Pain & Suffering

In popular Christian conversation, pain is frequently equated with suffering. No doubt pain is the cause of much suffering. The two, however, are two very different things, and for the sake of clarity in speech the two should, wherever possible, always be distinguished.

Let us first look at physical pain. Such pain is real and it is one of the most important functions of our nervous system. In and of itself, pain is a good thing. Many Christians often imagine that pain did not exist in the Garden of Even. The idea, however, has no basis either in Scriptures or by reason of science. The Bible neither affirms such an idea, though neither does it deny it. But we would not wish to look at Adam and Eve if they did not feel pain while still in the Garden. The reason is simple; they would be so covered in bruises and sores they wouldn't be pleasant to look at. Not feeling pain, they would never have learned not to kick their feet against rocks and bump their heads against overhanging branches. Pain is the body's natural way of warning us against danger and preventing us from getting hurt. It is, once we are wounded, the body's way of telling us that it is healing. Pain is one of God's great gift to his creatures for their protection. What we have said about physical pain but is also true of emotional and mental pain (which is, of course, sensed differently but is, nonetheless, just as real). They trigger our physiological mechanisms (such as releasing adrinaline) and even our spirit to prepare and equip our bodies to deal with the needed actions.

In and of itself pain is hardly an issue of faith; what makes pain an issue is when it takes on the mantel of suffering, when the pain and hardship exceeds beyond the normal, and we begin to raise and/or attach 'significance' to them, when they are so overwhelming that we feel they "must mean something," and finally when we cannot find any reasonable or "meaningful" significance for them and, especially, when we begin to ask "Why?" and, in particular, "Why Me?" At that point, one's sensation of pain verges into suffering, which, if prolonged, can lead to doubt. Suffering, by itself, however, is not >evil. The Bible is full of examples of saints caught up in such situations. Though his own experience Paul came to recognize that when Christians taught him that While the Bible no where gives an explanation for why suffering occurs (as if we can understand them if one was given), it offers plenty of food for sustaining those who suffer that God understands and is with them in all that they go through. Most of all God sent His Son in human form and went to the depths of human suffering in the rejection he felt at the hands of those would not listen, betrayal at the hands of one who claimed to one of his own, abandonment by those who promised him their loyalties, the injustice meted out by a ruler who chose to wash his hands of doing what is right, the humiliation and mockery by the mobs which knew no better, and finally the barbaric death on the cross. By all these He says, "I know. I understand. I am with you."

Suffering can also degenerate to a point where we can no longer see any sense in them, when they can no longer be understood as serving any heuritic purpose, and we begin to question its morality, when it raises the question, esp., of why God would allow such a thing and thought to be evil. This leads us then into the realm of theodicy.