Some suffering seems ‘useless.’ That’s the message of the book of Job. Some suffering isn’t because we sinned and it doesn’t seem to mature us, but God’s answer to Job—particularly in his second speech (Job 40-41)—is that the terrifying chaos monsters that Job wished would drown the world are worse than Job thought they were, and God seems almost fond of them, and he’s clear that he will crush them at the end.

The ‘problem of evil’ is a philosophical way of framing a challenge that every Christian and everyone who has considered Jesus’ claims knows intimately. The ‘problem’ is simply, if God is good, if God is all-powerful, and if evil exists, one of those three premises must be false. We know the challenge more simply in our own hearts: why do we suffer? Why do people die?

I imagine most of my readers have an answer to this, but we often get caught by assuming that the answer we first approach is the only answer the faith offers us. Instead, the Christian faith has a range of ways of answering.

‘Because of Sin’

This I was taught as ‘the Augustinian Theodicy,’ but had learned much earlier than I knew who St. Augustine was, it was simply the answer I learned at church.

Essentially bad things happen because Adam & Eve sinned and broke the world. If they hadn’t they wouldn’t. Our own sin or the sin of others is the root of the evil we wade through. Even the ‘natural evil’ of disasters that don’t seem to be made by human hands are the result of the world’s broken nature which is due to our sin (and the sins of the powers, though I wasn’t taught that angle growing up).

There are nuances available here; we could also speak of justice. There are examples in the Bible of people suffering as a result of their sin. Some of these are direct judicial results of their sin, in other words, God punished them. Others are the consequences of their sins, our sin ‘comes home to roost’ and we live in the world we create for ourselves. This fits much pain and suffering, but not quite all of it.

This is true but it’s not all that’s true.

‘So We Grow’

This I was taught as the ‘Irenaean Theodicy,’ when I first encountered it, long before I read and grew to love St. Irenaeus. I found it quite shocking when I first heard it at age 16 in an A-Level classroom.

Essentially bad things happen because God allows them so that we can grow spiritually and learn maturity and wisdom. While we don’t say it out loud very often, this is most evangelicals default pastoral option. We ask each other what God is teaching us in the midst of pain. It’s not a bad question to ask after the pain has passed, but sometimes what we’re learning is that pain is painful.

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