God in Suffering
_If there is one question that has stirred the deepest tension in my bones, it is this: Where is God in our suffering?
Of all the questions I’ve carried, this one returns most often, usually in the middle of the night, when my mind begins to churn, and sleep evades me. It is a question you are forced to live inside of; like the tesseract, there seems to be no end, no resolution, just more. And so, I've stuck this chapter at the end of my book, not as a capstone, but as a springboard.
You will no doubt be left wanting, as these are the types of questions that do not settle. Instead, they seem to shake the foundations of truth and rattle the scaffolding found in the tidy propositions of our doctrinal systems. Suffering is a darkness, it is shouts into the night, words into the gale, it is the unknowable unknown, it is our dark hour, our everlasting night. David James Duncan writes:
“When experience flies into realms that language cannot touch, honesty demands beyond-language.”1
This chapter is a rumination on the questions that persist. For in the darkness, we often find more than ourselves, a mysterious other that does not explain itself, but does not abandon us either._
When I was in graduate school at the University of Oklahoma, there was a chapel, a room off the side of the Methodist Student Union, where I often spent time during the wee hours of the morning. It was on the way from the library to the room I was renting on a quiet street west of the dormitories. I spent hours in this chapel, demanding presence, seeking a word, a comfort, an answer to the big questions my angsty twenty-something heart sought. I never got an answer, and I've always regretted not staying longer, being more persistent, and perhaps more penitent. Maybe then I would have gotten an answer.
Doctrine and Dogma
We are creatures who need understanding, who need an answer. The aftertaste of the apple compels us, as Adam’s seed, into a desperate pursuit of truth. This distinctly human characteristic may be a side effect of our being made in the image of God, remnants of deity compelling us toward the attainment of absolute knowledge, with the hope that formulating a complete understanding of self will give us equal footing with our creator. It seems the serpent’s deceitful words still hold sway over the children of Eve. Even after the lesson at the Tower of Babel, modern man has not been dissuaded from such transcendental pursuits, to create, to be at once man and god.
The early prohibition against the knowledge of good and evil has been a catalyst, as many have dedicated themselves religiously to the pursuit of learning. A quest to find the fountain of youth, hidden in the veil of absolute knowledge, driven by the hope that mankind can solve the riddle of our existence, thereby precluding our demise.
The doctrine of imago Dei, can be of use here as we wrestle with being made in the image and likeness of God.2 Some believe we reflect God through our morality, our spiritual capacity; others assert the image of God is most tangible in our relationships with others, our community capacity. And still others say, we know we are created in God's image by our ability to create, to make something from nothing.
Humankind, it can be of no doubt, desires to understand its beginning, and in knowing its inception, can provide a direction, a vision for the future. But what if the answer is best provided as metaphor, as story, and archetypes? What if the truth of our origin is not able to be substantiated by observed fact or with historical proof? Or what if, like David James Duncan brings forth in his book, God Laughs, and Plays, what if the answer is only found in the incarnation, the living out of the question?
“The only answer worth giving is the one we discover through the effort of living the question.”3
Faith in Suffering
In this present mystery, is where we find ourselves. Reacting to the circumstances of today, varied conditions of happiness and despair, joy and sorrow. Which, if we are ready and willing, allows us to participate in conversations about the mystery, and about God’s role within. In these moments, the silence of the unknown gives us room to ponder the paradox of suffering in this world. Unfortunately, we sometimes sabotage these conversations with cliché answers and Christian buzzwords (often communicated with the best of intentions), leaving many discouraged and offended because we cannot sufficiently communicate God’s role in suffering and pain. Or our explanations are too harsh for those whose wounds are still deeply open.
It seems the explanation of man cannot begin to squelch the desperate yearning for understanding in the hearts of those who are suffering. Doctrines and propositions fall mute amid a mother’s anguish, the unquenchable tears of a child, the visceral lament of a nation in mourning.
We cannot reasonably explain the death of a child whose expectant mother must deliver a stillborn into the arms of a devastated father. We cannot use words to comfort a starving child who has never known the fullness of a five-course meal. Nor can we, with a right mind, categorize the attempted extermination of an entire race of people as something God has approved and turns a blind eye toward. We are not the first to wrestle with injustice, loss, and devastation. And here it would be appropriate, albeit cliché, to introduce Job, the punching bag of the Old Testament, who lost everything, and yet remained faithful. But I think we've gotten his story wrong, and I don't think we should offer his story as a comfort to those who are experiencing catastrophe.
Divine Coherence or Paradox?
It is here that many attack the omnipotence of God, relegating our Creator to an impotent Father. As an agnostic, I must confess my struggle to believe in a God, that would allow the rape of a young girl, the suffering of a child, and the genocide of a nation. Especially as we profess how great God is—a loving Father, who only wants the best things for us, yet is quick to judge, quick to punish, and quick to condemn the wayward and disobedient. The Bible itself contains multiple faces of God, from an Old Testamant God who is biased towards his people, wrathful to the outsiders, to an tyrannical God who takes a bet with the Devil, to the New Testament God, who is portrayed as a loving Father, who the puts his son to death on a cross, to again a wrathful God of Revelation, who baths the ground in the blood of sinners.
If we take these stories literally, we find not a coherent God, but a paradoxical one. And this paradox forces us to ask questions, much like Job, who may be the most misunderstood character in the Biblical Canon.
Growing up, Job was portrayed as a poor man's superhero. When suffering hit, we were to be like Job, and have long-suffering, patience, and a holistic view of God's faithfulness. Our pastors and teachers were quick to hold Job up as a model of endurance, as if the moral of suffering and persecution is to sit patiently while God and Satan work out their differences. But in reality, when you read the text, Job doesn’t stay quiet, patient, or penitent. He argues, accuses, weeps, mocks, and protests. He refuses to be pious in front of his comforters and advisors. He challenges everyone, everything, and even God himself. His lament is not a passive acceptance of divine will—it is a holy confrontation.
Walter Brueggemann, in the Psalms and the Life of Faith, positions lament as not just personal grief, but resistance. To lament is to disrupt the status quo and make space for truth. “Lament is not only an act of resistance,” he writes, “but a refusal to settle for the world as it is.”4
In this light, Job is not an exemplar of silent suffering; rather, he is a prophet of dissent and a witness against injustice. The most startling part of the story is not what happens to Job's family, livelihood, or health, but the fact that God honors his dissent. At the end of the whirlwind, it’s not Eliphaz or Bildad or Zophar whom God affirms. It’s Job—wounded and raging Job—who has “spoken rightly” of God (Job 42:7).
Carl Jung presses this paradox even further. He reads Job not as a submissive believer, but as a figure of ethical clarity, one who reveals the unresolved tensions in God Himself. In Answer to Job, Jung writes:
“What about the moral wrong Job has suffered? Is man so worthless in God’s eyes that not even a tort moral can be inflicted on him? That contradicts the fact that man is desired by Yahweh and that it obviously matters to him whether men speak ‘right’ of him or not.”5
Jung’s critique is piercing: if it matters to God that humans speak rightly of Him, then our suffering cannot be dismissed as mere collateral in some cosmic drama. Job is more than a victim; he is a mirror. A man in whom God is forced to confront His own contradiction.
So confronted, God is then compelled toward transformation. For Jung, the book of Job anticipates the Incarnation, not as redemptive sacrifice, but as divine maturation through the lesson of Job. In Christ, Jung sees God choosing to become human to understand suffering, rather than standing above, separate from, and inflicting the wounds on his creation. So it is, paradoxically, Job’s protest that initiates this movement towards humanity, towards being one with the suffering.
Taken together, Brueggemann and Jung rescue Job from a cliché; no longer a poster child of the long-suffering and faithful servant, he can be seen as he was. A witness to the pain of this world, and a challenge to the reality of God's part in it.
Omnipotence or just a bully?
Does an omnipotent God use suffering to reprove the wayward and pain to correct the apathetic? Or does this interpretation only serve to increase social control within a congregation? Or is this deeper and more nuanced? Does God's omnipotence mean the end is justified by the means? That is, "God can accomplish whatever He wills... in the way in which He wills it"6</sup), which is to say, God is not bound to the morality of normative law?
It is the last question that I wrestle with, and one that might lead us towards a path out of this dense forest of theological nuance. Can God create a wave without a trough? Can he produce in humans a righteous character without the tools of pain and suffering?
If he is in all and above all, how involved is God in creating the wave, the trial? Is he the chief instigator, the approving manager, the side better, or the casual observer?
Or should we not consider the causal relationship at all? An agnostic view would take us to the edge of this question, as suffering and pain have no bias. Rather, it is the world in which we live, a sea of waves and troughs, a butterfly effect of causality, in which the inciting incident cannot be identified or corralled. We have muddied the water, leaving the cause indistinguishable from the effect. So, again in an agnostic view, though we are tempted to blame God for every present struggle, or pray to God for deliverance from the current affliction, it is not God at all, but life.
If we have no supernatural instigator, we can take a more naturalist view of our lives, which can help us categorize the ebbs and flows of our daily interactions. So we, like the pine tree, need fire to unlock seeds for future life and growth. We are not able to grow without suffering through an ordeal that stretches us out of ourselves. Pain is the only thing that can unlock a beautiful orthopraxy in our lives.
"So, count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing."7
The consequence of pain and suffering is the knowledge of good and evil. Eating the apple was inevitable, as our humanity is dependent on our ability to grow out of pain, to mature in our suffering, and to evolve in our response, that is to create avenues towards the avoidance of pain and the suffering that may follow.
And while I don't see suffering as a basic human inheritance, earned from the Fall, I do see it as a reality in which we must navigate, not from avoidance, but by being present within the experience.
Conclusion
“Knowledge of God is not an escape into the safe heights of pure ideas, but an entry into the need of the present world—sharing its suffering, its activity, and its hope.”8 -- Karl Barth
It has never been God or suffering that we must try to explain. Rather, we must learn to cultivate a faithful, embodied relationship with pain.
Sources
- David James Duncan, God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right, p. 214.
- Genesis 1:26–27
- David James Duncan, God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right, p. 34.
- Walter Brueggemann, The Psalms and the Life of Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 98.
- C.G. Jung, Answer to Job, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), §740.
- Bruce A. Demarest and Gordon R. Lewis, Integrative Theology, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Academie, 1987), 238.
- James 1:2–4
- Donald G. Bloesch, A Theology of Word & Spirit, (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1992), 125.