God and Human Suffering: Theology in the Trenches (or at least in the ICU)

One major effect of my summer as a hospital chaplain was my reevaluating the relationship between God and suffering, and especially the role of God’s will in the experience of suffering. A handful of different patients and families shared with me their belief that suffering was part of God’s will and that there was a higher reason for their pain. This is not a new idea to me – in college, I was deeply committed to the idea that there are times when God breaks us down in order to build us up again. Since that time, however, I have been moving toward a different understanding of the plight of human suffering and the place of God in its midst. I was forced to confront and to develop for myself a theology of suffering over that summer, feeling both curious about and challenged by the faith of these patients and families.

While I am hesitant to completely disregard a theology of ordained brokenness, I am also more willing than I used to be to admit that my picture of a good and compassionate God doesn’t leave much room for a deity that uses suffering as a learning tool for humanity. I believe that when sin and death came into the world, so also came brokenness. Christ came to earth and allowed his body to be broken so that we could be free from the powers of sin and death (are we not asked to remember this exchange of brokenness every time we gather around our Lord’s table?), but it is easy to see that our world still suffers under the weight of that brokenness, even as we hope for the fulfillment of the salvation of this world.

And yet just because I can find a reason to understand that suffering exists, this doesn’t mean that I have found a good answer as to why, especially why some people suffer and others do not. It is an important learning edge for me that I have come to accept the fact that I will never fully understand human suffering. What I do know, however, is that no matter what God’s place is in relationship to the root of suffer – whether God has caused it, allowed it, or totally rejected it – through God’s infinite love and grace I can have the confidence that God will bring us through it, and guide us on the other side. Implicit in this is my further theological skepticism of an understanding of “God’s will” that implies it to be a changeless and even overbearing fate rather than a sign of God’s faithfulness.

This is an important theological notion, in my opinion. It is the difference between hope as merely the resignation to “God’s will” as an rigid and impermeable destiny, and hope as the expectation that God will never leave our side. Along with this nuanced understanding of hope in God comes the further theological permission to question God and faith. Always falling back on “this is God’s will” as an explanation for bad things that happens means suppressing fear or doubt so as not to imply faithlessness. I prefer to think of a God who suffers with us when we are suffering, who sent his son to suffer so that we could be soothed in our own suffering.

Paul says in Romans 5: “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” When Paul implores us to “boast in our suffering,” I do not believe he is saying to us that our suffering isn’t real or that our suffering is bearable because it is God-ordained. I rather believe that Paul is sharing with us the wondrous message of God’s grace. We rejoice in our suffering because we do not go at it alone. Even though he lists a number of virtues that may result from suffering, he makes the point that it is God’s love that sustains us in hard times. Suffering is not from God as much as hope in the midst of suffering is from God.