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PRESBYTERIAN
The Presbyterian Church in Canada • presbyterian.ca ISSUE 28, WINTER 2023
Understanding God in the Midst of Suffering
By the Rev. Dr. Joon Ki Kim, Little Harbour Presbyterian Church in Little Harbour and St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in New Glasgow, N.S.
Suffering—a state of pain, agony, distress or loss—is found wher- ever we human beings are born, live and die. Whether one is ready to face suffering courageously or simply wishes to evade it at all costs, it is prevalent and peren- nial. There are various forms of suffering and various extents of severity in manifold cases of suf- fering. Diverse forms of suffering may share the essential similar- ity that one is “being pushed be- yond one’s limits and human re- sources” (Michael Knowles, We Preach Not Ourselves).
In The Brothers Karamazov by the 19th-century Russian nov- elist Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan, a brilliant atheist thinker, raises questions about the meaning of Christian faith in a haunting way. Having a conversation with his devoted Christian brother Alyo- sha, Ivan wants him to consider honestly whether or not the Chris- tian faith may contain any crucial, and at the same time intelligible, sense of the reality that humans are experiencing in the world. For that purpose, Ivan focuses on the topic of suffering.
In particular, he describes the torturous pain of innocent chil- dren, suffering and dying under the hands of violent adults. Ivan asks, “Imagine that you are cre- ating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature—that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance—and to found that edi- fice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?”
In spite of his intense conten- tions against the validity of the Christian faith, Ivan helps us to catch a glimpse of a highly sig-
nificant point: Suffering should be a continual checkpoint in one’s journey of exploring the meaning of the Christian faith. He argues that if one’s faith in God is not able to generate a meaningful re- sponse to the matter of unsettling suffering, it cannot be meaningful anywhere else, either.
What God does
about suffering
Ivan’s persistent questions about suffering lead the readers to con- sider a daunting possibility. Has God intentionally caused the mat- ter of suffering to exist, including the terrible suffering that little chil- dren are faced with? Ivan affirms that if God sees it is necessary to let even a single child be a victim of excruciating torment for a gran- diose purpose such as God keep- ing the balance between good and evil, or creating a necessary
path to the ultimate redemption of the entire universe, that kind of God should be rejected.
Once I heard a Christian speak- er saying, “Receive, with grati- tude, everything that has hap- pened and will happen in your life, knowing that each one of them is the greatest expression of God’s love for you.” Can it be true? The statement implies that even a hor- rible form of violence committed to a child, which Ivan mentions, is the direct will and creation of God. Would one need to be thank- ful for it, being assured that it is one of the greatest gifts of love from God? Are Christian believers obliged to defend and glorify God, who is the real cause of every personal trauma and collective tragedy, such as the Holocaust and other genocides for whatever high-sounding purpose?
In the book of Job, Job’s three
friends are passionately devoted to the task of defending God with their premise that the severe suf- fering that Job has been undergo- ing is what God has purposely carried out for God’s own good reasons. In the middle of the de- bate between Job and his friends, Job reveals his awareness that he is not the only one who un- dergoes dehumanizing pain which cannot and should not be justified. When Job indicates the problem of the miserable suffer- ing of the poor, which is so ram- pant in the world, he says, “Like wild asses in the desert they go out to their toil, scavenging in the waste-land food for their young. They lie all night naked, without clothing, and have no covering in the cold. They are wet with the rain of the mountains, and cling to the rock for want of shelter. There
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