Human Suffering: The Landscape of Life

The question is an old and venerable one: If God is good all-knowing and all-powerful then why is there so much pain and suffering in the world? If you believe that God knows about and causes everything that happens in the universe then you have several options when confronted with apparently senseless suffering. You can blame the victim and assume that the suffering is a punishment for something she or he did in this life or in a past life. You can affirm the mysterious inscrutability of God’s ways so that we cannot fathom divine wisdom and cannot view events from the larger cosmic perspective. Or you can maintain that since everything that happens is by the will of God it must by definition be good. This book gives a detailed description of suffering as the most disturbing and profound of human experiences. It raises salient and very concrete questions about suffering in general; Why must there be human suffering? Why has God not stopped the terrible suffering that afflicts us? Is there a reason God does not intervene? Does suffering have a great unseen purpose that can be understood? Pain and suffering can shape us to be more like Christ but it can also make us hard.