The Problem of Pain
The ideas I have written of here are some of the most profound theological ideas of all time put together by CS Lewis. This is actually my essay for a class from his book “The Problem of Pain, but I feel it is essential that you hear what he has to say about pain. It may very well answer one of the biggest questions the world has ever known: “If God loves us then why is there pain?“
Throughout history the world has questioned over and over again about the idea of pain. “If there is a God who truly is love, then why did he create pain?” In C.S. Lewis’ book, “The Problem of Pain,” some of the deepest ideas and theories as to why pain would exist are assessed. When the attribute of pain is stripped down to its core, the truth is found in the exact question that is being asked. Pain exists because it is a characteristic of the true love that God is. This whole concept doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, but with a deeper look this answer is inevitable.
If there is one ideal in Christianity that the faith can ground itself in, it is that God is “divine goodness.” Everything He asks humanity to do is that of which the world categorizes as moral. He does not ask us to indulge in sin or even to take part in it in the slightest bit. That would be against His nature and what He wishes His people to live like.
So in correspondence to this quality of God’s, there needs to be a realization that anything outside of His goodness, morality, and love, has the possibility of bringing additional hurt to one’s life that is not necessarily the essence of His plan. As Lewis points out, “When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy.” A lot of times human nature is to take this extra pain that it has caused itself and turn it on God. However, this kind of pain exists as a vehicle to take us towards God, not away from Him. It is a reminder to humanity that if they want to follow their own path they will get stung. However, humanity tends to grow immunity to the sting because it is a small price to pay for the pleasure and temporary happiness that sin has created in the long run.
So in order to avoid this unholy pain, one would need to ground his or herself not only in God, but in living a life of goodness and correction. Granted there will be failures, but this is the first step towards perfection. Lewis gives us a brilliant comparison of our goodness to God’s when we are ready to play according to His rules: “The divine goodness differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child’s first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning.”
This whole idea of sin in general brings about another theme we know as divine omnipotence. If God is able to do anything and everything, then the fact that he thought pain was necessary for humanity to endure must have been of great importance. We also need to come to terms with the fact that this omnipotence held the idea of free will above that of an instinct of worship. Out of His love He wanted us to choose to love Him, not to be forced into it. But because He “is” love it would be foolish not to return such a feeling; especially because His love is an escape from the outside pain caused by Satan as stated above.
God didn’t want to create a bunch of robots that naturally lived lives of holiness for His sake; He wanted to receive our genuine love, which can only be expressed through this crazed idea of free will. When using the word crazed, the reference is made in correspondence to God’s character. If God really is the true definition of love, then the fact that He desires free will in our lives- an idea that created eternal damnation and separation from Him in the first place- must be one of the most difficult acts of true love the Creator ever had to carry out. It must pain Him more than anything to loose one of His very own simply because His own allowed its free will to become corrupt in itself.
And it is with this idea that we are brought to the concept that pride is a cause of pain as it is filled with human wickedness. This characteristic is the “chief sin” and creates a state of mind that is totally against God. This is because pride creates a god out of the man or woman who struggles with it. It numbs a person to the concept that there is something out there much greater and wiser than them, therefore leading them to lead their own life, bringing with it all the pain that one can expect in a life outside of True Love. While this person will achieve love, it will be all for themselves. A steadfast eye should be kept on a brother or sister’s sense of pride, as well as one’s own.
This pride creates a lead wall between a person and God. After all, when a person is his or her own god there’s hardly any reason to consider letting someone else take that place. A life associated with great pride is really a life of “I, me, myself, me, and I.” You’ll find that everything a prideful person does is in effort to pleasure one’s self; not one’s neighbor. But if all this is true, then is it possible to heal a patient who has a pride-problem? The answer is yes. It has been found that pain has the ability to cure a person of such a disease. When a person who is full of dignity experiences pain, they are put in a position where being their own god won’t get them anywhere. It is rather difficult to rely on oneself to save oneself. This puts a person at the mercy of God to restore their life. Again, we see that pain gives us a reason to turn to God and that without it, we never would. Lewis says it best when he writes, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
Seeing as how we are called to live a life like that of Christ’s it is interesting to realize that we don’t expect pain and suffering to be a part of it. Did Christ not suffer the most famous and gruesome death story in history? If we are called to live like Him, then we need to expect that on some level, we will experience the same. As George MacDonald said, “The Son of God suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.” Is it not obvious how much Christ cared for us? He demoted Himself to take on the form of His own sinful creatures to show man what a human should really look like when it falls under direct obedience to God. And the pain that Jesus endured, of all things, was definitely not a minimal problem in His life.
C.S. Lewis really portrayed this notion in a way that it may have never been portrayed before: “Christianity, true, as always, to the complexity of the real, presents us with something knottier and more ambiguous-a God so full of mercy that He becomes man and dies by torture to avert that final ruin from His creatures, and who yet, where that heroic remedy fails, seems unwilling, or even unable, to arrest the ruin by an act of mere power.”
This death and resurrection of Christ brings us to the realization of the existence of Hell. How could this ultimate pain really be included in God’s love? The idea of Hell might be better shown through an analogy of a father and his son much like Lewis speaks of in His book. A father knows what’s best for his son and what will make him a better man. He hopes so desperately that his son will follow the right path, but in order to help him achieve that way of life, discipline is in order. So the father disciplines his son when he screws up to further him down the road of righteousness, but the son continues to follow his own road. The son has been warned many times of where his life will end up if he continues down his own path of destruction, but the son seems not to care. Can a person who lives their own sinful way and in their own worldly happiness really acquire the kingdom of Heaven? Turning life on earth into a big joke to everyone who tried so dearly to follow God’s plan? It is not that God wants his people to live in eternal damnation; it is the mere fact that what we do here on earth requires justice and discipline.
In the end, it is safe to say that pain really isn’t a problem; it’s a spiritual vessel. True, God did create pain, but did He not do so to turn us from our human wickedness? And if so, did he not want us to turn from wickedness so that we would run to Him where he could surround us with true love? And if that is also true, then wouldn’t He want to surround us with this true love so that we could live with Him eternally instead of apart from Him in Hell? When you view pain in that sense, it really doesn’t seem like it was created to hurt humanity at all. Perhaps pain is the entire reason we are able to have faith in God in the first place. After all, a life without suffering is in fact not a life at all.
Things are starting to free up a bit here with school and whatnot so I should be back to work on my Bible analyses soon.
