Tim Keller's powerful book on pain and suffering

I like all the books Tim Keller, pastor in New York City, has written. His Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering has so much to say to all of us. I want to spend several blogs highlighting his comments.

In one of his opening chapters, Keller talks about the different way cultures handle the problem of pain and suffering. Cultures train their members for grief, pain, and loss. Western culture does a terrible job. It gives its members no explanation for suffering and very little guidance on how to deal with it. Today we are more shocked and undone by suffering than our ancestors were. Other cultures say suffering can be a way of achieving your purpose in life, but not so in secular Western culture. According to the secular view, this material world is all there is. And so you must have freedom to choose the life that makes you most happy. However, suffering can have no meaningful part and must be avoided. It sees suffering as an accident. The world is senseless with no such thing as good and evil. All other cultures make the highest purpose of life something besides individual happiness and comfort, things that can be achieved not only in spite of suffering but through it. But if the meaning of life is individual freedom and happiness, then suffering is of no possible use.

One of the implications of this view is that the responsibility for responding to suffering is taken away from the sufferer. Traditional cultures believe that the main responsibility in dark times belongs to the sufferers themselves. They need to work on patience, wisdom, and faithfulness. Today the secular model puts sufferers in the hands of experts, but they don't agree on what to do to alleviate the problem.

In a secular society there are only two things to do when pain and suffering occur – manage and lessen the pain, look for the cause of the pain and eliminate it. Older cultures looked inside for fixes, but Western people are often simply outraged by their suffering. Sufferers in the West are not told that their primary work is any internal adjustment, learning, or growth. 

So how does Christianity fit into the cultural views on suffering? Christianity, unlike Buddhism, says suffering is real. Unlike believers in karma, Christians believe that suffering is often unjust and disproportionate. The Christian understanding of suffering is dominated by the idea of grace. Christianity teaches that suffering is overwhelming, it is real, it is unfair, but it is meaningful. There is a purpose to it, and having faced it rightly, can drive us more deeply into the love of God and into more stability and spiritual power thansanyone can imagine. For suffering, Buddhism says accept it, karma says pay it, fatalism says heroically endure it, secularism says avoid or fix it. Christians say all of these approaches may have some truth, but they are too simple. While other worldviews lead us to sit in the midst of life's joys, foreseeing the coming sorrows, Christianity empowers its people to sit in the midst of this world's sorrows, tasting the coming joy.