Fides Quaerens Intellectum

C.S. Lewis once said “pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” 

This week at the IMPACT 360 (www.impact360.net) campus our students have been tackling the problem of evil and suffering, most of them for the first time in any kind of academic environment.  We’ve studied the problem philosophically and theologically, but some of the most profound moments this week have been in hearing real-life stories about how we as finite and fallen human beings experience and react to evil and suffering itself…like Job did. 

In the spirit of this week’s academic agenda, one of our students (I’ll use the alias ”Amy”) delivered a powerful devotional based on her experience of a a high school friend who suffered a traumatic brain injury–an injury whose scars might well last a lifetime.  How could a loving God permit this kind of suffering to invade the optimism, hopes and dreams of someone so young?  And did she DESERVE this somehow?  Does an all-loving, all-powerful God really understand (or if he does, then does he really give a rip?) about how much emotional garbage is dumped into the lives of people for whom such evil and suffering afflicts?  Is the brain injury an example of what the egghead philosophers and theologians call “gratuitous evil”–evil that seems to be pointless, that serves no greater good? 

We came to the conclusion this week that, well, yes, God does understand and he does care.  As a group, our students aren’t necessarily on the same page with each other over the question of whether a truly sovereign God and gratutious evil can coexist, but all agree that God always has believers’ ultimate good in mind through everything that happens (Rom. 8:28).  And, just as Lewis said and as Amy’s devotional this morning illustrated so poignantly, God often chooses to use pain and suffering as his megaphone to rouse us out of our slumber for the sake of using us more powerfully.  As A.W. Tozer once wrote, “I doubt God can use a man greatly until he has hurt him deeply.” 

As part of their reading in preparation for the week, I had the students read a portion of Nick Wolterstorff’s book, Lament for a Son.  Nick’s son Eric died at the tender age of 25 in a rock-climbing accident.  This book is a telling journal about how Wolterstorff–a prominent Christian philosopher/theologian, recently retired from Yale Divinity–dealt with that searing pain as he tried to make sense of it all.  Until about two weeks ago, I was honestly resisting picking up that book because I can’t bear the thought of losing my own son.  I just can’t go there.  That said, I’m commending Lament for a Son to you for your own reading.