(Apart from the Bible, C.S.Lewis’ The Problem of
Pain is the only book I can remember reading five times. This
essay comprises the gist of the work. This apologetic classic
ought to be read alongside Lewis’ later work, A Grief Observed.
The first book was written from his head, the second from his
heart (after his wife died). Make sure you see the film/video
about C S Lewis and Joy Davidman – Shadowlands. The Problem of
Pain has some brilliant insights. This paper will provide a good
basis for an adult group discussion.

…..

‘If God were good, he would wish to make his creatures
perfectly happy, and if God were almighty he would be able to
do as he wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God
lacks either goodness, or power, or both.’

These creatures cause pain be being born, live by
inflicting pain, and in pain they mostly die. Why?

And however did human beings attribute the universe
to the activity of a wise and good Creator? All of the great religions
were first preached, and long practised, in a world without chloroform!
Christianity, in a sense, creates the ‘problem of pain’ by postulating
that ultimate reality is righteous and loving.

IS GOD ALL-POWERFUL?

The Bible asserts that ‘with God all things are possible’.
This must tacitly exclude, of course, the intrinsically impossible
– you may attribute miracles to God, but not nonsense. In God’s
universe there are physical and moral laws, which may operate
beneficially for some but not for others: water which is ‘beautifully
hot’ to a Japanese adult in a Sento bath will burn a small child.
Morally, because wrong actions result where free wills operate,
the possibility of suffering is inevitable. God does not violate
the aggressive person’s will to strike the innocent.

IS HE ALL-LOVING?

When Christians say that ‘God is Love’, what do they
mean? Is he a senile benevolence who wishes you to be happy in
your own way? A disinterested cosmic magistrate? Or a mere ‘heavenly
host’ who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests? No,
no and no. To ask that God’s love should be content with us as
we are is to ask that God should cease to be God. Because his
love is a ‘consuming fire’ he must labour to make us truly lovable,
and when we are such as he can love without impediment, only then
shall we in fact be truly happy. Nor is God’s love selfishly possessive,
like that of an immature parent. He who lacks nothing chooses
to need us, but only because we need to be needed. His commands
to worship and obey him marshall us towards our most utter ‘good’
if only we knew it. Thus there are only three real alternatives:
to be God; to be like God and to share his goodness in creaturely
response; and to be miserable.

IS PAIN OUR FAULT?

Because some psychoanalysts have explained away the
old Christian sense of sin, God easily seems to us to be impossibly
demanding, or else inexplicably angry. To our resentful consciousness
the ‘wrath’ of God seems a barbarous doctrine. Occasionally we
might admit our guilt, or perhaps blame ‘the system’, or hope
that time will heal our past misdemeanours. But the fact and guilt
of sin are not erased by time, but by contrite repentance and
the blood of Christ. God’s road to the Promised Land runs first
past Sinai, and then Calvary. We are creatures whose basic character
is a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror
to ourselves.

We humans have deliberately abused our free-will,
one of God’s best gifts to us. And we are not getting any better
– not even the animals treat other creatures as badly as humans
sometimes treat other humans. From the moment a creature becomes
aware of God as God, and of itself as self, there is the danger
of self-idolatry, pride. But God has the antidote: he saw the
crucufixion of his Son in the act of creating the first nebulae.
God himself assumes the suffering nature which evil produces,
and offers forgiveness, and life in Christ.

‘UNDESERVED’ HUMAN PAIN:

Probably four-fifths of all human suffering derives
from our misusing nature, or hurting other people. We, not God,
have produced racks, whips, prisons, guns and bombs. It is by
human avarice and stupidity that we suffer all of our ‘social’
evils.

Because we are rebels against God who must lay down
our arms, our other pains may indeed constitute God’s megaphone
to rouse a deaf world to surrender. There is a universal feeling
that bad people ought to suffer: without a concept of ‘retribution’
punishment is rendered unjust (what can be more immoral than to
inflict suffering on me for the sake of deterring others if I
do not deserve it?). But until the evil person finds evil unmistakably
present in his or her existence, in the form of pain, we are enclosed
in illusion. Pain, as God’s megaphone, gives us the only opportunity
we may have for amendment. It plants the flag of truth within
the fortress of a rebel soul. All of us are aware that it is very
hard to turn our thoughts to God when things are going well. To
‘have all we want’ is a terrible saying when ‘all’ does not include
God. We regard him as we do a heart-lung machine – there for emergencies,
but we hope we’ll never have to use it.

So God troubles our selfishness, which stands between
us and the recognition of our need. God’s divine humility stoops
to conquer, even if we choose him merely as an alternative to
hell. Yet even this he accepts!

Although pain is never palatable, we humans are in
some senses made ‘perfect through suffering’. I see in Johnson
and Cowper, for example, traits which might scarcely have been
tolerable if they had been happier. Suffering is not a ‘good’
in itself, and we certainly want no Tamberlaines proclaiming themselves
the ‘scourge of God’. Very occasionally humans may be entitled
to hurt their fellows (eg, parents, magistrates or surgeons) but
only where the necessity is urgent, the attainable good obvious,
and when the one inflicting the pain has proper authority to do
so. Only a Satan transgresses beyond these. (Luke 13:16)

A Christian cannot believe, either, that merely reforming
our economic, political or hygienic systems will eventually eliminate
pain and create a heaven on earth. God does indeed provide us
with some transient joy, pleasure, and even ecstasy here, but
never with permanent security, otherwise we might ‘mistake our
pleasant inns for home’.

ANIMAL PAIN:

What about the ‘pain of guiltless hurt which doth
pierce the sky’? Do the beasts, and plants, ‘feel’? Certainly
both may react to injury but so does the anaesthetised human body;
reaction therefore does not prove sentience. Perhaps – we cannot
be sure – we have committed the fallacy of reading into other
areas of life a ‘suffering self’ for which there may be no real
evidence.

HELL – ETERNAL SUFFERING?

The doctrine of hell, although barbarous to many,
has the full support of Scripture, especially of our Lord’s own
words; and has always been held by Christendom. And it has the
support of Reason: if a game is played it must be possible to
lose it. If the happiness of a creature lies in voluntary self-surrender
to God, it also has the right to voluntarily refuse.

I would pay any price to be able to say truthfully
‘All will be saved’. But my reason retorts, ‘Without their will,
or with it’? In fact, God has paid the price, and herein lies
the real problem: so much mercy, yet still there is hell.

God can’t condone evil, forgiving the wilfully unrepentant.
Lost souls have their wish – to live wholly in the Self, and to
make the best of what they find there. And what they finds there
is hell. Should God increase our chances to repent? I believe
that if a million opportunities were likely to do good, they would
be given. But finality has to come some time. Our Lord uses three
symbols to describe hell – everlasting punishment (Matthew 25:46),
destruction (Matthew 10:28), and privation, exclusion, banishment
(Matthew 22:13). The image of fire illustrates both torment and
destruction (not annihilation – the destruction of one thing issues
in the emergence of something else, in both worlds). It may be
feasible that hell is hell not from its own point of view, but
from that of heaven. And it is also possible that the eternal
fixity of the lost soul need not imply endless duration. Our Lord
emphasises rather the finality of hell. Does the ultimate loss
of a soul mean the defeat of Omnipotence? In a sense, yes. The
damned are successful rebels to the end, enslaved within the horrible
freedom they have demanded. The doors of hell are locked on the
inside.

In the long run, objectors to the doctrine of hell
must answer this question: What are you asking God to do? To wipe
out their past sins, and at all costs to give them a fresh start,
smoothing every difficulty, and offering every miraculous help?
But he has done so – in the life and death of his Son. To forgive
them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, that
is what he does. Hell, it must be remembered, is not only inhabited
by Neros or Judas Iscariots or Hitlers. They were merely the principal
actors in this rebellious drama.

HEAVEN

‘I consider,’ said Paul, ‘that the sufferings of
this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that
is to be revealed in us’ (Romans 8:18). God’s heaven is not a
bribe: it offers nothing a mercenary soul can desire. The great
summons to heaven is that away from self. This is the ultimate
law – the seed dies to live, the bread must be cast upon the waters,
if you lose your soul you’ll save it. Perhaps self-conquest will
never end; eternal life may mean an eternal dying. It is in this
sense that, as there may be pleasures in hell (God shield us from
them), there may be something not at all unlike pains in heaven
(God grant us soon to taste them).

ALL YOUR LIFE AN UNATTAINABLE ECSTASY HAS HOVERED
JUST BEYOND THE GRASP OF YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS. THE DAY IS COMING
WHEN YOU WILL WAKE TO FIND, BEYOND ALL HOPE, THAT YOU HAVE ATTAINED
IT, OR ELSE, THAT IT WAS WITHIN YOUR REACH AND YOU HAVE LOST IT
FOREVER.