In Suffering, Love

Rethinking the Problem of Evil

I’ve done my best to avoid suffering, and I am more fortunate than some that my life circumstances have made it mostly possible to do so. Nevertheless, I only need to look around my west Provo neighborhood or listen to what is said in testimony meeting to see it. Some people suffer horribly, whether from war, poverty, and famine, from loneliness or disease, from betrayal by someone beloved or the death of a person close to them—any of a hundred things. None of us has escaped suffering; some have endured it intensely. What have we done with it? What ought we to do with suffering?

It is no surprise that, in the midst of suffering, we ask “Why?” As the book of Job attests, that question is hardly new.¹ It seems to be a natural response even for unbelievers. But we no longer think about the question in the same way we once did. For about 1600 years Christian thinkers didn’t ask the philosophical/theological question about the origin of evil and suffering. They knew the answers: they are a consequence of sin, a test of our faithfulness, a mystery to be answered hereafter. Augustine, Aquinas, and others said things about the causes of suffering, but the general view was that suffering has a divine purpose, whether or not God’s purpose can be understood.