The Problem of Pain

Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? GENESIS 18:25

The first of Lewis’s popular Christian books was written to order. In 1939 a publisher asked him to write a short book on suffering for a series aimed at general readers. He agreed, though he said in his preface that he wished he could have published it anonymously, because he knew he was writing about something that others had borne far more bravely than he. The Problem of Pain appeared in 1940, as Britain went to war. It is a book of the head more than of the heart, but it is a careful and serious attempt to think through the hardest objection to the Christian faith.

The problem stated

The objection is an ancient one. A God who was both good and all-powerful, it says, would not allow His creatures to suffer; His creatures do suffer; so He must lack either goodness or power. Lewis set out to show that the argument depends on what we mean by the words good, almighty and happy, and that the Christian meanings of those words change the problem considerably.

Clouds and darkness are round about him: righteousness and judgment are the habitation of his throne. PSALM 97:2

What almighty means

He began with omnipotence. To say that God is almighty, Lewis argued, means that He can do anything that is possible in itself. It does not include doing what is self-contradictory. God cannot make a square circle, because a square circle is not a thing at all; it is a meaningless combination of words. Now, if God chose to make free creatures who could know and love Him and one another, He had to make them a world to live in — a stable, ordered, shared environment where they could meet and act. But such a world, with fixed properties, will necessarily allow some creatures to hurt others. The same fire that cooks a meal can burn a house down. God could, in principle, intervene to prevent every harm, but a world in which He did so continually would be a world in which no free choice had real consequences.

What good means

Lewis then turned to the goodness of God. Our trouble, he suggested, is that we tend to want God to be kind rather than loving — to be an indulgent elderly relative who wants only that everyone should have a pleasant time. But love is far more demanding than kindness. We are kind to strangers; we love our children, and because we love them we will not leave them as they are. A craftsman takes the most trouble over the work he cares about most, and the trouble is a measure of his care. God’s love for us is like that. He wants us not merely to be comfortable but to be good, because only goodness can bring us into lasting joy in His presence.

For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. HEBREWS 12:6

Human wickedness and the Fall

Lewis then insisted, against the mood of his time, that much of the suffering in the world is caused by human beings. Most of the pain people endure is inflicted by other people: by greed, cruelty, war, injustice and neglect. And he argued that a modern reluctance to talk about sin had made the problem seem more mysterious than it is. The Christian doctrine of the Fall holds that humanity has rebelled against God and is, as a race, in a state of disorder. Our suffering must be understood against the background of that rebellion.

Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. ROMANS 5:12

Pain as a messenger

Lewis argued that pain has a peculiar power that pleasure does not. We can take our pleasures for granted, and we can ignore the quiet voice of conscience; but pain cannot be ignored. It breaks through our complacency, shatters the illusion that all is well, and confronts us with the fact that we are not self-sufficient. A man who is getting along comfortably may never think of God at all. Suffering makes him ask questions. It does not always bring him to God — it can harden as well as soften — but it gives God an opening that comfort does not.

Before I was afflicted I went astray: but now have I kept thy word. PSALM 119:67

He was careful not to say that all suffering is deserved, or that suffering is good in itself. Pain is an evil. But God, who did not cause the Fall, can use even the evils that follow from it to bring His children home.

Hell, animals, heaven

The last chapters of the book took up three further subjects. On hell, Lewis admitted that no Christian doctrine was less welcome to him, and that he held it because Scripture, and above all the Lord’s own words, left him no choice. He argued that hell is not a punishment arbitrarily imposed but the final condition of those who have chosen, to the end, to be on their own terms rather than God’s — and that God respects that choice.

On animal suffering he admitted frankly that he was speculating. He wondered whether the higher animals might in some way share in the resurrection through their relationship with human beings. He offered this as a guess and asked his readers to treat it as one.

On heaven he wrote some of the most beautiful pages in the book, arguing that the secret longing he had felt all his life, the longing described in an earlier chapter of this companion, is the very thing that heaven will fulfil.

Weighing it

The Problem of Pain is a valuable book, and its central arguments — about omnipotence, about love that is more than kindness, about the reality of human sin, and about the use God makes of suffering — are consistent with Scripture and have helped many readers.

Two points need weighing. The first is Lewis’s account of the Fall. Accepting, as a scientific hypothesis, that the human body may have developed over a long period, he offered what he presented openly as a guess — a plausible story rather than a dogma — in which God, at a certain point, brought a creature into full consciousness of Himself, and that creature then fell by choosing self over God. Lewis was careful to say that he was not certain of this account. He was also, throughout his life, a sharp critic of evolution treated as a total worldview — the belief that everything is steadily improving and that nature explains itself — which he regarded as a modern myth with no scientific standing. Many evangelical readers will hold, with the plain reading of Genesis and of Paul’s teaching in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, that Adam was a real historical man, created directly by God and the father of all humanity, and will find Lewis’s speculation unnecessary and unpersuasive. They should read the chapter knowing that he presented it tentatively, and that his main argument does not depend on it.

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. GENESIS 2:7

The second is a matter of tone. The Problem of Pain is clear and confident, and twenty years later Lewis himself would discover that the arguments, true as they were, did not make suffering easier to bear when it came to him. That discovery is the subject of the next chapter.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. When you think of God’s goodness, do you think more of kindness or of love? Read Hebrews 12:5–11 and consider the difference.

2. Think of a time when suffering made you think about God. Did it soften you or harden you?

3. Name one suffering in the world that you have blamed on God which is in fact the work of human sin. Pray about it, and ask what you might do.

4. Read Romans 8:18–25. How does Paul set present suffering against future glory?

5. If you are suffering now, do not hurry to an answer. Bring the pain itself to God.

A PRAYER

Judge of all the earth, You will do right, even when I cannot see how.

Forgive me for wanting You to be merely kind, and for resenting the love that will not leave me as I am.

Where I suffer through my own sin, bring me to repentance. Where I suffer through the sins of others, bring me justice and comfort. Where I cannot understand, keep me trusting.

Use every pain to bring me nearer to You, and keep before me the glory that shall be revealed, through Jesus Christ my Lord. Amen.