to show why God has allowed so much suffering in the world, or in defenses that claim
that God could have a good reason for allowing the suffering, although we mortals cannot
know what that reason is. It is claimed that there is a distinction between intellectual
arguments in this context, ones said to meet a logical problem, and the actual problems
people have to face in their lives. The distinction is a spurious one, since the trouble
comes from the way God and suffering are spoken of in these intellectual arguments,
ways that, for some philosophers, many theologians, and a vast number of people,
believers and unbelievers alike, make theodicies one of the saddest features of
contemporary philosophy of religion. They are appalled at the way human life is talked of
as a moral experiment for character building by God, how suffering is talked of as a
means to a greater good, and how a God, looking back at the huge tracks of human lives
laid waste, from the vantage point of the eschaton, is said to feel no remorse for what he
has allowed nor admit that he has blood on his hands. I want to say with Rhees: “If I
could put my questions more strongly, I should do so. For I think that religious apologists
have generally been irresponsible and
end p.463
frivolous in writing about this matter. They have deceived both themselves and others by
such phrases as suffering for Christ,'joyful sacrifice,' etc.” (1997f, 304). This is a
serious charge, but, then, these are serious matters. It is what an accusation of a mistake
looks like where worship of God is concerned.
Probably no way of talking of human suffering is without its difficulties, but there are
other religious responses to it far away from the inevitable consequentialism of
theodicies. I do no more than indicate one of these responses here. We have talked of
“grace” and “love” as synonyms for “God.” To see life as a grace is to be grateful for it.
Such gratitude, in relation to other human beings and the natural world, involves seeing
them as graces, not to be exploited for our own purposes. This is to see others as the
children of God, and the natural world as God's creation. But God's creation is a human
world, one that inevitably involves suffering of various kinds. The recognition of
suffering is involved in recognizing life as a grace, and this means that compassion for
the human condition is involved, from the outset, in the notion of human life as a grace.
Sometimes, compassion enables one to relieve suffering, but there is also the compassion
toward affliction of a kind for which nothing can be done. This is a compassion that does
not purchase the sufferer, and that, when received in that spirit, may rescue the afflicted
one from despair. But such a view entails facing the greatest difficulty of all, namely, the
fact that men, women, and children have been crushed by affliction without receiving any
compassion. It is important to have real words here, ones that recognize that it cannot be
said that these deaths are sustained or informed by a sense of God's presence. It seems
that all we have is their story, a story of how human beings are crushed by the world.
When theodicies rely, in the end, on massive compensations in the eschaton, they half-
recognize the emptiness of the general claim that suffering leads to improved character.
Would that they wondered more at the terrible lack of economy in such a conception of
the divine plan.
At the heart of Christianity is a crucified one who is said to be both man and God. He
dies abandoned with spittle on his face. In Gethsemane's garden, when he prays that this