Observing the ravages of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, Voltaire uses the opportunity to ridicule Alexander Pope's belief in God.

Suffering constitutes the greatest challenge to the Christian faith

The Isenheim Altarpiece is an altarpiece sculpted and painted by, respectively, the Germans Niclaus of Haguenau and Matthias Grünewald in 1512–1516.

The fact of suffering undoubtedly constitutes the single greatest challenge to the Christian faith, and has been in every generation. Its distribution and degree appear to be entirely random and therefore unfair. Sensitive spirits ask if it can possibly be reconciled with God's justice and love.

15,000 people die in the 1755 Lisbon earthquake

Allegory of the 1755 Earthquake, by João Glama Strobërle (who depicted himself standing on a pile of rubble on the lower-right corner). The painting depicts, on the upper-left corner, an angel holding a fiery sword (a personification of divine judgement).

On 1 November 1755 Lisbon was devastated by an earthquake. Being All Saints Day, the churches were full at the time, and thirty of them were destroyed. Within six minutes 15,000 people had died and 15,000 more were dying. One of many stunned by the news was the French philosopher and writer, Voltaire. For months he alluded to it in his letters in terms of passionate horror. How could anybody now believe in the benevolence and omnipotence of God? He ridiculed Alexander Pope's lines in his Essay on Man, which had been written in a secure and comfortable villa in Twickenham:


Pope's Villa, Twickenham by Samuel Scott (c. 1759)

"And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right."

Voltaire believes the earthquake proves God is either not good or not almighty

François-Marie Arouet, known by his nom de plume Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and separation of church and state.  Pastel by Maurice Quentin de La Tour, 1735.

Voltaire had always revolted against this philosophy of Optimism. Would Pope have repeated his glib lines if he had been in Lisbon? They seemed to Voltaire illogical (interpreting evil as good), irreverent (attributing evil to Providence) and injurious (inculcating resignation instead of constructive action). He first expressed his protest in his Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon, which asks why, if God is free, just and beneficent, we suffer under his rule. It is the old conundrum that God is either not good or not almighty. Either he wants to stop suffering but cannot, or he could but will not. Whichever it is, how can we worship him as God? Voltaire's second protest was to write his satirical novel Candide, the story of an ingenuous young man, whose teacher Dr Pangloss, a professor of optimism, keeps blandly assuring him that 'all is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds', in defiance of their successive misfortunes. When they are shipwrecked near Lisbon, Candide is nearly killed in the earthquake, and Dr. Pangloss is hanged by the Inquisition. Voltaire writes: 'Candide, terrified, speechless, bleeding, palpitating, said to himself: "If this is the best of all possible worlds, what can the rest be?"


The problem of suffering affects us through life from birth to the grave and is enough to make you an atheist

Caricature of Joseph Parker (1830-1902). Caption read "Congregational Union?".Published in Vanity Fair, 19 April 1884. Carlo Pellegrini (1839–1889)

The problem of suffering is far from being of concern only to philosophers, however. It impinges upon nearly all of us personally; few people go through life entirely unscathed: It may be a childhood deprivation resulting in lifelong emotional turmoil, or a congenital disability of mind or body. Or suddenly and without warning we are overtaken by a painful illness, redundancy at work, poverty or bereavement. Or again, perhaps we are afflicted by involuntary singleness, a broken love affair, an unhappy marriage, divorce, depression or loneliness. Suffering comes in many unwelcome forms, and sometimes we not only ask God our agonized questions 'Why?' and 'Why me?' but even like Job rage against him, accusing him of injustice and indifference. I know of no Christian leader who has been more forthright in confessing his anger than Joseph Parker, who was minister of the City Temple from 1874 until his death in 1902. He says in his autobiography that up to the age of 68 he never had a religious doubt. Then his wife died, and his faith collapsed. 'In that dark hour', he wrote, 'I became almost an atheist. For God had set his foot upon my prayers and treated my petitions with contempt. If I had seen a dog in such agony as mine, I would have pitied and helped the dumb beast; yet God spat upon me and cast me out as an offence - out into the waste wilderness and the night black and starless."

The problem of evil is in the Bible but not resolved

William L. Rowe's example of natural evil: "In some distant forest lightning strikes a dead tree, resulting in a forest fire. In the fire a fawn is trapped, horribly burned, and lies in terrible agony for several days before death relieves its suffering." Rowe also cites the example of human evil where an innocent child is a victim of violence and thereby suffers.

It needs to be said at once that the Bible supplies no thorough solution to the problem of evil, whether 'natural' evil or 'moral', that is, whether in the form of suffering or of sin. Its purpose is more practical than philosophical. Consequently, although there are references to sin and suffering on virtually every page, its concern is not to explain their origin but to help us to overcome them.

Our sufferings and the cross of Christ

Christ on the Cross, by Carl Heinrich Bloch, showing the skies darkened

My object in this chapter is to explore what relation there might be between the cross of Christ and our sufferings. So I shall not elaborate other standard arguments about suffering which the textbooks include, but only mention them as an introduction.

Suffering is an alien intrusion into the world

Christ healing an infirm woman by James Tissot, 1886-1896.

Christ healing a bleeding woman. Photo from Catacombes of Rome

First, according to the Bible suffering is an alien intrusion into God's good world, and will have no part in his new universe. It is a Satanic and destructive onslaught against the Creator. The book of Job makes that clear. So do Jesus' description of an infirm woman as 'bound by Satan', his 'rebuking' of disease as he rebuked demons, Paul's reference to his 'thorn in the flesh' as 'a messenger of Satan' and Peter's portrayal of Jesus' ministry as 'healing all who were under the power of the devil.' ' So whatever may be said later about the 'good' which God can bring out of suffering, we must not forget that it is good out of evil.

Suffering is often due to sin

Job and his friends. Ilya Repin (1844–1930)

Secondly, suffering is often due to sin. Of course originally disease and death entered the world through sin. But I am now thinking of contemporary sin. Sometimes suffering is due to the sin of others as when children suffer from unloving or irresponsible parents, the poor and hungry from economic injustice, refugees from the cruelties of war, and road casualties caused by drunken drivers. At other times suffering can be the consequence of our own sin (the reckless use of our freedom) and even its penalty. We must not overlook those biblical passages where Sickness is attributed to the punishment of God. At the same time we must firmly repudiate the dreadful Hindu doctrine of karma which attributes all suffering to wrong-doing in this or a previoius existence, and the almost equally dreadful doctrine of Job's so-called comforters. They trotted out their conventional orthodoxy that all personal suffering is due to personal sin, and one of the major purposes of the book of Job is to contradict that popular but wrong-headed notion. Jesus categorically rejected it too (e.g. Lk 13:1-5; Jn 9:1-3).

Suffering is due to our human sensivity to pain

Two lepers denied entrance to town, 14th century from Miniatur aus einer Handschrift des Vinzenz von Beauvais

Thirdly, suffering is due to our human sensitivity to pain. Misfortune is made worse by the hurt (physical or emotional) that we feel. But the pain sensors of the central nervous system give valuable warning-signals, necessary for personal and social survival. Perhaps the best illustration of this is the discovery by Dr Paul Brand at Vellore Christian Hospital in South India that Hansen's disease ('leprosy') numbs the extremities of the body, so that the ulcers and infections which develop are secondary problems, due to loss of feeling. Nerve reactions have to hurt if we are to protect ourselves. 'Thank God for inventing pain!' wrote Philip Yancey; 'I don't think he could have done a better job. It's beautiful."

Suffering is due to our environment

People seeking refuge from flood in Jawa Tengah, Java. ca. 1865–1876 by Raden Saleh

Fourthly, suffering is due to the kind of environment in which God has placed us. AIthough most human suffering is caused by human sin (C. S. Lewis reckoned four-fifths of it, and Hugh Silvester nineteen-twentieths, i.e. 95%), natural disasters such as flood, hurricane, earthquake and drought are not. True, it can be argued that God did not intend the earth's 'inhospitable areas' to be inhabited, let alone increased by ecological irresponsibility. Yet most people go on living where they were born and have no opportunity to move. What can one say, then, about the so-called laws of nature which in storm and tempest relentlessly overwhelm innocent people? C. S. Lewis went so far as to say that 'not even Omnipotence could create a society of free souls without at the same time creating a relatively independent and "inexorable" Nature'. 'What we need for human society', Lewis continued, 'is exactly what we have - a neutral something', stable and having 'a fixed nature of its own', as the arena in which we may act freely towards each other and him. If we lived in a world in which God prevented every evil from happening, like Superman in Alexander Salkind's films, free and responsible activity would be impossible.
 

Suffering is not meaningless and has purpose

The Christ as the Suffering Redeemer is a painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna, dated to c. 1488-1500.

There have always been some who insist that suffering is meaningless, and that no purpose whatever can be detected in it. In the ancient world these included both the Stoics (who taught the need to submit with fortitude to nature's inexorable laws) and the Epicureans (who taught that the best escape from a random world was indulgence in pleasure). And in the modern world secular existentialists believe that everything, including life, suffering and death, is meaningless and therefore absurd. But Christians cannot follow them down that blind alley. For Jesus spoke of suffering as being both 'for God's glory', that God's Son might be glorified through it, and 'so that the work of God might be displayed' (Jn11:4 and Jn 9:3). This seems to mean that in some way (still to be explored) God is at work revealing his glory in and through suffering, as he did (though differently) through Christ's. What then is the relationship between Christ's sufferings and ours? How does the cross speak to us in our pain?

Source: Stott, John R. W. The Cross of Christ. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986; reprint, 2006, pages 303-306.