Pain: what’s love got to do with it?

Nicola Laver interviews Amy Orr-Ewing for en

There are few certainties in life, but one thing is sure – each one of us will both experience and observe suffering. Christians are never promised a life free of pain and anguish, but with the steadfast hope and comfort that we have in God we can comfort others.

In her new book, Where is God in all the Suffering?, Dr Amy Orr-Ewing draws on her personal experiences and observations of suffering and pastoring the sufferer, and writes in the context of a loving God. And it this most basic of instincts – love – that is her starting point.

‘Love seems to be at the absolute core of why suffering feels like it does,’ she writes. ‘… And when I suffer, the question I am struggling with at the deepest level is this: am I loved? And if I am truly loved, how could this be happening to me?’

The problem of pain

Though an academic and theologian – Amy is the President of OCCA (The Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics) – this book is unashamedly not an academic text. Rather it is a personal and philosophical perspective to the problem of pain and the harsh realities of sickness, grief, violence, mental health and systemic suffering in this world. Amy explores how different belief systems deal with these issues, but crucially points the reader to the true hope that can only be found in Christ who Himself suffered to redeem us.

Just days before I spoke to Amy about her new book, thousands of refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos had been thrown into deeper suffering when fire consumed their refugee camp. The full extent of the suffering of Yazidi women and children at the hands of ISIS six years ago was also back in the news.

Nicola: Why write this book?
Amy: I wanted to deeply engage with the worst faces of suffering. I think sometimes in the church our apologetics can be a bit, well, here’s the answer – suffering is this big blob and you just attach the answer to the blob. But actually, it doesn’t always connect with the very varied, deeply traumatic experiences of suffering that people are having, whether that’s the loss of a loved one, someone dying young, the loss of a child, a cancer diagnosed or longstanding chronic illness, suffering as a result of natural disasters or sexual violence.

So I wanted to draw on genuinely powerful experiences that people have had of suffering and see if the Christian faith has anything to say to that, rather than the theoretical.

It is to help us journey through, from a Christian point of view, how we consider this question of whether God exists; whether He is loving; and whether the Christian faith is true when we actually apply it to the very worst forms of suffering we might experience.

Evolution has nothing to offer

Nicola: Why do you write from the perspective of God’s love?
Amy: We know that God is love; and that He so loved the world that He sent His Son. To even look at the question of suffering through the lens of love is a uniquely Christian perspective.

The worldview is that there is no evolutionary reason why you or I should care about the Yazidi women or the refugees on Lesbos. We might feel mild pity, but there’s no explanation as to why a person should feel outraged by a person on the other side of the world who is being raped systematically, if they’re just a bunch of atoms.

Or if you look at it according to the Eastern idea of karma, you get what you deserve. So if you look at any kind of extreme of suffering you’re looking through the lens of karma – it’s basically victim-blaming.

Uniquely powerful explanation

Nicola: So how do we respond as Christians to someone who is suffering?
Amy: When it comes to the Christian faith, we’re faced with a God who is loving and who has created a human being in His image. It’s absolutely breathtakingly, uniquely powerful in terms of explaining who we are and how we respond to suffering. So we feel outrage at the Yazidi women’s situation because, inherently, we know as Christians that these people are made in the image of God.

Their life is sacred, it’s precious, it bears the image of God. They are loved by God, therefore, what’s happening is a violation that goes beyond just the physical process of flesh being torn, there’s something more awful about their suffering.

We’re called and motivated to bring God’s love and bring change into that situation because of that way of looking at the world.

Classic atheist argument

There is a second layer: how could it be possible that a loving God could exist and this be the world that we’re in? Because if God is God, He is all-powerful and sovereign; and if He’s loving He should care enough to intervene. So the fact that He’s not intervening with the Yazidi women means either He’s not powerful enough to do it or He’s not loving. And that’s the intellectual dilemma – the classic argument of atheism.

But actually, when we read the Bible what you see is the world that we experience. And the same Bible that describes a loving God existing and interacting with the real world, actually understands that dilemma.

How it’s possible that a loving God exists is actually in there, there’s an explanation for it, right at the beginning in Genesis when God created a good and perfect world and He created human beings in His image. He’s a loving God, so we have the capacity to love human beings in a way other creatures don’t.

And we also have the capacity to make decisions. Then, we see the exercise of that decision-making for ill as well as for good (at the Fall). And our decision-making doesn’t just impact on other people, it impacts the very fabric of the environment (science also knows that to be true, but Genesis got there quite a bit earlier!)

So we see an explanation of how a loving God exists and how we can live in a world of suffering and pain as a result of other people’s exercise of their decision-making capacity.

We’re not just left with an explanation [of suffering] in the Christian faith, we’re also met in our suffering world by a loving God. Ultimately, God in Jesus willingly, self-sacrificially, redeems the world through suffering and there’s the promise of hope, that one day every tear will be wiped and there will be an end to sickness and suffering.

As Christians, we live as people of hope; not that we’re not going to suffer in this life but that we’re looking forward to being with Jesus in eternity.

Nicola: You approach the issues through the ‘lens of love’, but how do you square this with the holiness of God and the need for divine justice?
Amy: As human beings we do not like the idea of a God who judges evil (and in lots of sections of the church that’s a really unpopular idea that’s hardly ever mentioned). One of the themes I explore is when we look at issues of extreme violence and our hearts actually cry out for justice, we do want the perpetrator to come to justice.

It’s a deeply human instinct in people to desire justice, which I think actually points to the existence of the God of the Bible. Even that cry for justice in people who don’t believe in God… our hearts cry out for justice because we’re made in the image of a holy and just God.

The issue comes when we start to face up to our own sin. What’s uniquely powerful about our Christian faith is that in the narrative of the Bible, there’s an explanation for the suffering that we suffer at the hands of other people (their sin) – and in one sense we’re all victims of that.

But we’re also all perpetrators if we’re honest, if we look into our own hearts. Every single one of us is both victim and perpetrator, which is why the cross of Jesus Christ is so uniquely wonderful and powerful because God so loved the world that He gave His Son.

The perpetrator of our own evil is also potentially forgiven through the cross of Jesus if we come to Him and accept His work on the cross for us. As perpetrators and victims, Christ meets us at the cross.

Nicola: What sets this book apart from other publications on suffering?
Amy: It is designed to be a fresh and a different experience for the reader. I wanted to write something that didn’t gloss over the specific horror of the experience of suffering that I’ve been party to; and to approach it from both a deeply experiential point of view and rigorously taking the intellectual side seriously.

Then I wanted to look at specific experiences around suffering, then bring in ‘What does the Bible say?’, and how do we look at this specifically, not just in general terms. So, for example, why do people experience anger when horrific things happen? How does the Bible explain that anger and ultimately point us to God?

The book comes into land on Jesus as the Suffering Servant and an evangelistic appeal at the end.

Nicola Laver is the editor of the Solicitors’ Journal.