley calls “radical suffering.” She points out two features that distinguish this type of pain and suffering. It is “destructive of the human spirit and…cannot be understood as something deserved” (21). Such pain and suffering wears down the soul of the one suffering and erases any sense of being or agency that that individual might have had. When this happens, the individual loses all sense of one self and is left at the whim of whatever is causing the pain and suffering to begin with. Often, the individual ends up participating in the very act of inflicting pain on himself or herself. Farley argues that this type of pain and suffering should be resisted because it “is a kind of crippling of the human spirit…” (42).

This pain and suffering destroys our possibility of being in a loving relationship with God because it destroys our very being, which is a form of inner death that can lead to one’s physical death. Hall calls it a “death-serving death, that is, death which draws attention to itself instead of drawing us the more fully into life” (62). Because that is the effect of this type of pain and suffering, God is against it being a part of the reality of God’s good creation. God desires shalom, wholeness and health, for all of God’s creation. Pain, suffering, and death of this sort threaten to break down and destroy that shalom. For that reason, Wolterstorff claims that “death is shalom’s mortal enemy” and therefore “we cannot live at peace with death” (63).
God does not live at peace with this type of pain and suffering. The Scriptures witness to God’s raging against it. God is not satisfied to let the Hebrew people suffer under the soul-crushing rule of the Egyptian people. God does not let Joseph, sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, whither away and die. And God does not let the cross have the final word in Jesus’ life. As Hall argues, “by no stretch of the imagination could anyone accuse this tradition of positing a God who actually wills the massive, unbearable, or seemingly absurd suffering of the creature – any creature” (74). Rather, as he points out, “our Scriptures bear witness to a God who weeps over the tragedies of earth – even over the little losses” (75).

God does not want this sort of pain and suffering. And yet, the all-powerful God holds back from acting in overt ways to prevent such acts from happening. To do so would be to impose God’s will on creation instead of allowing it to have its freedom. God wants humanity to choose loving relationship with God and in so choosing to choose to act in loving ways towards God’s good creation – ways in which radical suffering will be resisted instead of being perpetrated or tolerated. Through the power of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, God nudges creation in ways that help it towards making the realm of God’s shalom a reality.

God does not act overtly to prevent or stop such times of pain and suffering but neither does God leave us alone. Rather, God enters into the suffering with us. “God is not only the God of the sufferers but the God who suffers” (Wolterstorff, 81). As Hall explains it, “God suffers because God would be with us, and suffering is our condition” (117). Through our loving relationship with God, God is so connected with us that God feels our pain and suffering and bears it with us. God does not abandon us to deal with it on our own. Rather God walks with us into the face of it and through to the other side.

God is a compassionate accompanier to all who suffer or are in pain feeling the very pain that they feel. God acts in ways similar to the compassion of which Wendy Farley speaks when she says, “Compassion labors to penetrate the darkness of pain and mediate to the sufferer the taste of love and the power of courage” (117). By suffering with us and bearing our pain alongside us, God allows us to gain an awareness of God’s deep love for us and this gives us courage to resist that which is seeking to destroy us.

This awareness gives us a glimpse of what should be rather than what is. In this glimpse lies our hope. “Because God’s own face is set against that which negates life, suffering does not and must not have the last word in this tradition” (Hall, 75). Rather, God’s grace will have the last word. God who desires shalom for God’s good creation will not rest until all experience that. Reality shows us that “it is very evident that this person-making process, leading eventually to perfect human community, is not completed on this earth” (Hick, 51). Our earthly reality, where sin and evil are very real, is not all God desires for us. What we have here is not all there is. God is working to bring about a new heaven and a new earth where pain and suffering shall be no more. Now we see through a mirror darkly. We only catch glimpses of what will be.

This world, filled with necessary and unnecessary pain and suffering, does not allow for the creature to attain the wholeness of being that God desires for all of creation. As Wolterstorff asserts, “until justice and peace embrace, God’s dance of joy is delayed” (91). We cannot fully know now what God holds for us then. But God is working to perfect that which God has begun in each of us. Let us trust in God’s work on our behalf “until we see” (Wolterstorff, 102).