the paradox of pain

A E Wilder Smith

Harold Shaw Publishers

Wheaton, Illinois

THE PARADOX OF PAIN. Copyright

©1971 by A. E. Wilder Smith.

Printed in the United States of America.

All rights reserved. No part of this

book may be used or reproduced in any

manner whatsoever without written

permission except in the case of brief

quotations embodied in critical articles

or reviews. For information address

Harold Shaw Publishers, Box 567,

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chapter 1 p3

Thought and Action: Today and Yesterday

chapter 2 p29

The Pink Professor

chapter 3 p43

Fallacies in the Atheistic and Agnostic Positions

chapter 4 p55

The Origin of Evil

chapter 5 p77

The Problem of Rebuilding

chapter 6 p91

Suffering and Anguish-

Any Reasonable Interpretation?

The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no

God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures

are necessary.

C. S. Lewis

acknowledgements

This text has been prepared from a short presentation of the same sub-

ject which appeared several years ago under the title Warum lasst Gott es

Zu? That book was intentionally brief so that it could be placed in letters

addressed to countries behind the Iron Curtain, where it has circulated

widely for several years. The present work has been extended consider-

ably and revised to meet the needs of English-speaking people in the

Western world.

As will appear from some parts of the text, the work of extension and

revision was undertaken during the author's stay in Turkey as a visiting

professor. Dr. Julian Richardson, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engi-

neering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, has made a number of

helpful and constructive criticisms.

Finally, my wife has helped in many ways with the preparation of the

text and its contents. Without her patience while living in Turkey in

temporary quarters, the book would never have emerged.

foreword

This book is an attempt to search for meaning in the abyss of

suffering, wrong, evil, blood, sweat, tears and anguish in which

the human race finds itself. In a day when meaning is inter-

preted in terms of meaninglessness, any text involving more

than a superficial interpretation of suffering is extremely diffi-

cult to write, to say nothing of interpreting the general subject

matter.

However, in spite of the meaninglessness of life as taught

from Darwin to Camus and in modern atheistic theology, the

author believes that, in the long run, man's nature is rational,

and that he will not rest until he has asserted himself as a

rational being—even in the rationale of suffering. For, in spite

of the admitted chaos surrounding us, tempting us to likewise

disintegrate into chaos, every time a girl falls in love with a

boy, they both find they begin to have meaning for one an-

other whether they like it or not. Love is the great producer of

meaning, even in suffering. Therefore, this text is aimed at

those who have found or are finding some meaning or ratio-

nale in their life and would like to extend it to cover the

problem of suffering. After all, we are all supplied with a large

and complex organ known as the brain which is superb at

untying knots of logic and meaning and is unhappy if it has no

work to do. Presumably it was supplied us as a standard part

that is to be used.

chapter

1

Thought and Action: Today and Yesterday

Few realize how differently people today use the process of

thinking as compared to individuals of a hundred years ago.

We live in an age of unprecedented technology and, therefore,

of technological thought, so of necessity technological subject

matter must color today's thought processes more than in the

past. But this coloring of thought is not the essential factor.

The generation gap has not resulted from a mere change of

shades in thought, but by the adoption of entirely new

thought modes or processes. Radical changes in the very mech-

anism of thought have occurred.

A century ago the average thinking person considered life

and the universe to be orderly and to contain meaning. He

willingly admitted that it was often difficult to discover the

meaning and order behind things. But this fact did not disturb

him in his basis of thought, namely, that order and meaning

were there if he could only find them. Though human stupid-

ity or weakness might distort and slow down the unraveling of

meaning, the meaning was still there. The book of the universe

14

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and of life was hard to decode or read. But the average thinker

was still convinced that it was a code capable of being deci-

phered if sufficient insight and intelligence could be brought

to bear on it.

Based on such premises, huge efforts were easily justified in

the effort to decipher the mysteries of the meaning and mech-

anisms of life and the universe. The overrun from this convic-

tion can be seen today in the momentum still present in such

efforts as molecular biology and space exploration, where

laws, interpretation and meaning are being sought. However, it

is not generally recognized that large areas of today's philoso-

phy, art, music, general culture and even theology have aban-

doned the very premises which launched the huge scientific

effort which has utterly changed the whole world of technol-

ogy and science. Most practicing research scientists still work

on the premise that nature is a code, and that life is a meaning-

ful system governed by law and yielding its meaning to those

who try hard and intelligently enough. But other branches of

knowledge such as those mentioned above have more or less

arrived at the conclusion that life and the universe are, in the

last analysis, absurd and devoid of meaning. Camus is an exam-

ple of this, for he received the Nobel Prize for saying just this

in his own elegant way.

Thus, where our forefathers based their thought processes

on the premise that life and the universe were meaningful, the

generation gap in thought processes today is largely caused by

exactly the opposite premise. Sartre, Camus and other modern

thinkers have obtained the highest praise from today's intelli-

gentsia for elegantly and cleverly purveying the premise that

life, man and the universe are meaningless. It naturally follows,

therefore, that suffering is meaningless too.

Only in such a cultural atmosphere were scientific theories

such as those of Darwin able to take root and flourish both in

scientific and popular circles. For Darwin, aided by Huxley,

propagated the view—using mountains of scientific detail as

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and Action:

Today and

Yesterday

evidence—that all life processes arose spontaneously—without

motivation or rationale—from randomness. In the last analysis,

randomness is congruent with lack of order and, therefore,

with lack of meaning. According to this view, the mixtures of

amino acids which are supposed to have given spontaneous

birth to life showed no meaning or motivation behind them.

No volition guided them and other building blocks into the

codes of meaning which make up DNA as we know it today.

The first proteins and nucleic acids allegedly arose spontane-

ously from meaninglessness. This boils down to saying that if

there is any meaning in life or its origin at all, that meaning

must be based, in the last analysis, on sheer meaninglessness.

The same applies to life's destiny—it must be meaningless too.

And, if meaning is founded and grounded on meaninglessness,

how else can meaning be defined except as meaninglessness!

EQUATING FACT TO NON FACT

Thus, biological sciences are also mixed up in the change in

thought processes which have so radically altered the modern

world. Consider the lengths to which scientific philosophers

such as Sir Julian Huxley have gone. He teaches all who will

listen that human and social order flourish better if humans

believe in a god or support a religion of some sort, for their

belief helps them respect each other. Therefore, he advocates

the propagation of some sort of belief in a god external to

nature, even though he says that we, the enlightened ones, well

know that such a belief does not correspond to the actual facts

of nature, but is thoroughly false and deceptive. "Religion

today is imprisoned in a theistic frame of ideas," he claims,

"compelled to operate in the unrealities of the dualistic world.

In the unitary humanistic frame it acquires a new look and

new freedoms. With the aid of our new vision it has the oppor-

tunity of escaping from the theistic impasse and of playing its

proper role in the real world of unitary existence."1

Schaeffer rightly observes: "Now it may be true that it can

16

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of

Pain

be shown by observation that society copes better with life

through believing that there is a god. But, in that case, surely

optimistic humanism is being essentially unreasonable ... if, in

order to be optimistic, it rests upon the necessity of mankind

believing and functioning upon a lie."

In other words, human society demonstrably needs to be-

lieve in a god to function properly and optimally. "All right,"

says today's scientific philosopher, "let them carry on with

that belief if it helps them function, even though, strictly

speaking, it is a lie." Huxley has no objection to believing in

"anti-facts" (believing in. a non-existent god) if that allows

man to go on being optimistically humanist.

Consider the chaos implicit in this kind of thought pattern.

Huxley is a scientific humanist who believes in "unitary exis-

tence"—no divine existence outside human existence. This

means that there is no thought (Descartes' proof of existence)

besides human (or possibly animal) thought. Yet, the human

thought he uses is calmly allowed to be no-thought, for there

is no objection to holding a nongod to be a real god!

Surely everyone, including the rationalist, believes that man

is a rational being and that rationality is a part—an integral

part—of every man. To postulate that man, in order to func-

tion, must be nonrational is surely to destroy an integral part

of man, his rationality. This must divide and destroy his very

being, because this is believing a nonfact to be a fact just for

the sake of its usefulness. This is the position to which scien-

tific philosophy in some quarters—and they are influential

quarters—has led us. This line must destroy the very nature of

thought and rationality and, therefore, rational man himself.

Not only is this the main line in present-day intellectual

thought. The general public also thinks this way. Not only do

gifted intellectuals like Huxley, Camus and Sartre propagate

these views, but Fellini and Antonioni of Italy, Slessinger of

England and Bergman of Sweden are all actively proclaiming

the same "irrational rationalism" in their films. Thus, the view

17

Thought

and Action:

Today and

Yesterday

that life is meaningless is not merely the property of the high-

brows but is being claimed by so-called lowbrows too. Popular

mass education is seeing to this. Nobel prizes are doled out to

those who are responsible for teachings that are destroying

man, the rational one!

Former generations used as their thought basis the premise

that, if a fact is demonstrably true, then it was a suitable

starting point for further thought, belief and action. Thought

processes were rather absolute in their methodology. Today

such "naivete" is no longer permissible. In current thought, a

nonfact is allowable, without any difficulty, as a basis for

belief—if it is useful (e.g., Huxley's allowance of the divinity

concept). Thus the sharply different functions of facts and

nonfacts have been blurred in modern philosophical thought

and one will serve for the other as importunity demands. The

fact (truth) is equated with the nonfact (untruth).

HOW FAITH IS ARRIVED AT

But how can one get a man to believe in a nonfact in the same

way that our fathers believed in demonstrable facts? That is

the grand feat which modern thought has now accomplished

with Kirkegaard's aid. A new methodology was developed

especially for this one purpose—how to believe in and be con-

vinced of nonfacts and make them the basis of our faith.

The pattern is quite simple. If a man can see no rational

sense, rhyme nor reason in life and its problems, if he cannot

find any way of decoding life's mysteries, then he must no

longer seek the solutions by rational thought. He must close

his eyes, throw life's textbook into the corner, and take a

"leap of faith" based on nonfact. Thus nonfacts (blind leaps)

are now serving the purpose formerly monopolized by facts as

a foundation for thought and faith. Theology professors have

faith in faith rather than faith in a fact or a person.

It is vitally important to realize how different this method

of thought is as compared to that employed by the prophets

18

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Pain

throughout Holy Scripture. In the Acts of the Apostles Paul

the apostle is reported to have reasoned with the elders with

tears day and night about matters of faith? He was ready to

throw his faith overboard if it did not comply with the known

facts. If the body of the Lord Jesus Christ could have been

found after his death and resurrection, that one fact would

have abolished at one stroke all Christian faith and doctrine

forever. For the whole Christian position (faith) turned (and

turns) on this one outstanding fact—the Lord rose from the

dead as he had promised before his death. His body was trans-

muted from material mortality to the supramortal, to immor-

tality. The disproving of this one central fact—the pillar of

faith which was attested to by more than five hundred living

people at the time Paul wrote of the resurrection—would have

destroyed Christianity.

In those days Christians did not arrive at their faith by a

leap of faith in the dark, but by basing their thought processes

—and therefore their faith—on the fact of Christ's resurrection.

Any other way of arriving at real Christian faith stands forever

outside the testimony of Scripture as well as that of living

Christians. The methodology then, as now, remains the same if

we wish to arrive at the same assurance of faith: having

assessed the evidence for the facts, we base on them our

thought, and therefore our action and faith.

CAUSES OF THE MODERN GENERATION GAP

Much of the gap between the generations today is due to each

generation—the older and the younger—not recognizing differ-

ences in the other's basic methods of thought. Thinkers of

today, such as Camus, Sartre and Huxley, are perfectly willing

to base their beliefs and actions on nonfacts, simply because

they believe the world is absurd and devoid of rationale and

meaning. As a result, nonfacts are replacing facts in our

thought and belief processes. If the facts of history are no

longer needed as the foundation for our faith and thought, on

19

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and Action:

Today and

Yesterday

what then shall we build? On nonfacts, of course! Today it is

believed that there is a logical and intellectual chasm between

faith and nonfaith and that the intellectual way across is as

pathless as an abyss. In fact, it is maintained that only a blind

leap will transport us across the chasm. Both the new theology

as well as scientific rationalism use this leap over the chasm.

Huxley arrives at his optimistic faith in humanism by allowing

his nonfactual god-belief, his believing in something or some-

one he knows not to be there, to be in fact there! Perhaps it is

here that the reason lies for older generations not under-

standing the younger!

THE EXASPERATED STUDENT

I once knew a student who disliked higher mathematics, yet

needed this knowledge to pass his examinations. After many

futile attempts to master a chapter of a rather abstruse aspect

of the subject, he threw the book into the corner of his room,

muttering that it was all bunk and nonsense—to him. But it

was not nonsense to everyone. For others had mastered the

same contents and extracted meaning from them. The diffi-

culty was that the student, being unable to comprehend the

message of the abstruse chapter, concluded that it was absurd

nonsense. His conclusion was, unfortunately for him, wrong.

Camus and others are saying, in effect, the same thing—life

is absurd and meaningless—to them. But other serious people,

although usually the first to admit that life's book is hard to

decipher, confess to having found satisfying solutions to at

least some of life's problems. And their conclusions are based

on the facts given by events of history such as the resurrection

of Christ. And more and more problems and seeming para-

doxes may be resolved into order by the careful and logical

application of thought.

THE AGE OF REASON

Our much-prized age of reason has regressed into an age of

20

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nonreason. The age of scientific philosophy has reverted to an

age of non- or anti-philosophy. What else can we conclude if

leaders of modern thought say that they're willing to believe in

the existence of a god who they really don't think exists, in

order to hold onto their optimistic humanism? Learning and

philosophy are dependent upon the communication of mean-

ing and message. Is it any wonder that communication be-

tween man and man, generation and generation, is breaking

down because the message of the communication allegedly has

been found to be meaningless? In this way philosophy today

has become, in fact, an antiphilosophy, just as the age of rea-

son has become an age of unreasonable blind leaps of faith in a

pitch-black unreasonable and absurd world—of the kind

described by Camus.

The whole situation as seen by our present world philoso-

phy can be well summed up in these lines by Hans Arp, one of

the original members of the Dada group:

The head downward

the legs upward

he tumbles into the bottomless

from whence he came

like a dish covered with hair

like a four-legged sucking chair

like a deaf echo trunk

half full half empty

the head downward

the legs upward

he tumbles into the bottomless

from whence he came

Francis Schaeffer comments: "On the basis of modern

man's methodology, whether expressed in philosophy, art,

literature or theology, there can be no other ending than

this—man tumbling into the bottomless."

21

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Today and

Yesterday

PICASSO IN CHICAGO

Two years ago I was standing in front of the Civic Center in

Chicago where stands a huge abstract sculpture by Picasso, for

which the mayor of Chicago paid a large sum of money. While

I was determining from which angles it would be best to

photograph this piece of art, a well-mannered Chicagoan quiet-

ly asked why I was going to all the trouble. I said I wanted to

get the effect and meaning in real life faithfully reproduced on

film. His answer was quite interesting. He said that since in his

opinion the work carried and expressed no communicable

meaning in real life, it was a waste of time and good film to try

to reproduce it in a photo!

ATHEISTIC CLERGYMEN

Picasso again demonstrates the tendency of modern art to

detach itself from the realities and facts of life and, in doing

so, to lose meaning for many people. Theology, the proverbial

laggard in modern intellectual activity, has followed philoso-

phy, art and music, albeit at a distance of some years. I spoke

to a young German clergyman recently just before he was to

conduct a confirmation service. In all earnestness he informed

me that he, as a pastor, believed that there was no God behind

the universe, although he would not yet dare to say so openly

in his church. He believed in an atheistic theology. Theology

being the science of the study of divinity or God, we have

arrived at the position of a pastor studying the science of

no-God, which we may equate to nothingness, for a god that

does not exist is nothing. So the conclusion was that he had

spent seven years studying nothingness! I pointed out this

rather elementary fact to him. He retreated in some confusion,

saying that I had misunderstood him. He did not say, he ex-

plained that he believed in an atheistic theology, but rather, in

an a-theistic theology. This was quite different, he said, for it

meant that he could continue in his theology without God-

that is, a-theistically rather than atheisticallyl One wonders

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what sort of a shepherd of his flock such a young man will

make when he has to comfort the dying and lay hands on the

sick and those wracked with pain.

CONSEQUENCES

But why bother to go into all this theory and philosophy? If

there is no meaning behind the universe and life, why try to

find any? Why thresh so much straw when there is such a lot

of wheat about?

The reason is simple. Man is a rational being and cannot,

therefore, be happy without exercising his rationality. To ask

the rational being to live in and for meaninglessness or non-

rationality is to ask the rational being to destroy himself. He

goes into despair, for which, apparently, he was not designed.

For he will not rest, if he is honest with himself, until he leaves

the despair by replacing meaninglessness with meaning and

order. This applies to the meaning of suffering too.

If contemporary rational thinkers—being rational beings-

see injustice, war, suffering, violence and apparent meaning-

lessness on every side, they cannot rest until they have found a

rationale of some sort for it all. Huxley admits that he is

prepared to be an optimistic humanist on the basis of believing

in a nonexistent god—one he knows not to be there, but whose

presence and existence we must postulate to keep ourselves

happy. But the use of a nonrationality, a lie, a nonfact, to

keep a man "rational" and happy, will surely destroy the very

basis of rationality!

No, if rational man is to remain rational and not destroy the

integral part of himself called rationality, he must use fact

"like it is" to find some meaning for all the apparent chaos

and meaninglessness which surround him. How can he ration-

ally explain a beautiful young mother dying of cancer while

her child is being born? How can he avoid despair on seeing

men, women and children mutilated by war, hunger and pesti-

lence? These are realities. Camus shrugged his shoulders at

23

Thought

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Today and

Yesterday

such sights, sensitive as he was, and saw things exceedingly

clearly, and said that the world and life are meaninglessjok.es

—absurd. They represent no code, they carry no meaning.

Jesus Christ saw similar suffering and spoke of the beggar

Lazarus covered with sores and lying at the rich man's gate. He

had mercy and compassion on the beggar. But he did not leave

it at that and shrug it all off, just as if life and Lazarus were

meaningless victims of a harsh, absurd and cruel world. He

interpreted Lazarus' apparently meaningless suffering—and the

rich man's riches too—and told us in no uncertain terms in

Luke 16:20-25 what they meant.

But today's teachers of Christianity have not given con-

vincing answers to the modern "meaningless" theorists, even

though Christ's interpretation of the problem is on hand if

they care to read and believe it. The fact is, of course, that

Christ's interpretation of Lazarus' suffering, and of other prob-

lems involving suffering, is not generally accepted today. The

real reason for the unwillingness to accept his interpretation is

coupled to an unwillingness to accept the full fact and impact

of resurrection as evidenced in Christ's own body. If we really

believed in Christ's and our own resurrection as unshakable

facts, we wouldn't have the slightest difficulty in accepting

Christ's interpretation of the "mystery" or apparent "mean-

inglessness" of Lazarus' suffering. We have become so used to

equating nonfact with fact that we find it difficult to rigidly

follow the logical consequences of believing in a real fact! For,

in Lazarus' case the introduction of one overlooked fact,

namely, personal resurrection, reduced the hopelessness and

meaninglessness of his sufferings to meaningfulness. Of course,

if the "fact" of resurrection is, in reality, one of our famous

"nonfacts," then we must shrug our shoulders on seeing Laza-

rus and mutter with Camus, "Absurd!"

Christ, however, kept steadily before him as he explained

Lazarus' case the fact of personal resurrection, which he was

shortly to experience in his own body. To the humanist by-

24

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Stander, tied up in Huxley's ideas about "unitary existence,"

Lazarus as he lay there full of sores was a senseless cruelty, an

example of callous torture of innocent humanity. But if the

promise of recompense and correction—in fact, the mighty

recompense of resurrection—is a fact, then, of course, mean-

inglessness resolves itself to meaning. For surely if a short term

of suffering is the method by which eternal nonsuffering or

bliss is to be obtained, then Lazarus was in for a bargain—to

put it mildly—and reasonableness is restored to apparent un-

reasonableness.

The important thing is that by inserting an overlooked fact

into our sequence of thought, chaos is often reduced to order,

and meaninglessness to meaning. What modern philosophers

have been busy doing—indeed, philosophers of all time have

practiced the same art—is removing by unbelief certain facts

from the sad case of this suffering world, facts given us by God

himself to enable us to handle the problem intellectually, fust

as the addition of an overlooked fact (resurrection) brought

meaning into the meaningless in the case of Lazarus' suffering,

so the removal of some fact will reduce it from meaning and

rationality to meaninglessness and irrationality. We interpret

and diagnose on the basis of all the facts of a case, that is, we

appoint meaning in the light of all relevant facts. But, remove

the facts, even the revealed facts of the Bible, and meaningless-

ness and inability to diagnose the case must result because the

resulting picture is incomplete.

MAN CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT RATIONALITY

I have risked writing this book—an attempt to find meaning in

a world of chaos and pain—for one main reason. It is obviously

useless to argue reasonably with anyone who does not believe

in meaning and, therefore, in reason. Many modern theolo-

gians and philosophers are in just this position. But this is not

the case with a majority of the younger generation. For they

are increasingly discovering that they cannot live with the doc-

25

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Today and

Yesterday

trines popular in their own generation. Therefore they are

seeking something better, something more in line with their

experience. This is one of the reasons for the almost universal

rebellion against the "establishment," the "establishment"

which preaches meaninglessness today as well as that of the

"status quo" of a century ago.

One reason for this rebellion against and dissatisfaction with

the universal atmosphere of meaninglessness is quite unex-

pected. Young people, perhaps firm believers in Camus and

Sartre, are finding that they cannot help falling in love with

one another, just as their forefathers did. Girls are still pretty

and boys are still attracted to their beauty of body and

psyche. They become aware of the remarkable fact that falling

in love with each other, in spite of what they have learned

about the absurdity of everything, is not so absurd. In fact, it

is giving their lives a totally new meaning whether they like it

or not! Love is a new, hitherto neglected, fact and it trans-

forms their lives, giving them purpose where they had imag-

ined there was no purpose. The addition of one fact—human

love is a fact, not a nonfact—to their lives has resolved some of

life's meaninglessness to meaning.

The fact of love had been overlooked, but it now must be

taken into account in the formula for life, just as in the case of

the fact of resurrection which altered the equation dealing

with Lazarus' suffering. The fact of love brings new rationality

and new meaning, just as other facts—beauty in nature, order

in the biological cell, chemical laws in biochemistry, and elec-

tromagnetic laws in valency help us see order where pre-

viously, without knowledge of these facts, meaninglessness

reigned.

Because so many of the younger generation are finding their

way back to rationality against the strong current of propa-

ganda for the doctrine of absurdity (as evidenced by the giving

of Nobel Prizes to its propagators), I have written this at-

tempted apologetic on the problem of suffering, which bothers

26

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Pain

so many thinkers as being irrational and therefore meaningless.

To do this I have tried to add overlooked facts to the formula.

It is my sincere hope that the views on suffering presented

here do not turn out to be glib or facile. Anyone born during

the First World War and who has spent his young manhood in

the Second World War has certainly been confronted with the

anguish of the problem of pain, injustice and death in the

prime of life. He has had the advantage of all this experience,

in addition to having experienced the woes to which each man

is heir, regardless of the period in which he was born. The

author does not claim to be any exception. He hopes that the

trials and dreadful sights to which he and his generation have

been exposed have turned up new facts and experiences which,

when added to the equation of suffering, will help to reduce it

a little more to meaningfulness.

The following, then, is an attempt to enable us to regard the

problem of suffering and evil without losing our nature as

rational beings. For to lose our rationality is to lose our

humanity, or, as Schaeffer would say, our "mannishness."

There are, of course, gaps in any arguments of the type

presented here. There may be holes in the logic. The author

thinks he sees some of them. But the whole work is an attempt

to show that the doctrines of despair, which are the fashion

today, are intellectually untenable and that they inevitably

destroy man as a rational being, reducing him to the level of

the brute. They arise by our neglecting certain facts of the

problem. If we persist in them they will totally destroy our

humanity. If the opposite doctrines, which are set out here—

albeit imperfectly—are pursued, they will integrate our human-

ity and make us, in the words of the Bible, "whole" both in

mind as well as in body and spirit.

IS THERE A PLACE FOR "BLIND FAITH"?

Someone will be sure to object to this kind of presentation,

saying that, after all, the heavy emphasis on reason and ration-

27

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Yesterday

ality excludes the exercise of real faith as the evidence of

things not seen but hoped for.

This kind of objection would be valid if one believed that

reason is faith. But we have not said that. We have said that

evidence and facts should lead to faith and that nonfacts

should not. To build faith on a sound basis we must have

sound facts and not flabby nonfacts or meaninglessness. When

the facts of a case have been established beyond doubt, for

example, that Christ (in this case) did, as an historical fact, rise

from the dead on the third day, then we can start building

faith on that fact. For, by being resurrected after death, as he

had promised before dying, he proved that he had knowledge

which ordinary mortals do not possess about the after-death

state. In fact, the predicted and fulfilled resurrection proves

that he had divine foreknowledge, and his words bore the

weight attributable to divinity. If his words on resurrection

have thus been proved to be divine, then surely what he says

about me, my death, and my resurrection by his power will be

divine. These divine facts and words allow me sufficient basis

on which to build my faith by trusting in and acting on them.

This kind of building on divine evidence and facts, this trusting

of them and their author,is nothing less and nothing more than

biblical faith.

All that this really means is that we are objecting to "blind"

faith—leaps in the dark. I am well aware that at times I have no

facts or evidence to build upon—probably as Lazarus had no

evidence as he lay in misery. I am completely at sea in regard

to belief and faith in those difficult situations when I do not

know where I am nor what I should do or think. And I am

often in that anguished position.

But it is when I am in such deep waters that I take a new

look at the facts of divine illumination, help and guidance that

I have previously experienced. Looking back, I see how God

has kept his good hand over me, even in allowing apparent

catastrophes. Recalling past facts and evidence, I base my faith

28

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for the future and the present on them and so reestablish trust

(or faith in him) for the present where I cannot yet see the

needed evidence. But I cannot base trust on nothing, nothing-

ness or meaninglessness. I cannot leap in the dark. I trusted

him in the past; he helped. Is that not fact and evidence that

the same will be true of the present and the future, even in

ultimate catastrophe? These facts strengthen me to trust him,

the great personal Fact, now where I see no evidence. Such

faith is by no means blind. It is based on a hindsight experi-

ence of him, on facts and on reason. But it is not based on

nothing or nonfacts and therefore unaccountableness. Even in

the dark of tribulation and the unknown my wavering faith is

held steady by being founded upon him and his accomplished

work on the cross, plus my past personal experience of his

keeping faith with me. This is the basis for a trust founded

upon solid fact. On this basis we treat the problem of suffer-

ing.

chapter

2

The Pink Professor

When I was a student of natural sciences in England, some of

our lectures were given by a professor who had marked leftist

tendencies. His lectures at the university were the poorest we

ever endured. He'd bring a load of scientific journals into the

lecture hall, open them, apparently at random, and then,

equally at random, just talk. But he was a gentleman and was

kind, in his reserved way, to all of us.

A complete transformation took place in the evenings when

he went into town and stood on a soapbox to harangue the

masses with the verve and skill of the convinced revolutionary.

He was nobly rewarded by his leftist political friends when

they gained control of the country, for he soon became a peer,

with the title of "lord," and was appointed an important

administrator of a big university.

This professor was, in common with many Marxist theorists,

a convinced and militant atheist. One day he came into the

laboratory, unnoticed by me, as I was talking to another stu-

dent about things other than purely materialistic science. I

30

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Pain

remarked that, not surprisingly, the study of matter would

probably yield only information about matter. Transmaterial

matters might exist, but they would be overlooked by such

methods. One could not expect to pick up ultraviolet light

with a film sensitive only to infrared light. But even if infrared

paper showed nothing that would not prove that no ultraviolet

wavelengths existed. I saw no reason not to believe in God

merely because our instruments had not detected him. Perhaps

they were not on the same wavelength.

Overhearing these remarks, our professor exploded. "It

really is a mystery to me," he said, "how otherwise intelligent

people can say they believe in any god, let alone in a good and

wise one, whom they call a person. We can explain the whole

universe and all of life without resorting to the outdated and

unnecessary postulate of a god behind it all. Chance and long

time spans will do all that your theologians imagine he did

without ever appealing to such nonsense as the 'Old Man in the

Skies.' "

He continued: "It really is beyond my comprehension that

intelligent people today could be still taken in by the same old

drivel. I can understand cannibals in the jungle talking as you

do. But not a student of the natural sciences in the twentieth

century. It is bad enough to have people believing theoretically

in a god behind things. But you people are much worse. You

believe you have a personal sort of friendship with this god of

yours and think you will therefore get preferential treatment

from him. I can understand, perhaps, some old people saying

they believe in some sort of mysterious spirit when they see a

sunrise, a beautiful face, a rose or an orchid. But it is proof

positive of lack in intelligence on the part of those same peo-

ple when they do not take the time to see the other side of the

coin. They have not the courage to see the other side and

boldly throw out their mythical gods—the cowards!"

Having switched into his soapbox mood, our professor was

in dead earnest—and angry. "People must be lacking in IQ if

31

The

Pink

Professor

they do not see the other side of the picture which wipes out

all the sunset and beauty stuff." He continued by talking

about the cat stalking the mouse and playing with it, letting it

totter away half dead, and then grabbing it again at the last

minute in its horrible claws. Then, when the poor mouse did

not have the strength to provide any more fun for the cat, it

squeezed the life out of its tattered body, biting its head off

with a juicy crunch, and purring with delight at the evening's

entertainment. "It is marvelous that your intelligent, almighty,

all-loving and kind god prepared both the mouse in its helpless-

ness and the cat with its talon strength and cruel mentality.

That is a beautiful proof of the goodness of your god," he

said, with a look of profound scorn in my direction.

I shrank into my corner of the laboratory, but he had not

finished with me. "What about the young mother dying of

cancer, her body stinking with decay before they take the

baby from her and put her in her coffin? Is that your proof of

the great Creator who made all things well—all things bright

and beautiful? The Lord God made them all," he hissed. "And

what about your capitalists who have worn down the working

masses for centuries and built your churches to help you do it?

We are going to alter all that—and quickly, believe me!

"What disgusts me," he said, "is the rank hypocrisy of it

all." After a pause to regain his poise, he added, "What about

all the agony—the agony of the father and children left behind

when they bury the mother? What about the lifetimes of

hunger suffered by the poor in India and Russia? Did your

good god create all that as well as the sunrises and the laughing

faces?" Looking grimly at me, he leaned across the table and

said slowly, "Because, if he did—if he did make the disgusting,

the cruel and the nauseating, as well as the beautiful—then I,

for one, would believe him to be a devil and not a god. Only a

devil could make the apparently beautiful and then mock us

all with the anguish of the disgusting. But, as I am not so

medieval as to believe either in devils, or gods, for that matter,

32

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I regard the whole argument as a pure wanton waste of time,

not worthy of mention in a scientific laboratory."

Having unburdened his soul, he regained some of his pro-

fessorial aplomb and smilingly looked around for any answers

that might be forthcoming. I mumbled something to the effect

that his was only one side of the question. Other great people

had no difficulty in maintaining an entirely opposite view.

"Let us leave out the question of wars and suffering caused

by man himself," he said. "We might explain problems caused

by man directly as due to his not being evolved far enough

away from his animal ancestors. If we wait long enough, he

will evolve higher and get better. Let us leave that and look at

another field to which no one has ever honestly turned with a

reply that was satisfactory to me. What about the refinement

of torture we see all around us which has nothing whatever to

do with man's nature? Take the designed torture we can all see

in the transmission of the malarial parasite. It shows signs of

what looks like careful, thoughtful planning with the single

purpose of plaguing and torturing the host animal—or man. To

me the whole system looks like a remarkable sort of planning,

if a good god worked it all out. As I said before, if you want

plan behind the universe and life, this sort of setup and plan-

ning seems to show a good and a bad, a kindly and a vindictive

planner all in one—a god who is a devil."

Musing, he continued, "No, I just cannot believe this reli-

gious stuff myself. It really is just too ridiculous. My intelli-

gence and my common sense force me to reject the whole bag

of nonsense. I am near enough to being a nihilist, you tell me.

But I should become an absolute nihilist if I were to force

myself to believe in a god who is a devil. An almighty god,

such as you believe in, and a good god, just could not show so

many evidences of what appear to be thoughtful, planned

goodnesses, such as sunrises and other beauties, and at the

same time so many signs of cold, calculated, intelligent sadism.

If you were able to develop sufficient logic," he said, scorn-

33

The

Pink

Professor

fully addressing himself directly to me, "you would have

recognized long ago that your views lead directly to nihilism.

Can you imagine any supreme, almighty, personal being, who

was at the same time all-wise and all-good and yet frightfully

vindictive and bad, planning all sorts of plagues and diseases as

well as the beauty of the rising sun and healthy body? It just

does not make sense. It is plain bunk." He turned from me in

contempt.

There was quiet for a short while. Then he began once

more: "Of course, you people can always try to get around the

difficulty by actually assuming a devil, who surprised the all-

knowing and the all-powerful, almighty one by upsetting his

applecart when he was not looking. I suppose you people attri-

bute the disease, cancer, war, exploitation of the workers, and

all the rest of this world's woes to a devil, do you not? But do

you not realize that if god were almighty and good, wishing

us—the so-called creatures of his hand—well, he must have neu-

tralized the machinations of your devil before he got to work

with his hosts of wicked angels in which you, no doubt, be-

lieve? Then the devil could not have been a source of devilry,

could he? Of course, if your god is not almighty with respect

to the devil, then there is only one thing to say about him: he

is not god at all any more. So you destroy him this way if you

do not destroy him the other way. If god cannot get even with

the devil, then the devil must be a god too; and we are once

more reduced to the primitive ideas of warring gods and devils

in heaven and hell. You are not suggesting that we revert to

ideas like that, are you? They held up intellectual progress and

emancipation for centuries. I shall consider you an enemy of

all true progress if you have the effrontery to inform me in a

scientific laboratory that you believe in that sort of trash," he

said, looking hard at me.

I am afraid most of us were rather like the proverbial rabbit

when confronted by the snake—transfixed. No answers seemed

to be able to formulate themselves in our brains. After all, our

34

The

Paradox

of

Pain

professor was a learned man. He was not just repeating slogans

learned in Marxist circles. Obviously he was thoroughly con-

vinced of his views. His extreme seriousness made him willing

to stand up on a soapbox and confront the mob—an act which

must have been rather humiliating for a professor of his stand-

ing. Although he was almost useless as a lecturer and professor

in the classroom and experimental laboratory, we all respected

him as a man, even though not all of us liked his convictions

on political or religious matters.

While we were thinking about these things, he quietly

started again. "I used to say," he continued, "that I was an

agnostic and therefore could say nothing for certain about

religious matters. But now that I am getting more mature and

experienced, I have come to the conclusion that I am in reality

a total atheist. I have been forced to the point where I do not

believe in any god, either good or bad. That is, I believe nei-

ther in a good god nor in a bad devil. Such beliefs raise more

difficulties than they remove. They just complicate matters.

So, today, I just leave religious subjects outside my realm of

thought—like alchemy. And I do not like people raising them

in the classroom either. They only confuse, being highly unsci-

entific and subjective. I do not need to blur my intellectual

horizon with such primitive methods of thought any longer.

The Marxists are not altogether wrong when they call religion

'opium for the people.' It is just that; it muddles their

thoughts, blurs their vision and, because they then can see

clearly no more, renders them an easy prey for the capitalists

who are just waiting to exploit them for their own benefit."

THE SPOKESMAN OF MANY THINKING PEOPLE

I have never forgotten that afternoon in the laboratory. Cer-

tainly our professor had thought more about these matters

than we students had. Moreover, he understood the problems

of the ordinary thinking men and, when he wished, could be

an excellent spokesman for them. Because he understood

35

The

Pink

Professor

them, he could sway them when he spoke. He never spoke

with such conviction on cold, matter-of-fact chemical matters,

but no one could get across ideas like he when revolution and

Marxism came up.

The subject raised that afternoon in the laboratory is the

very question occupying the minds of many thinking people.

It looms large in the life of the person who, though satiated

with life's material goods and apparently concerned only with

pleasure and prosperity, is brought face to face with life's

cruelties and suffering every day in his newspaper and on radio

and television news, and is jolted by what is happening around

him in his own life. If God is almighty—and if he is God, he

must be almighty—why doesn't he stop all this chaos, all these

wars, all the unrighteousnesses, injustice, misery and suffering

in this world? Why did he ever let them start? Mere men

everywhere are bending all their efforts to do what they can to

stop it all. But, fortunately or unfortunately, men are not

almighty and therefore cannot reach their goal.

Years ago a student friend crippled with polio told me, "If

you want me to believe in your God, I shall expect him first of

all to make a better job of the world we live in—and of me." I

spent a good deal of time with him and he was apparently glad

to listen to me. In my student enthusiasm I explained not only

the Christian way of salvation by Christ's works, but also the

intricacies of prophecy and the end of the age. Afterward he

turned to me and said that now that he knew the way, he

didn't need to do anything about it. For, when he saw the end

coming, he would quickly accept God's way and be all right

forever! A year or two later he was stricken with a stroke one

Sunday morning while shaving. He died in seconds, without a

sound. His wife found him an hour or so later.

If God loves us men and women, as the Bible assumes he

does, why doesn't he end all misery and immediately set up a

workable, orderly system such as most men of good will would

like and for which they are striving? Doesn't he care for us any

36

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Paradox

of

Pain

longer? If he doesn't care and has forgotten us, why should we

care about him? Because he has allowed evil to exist along

with good, thus apparently compromising himself in his omni-

potence, many thinking people despair of an answer, or be-

come atheists, just as my professor had done.

THE PROBLEM IS NOT NEW

Before further consideration of this question, we must remind

ourselves that it is by no means new. Some have the mistaken

idea that they are very modern if they handle the question as

my professor did. They think that it stamps them as being

advanced thinkers in having recognized that mankind is facing

a new problem—and that they have solved it in a particularly

new way.

Of course, this is not the case. When thistles and the thorns

sprang up after mankind's first couple had fallen from the

paradise of God by disobedience, they probably asked the

same sort of question. Why indeed did God allow all this?

Does he no longer love us and care for us? It looks as if he

does not, for the very ground we cultivate does not bring forth

its harvest any more. The birth of Cain was probably accom-

panied by pain, which was capped when he became his

brother's murderer. How can that grisly history coincide with

God's goodness and omnipotence?

Job could have asked the same kind of questions when the

messengers came to him, one after another, each reporting a

worse catastrophe to his family. It got so bad that Job cursed

the day he had been born. He lost everything, including his

health. Even his wife deserted him, telling him to curse God

and die. How could Job believe in a holy, perfect, omnipotent

God, concerned about him and his family, when all the catas-

trophes about him pointed in the opposite direction? He is

God. He could have stopped it if he had wanted to. Did he

want to find a way out for Job? and if not, was he a sadist?

Did he still care about Job in allowing all this happen to the

37

The

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Professor

poor innocent man? The testimony of God and man was that

Job was perfect—and innocent. Yet it all happened, and no

explanation was forthcoming—until right at the end of the

book of Job. If God did not care about poor, innocent, perfect

Job, why should Job love God?

It is true of course, that there was still a great deal in Job

and Adam's worlds which pointed to God's care in spite of

thorns and thistles and catastrophes. But it is also true that

there is just as much in our world. At the beginning of Adam's

career the picture pointing to God's care and love was clear. In

that earlier world everything indicated only God's care and

omnipotence. But now Adam was outside paradise in a world

of murderous and slain sons, thistles and thorns. Job had lost

his family and fortune as well as the heart of his wife. The

picture had become mixed and was full of chaos, full of cir-

cumstances which made it hard for the actors in those plays to

believe in God's care and omnipotence. Many things now

pointed away from this direction, and the area of God's order

had retreated into quite a minute spot on the stage of life. So

the same sort of contradictions arose in Adam and Job's times

as they do now. Thus, the problem is by no means new. It is as

old as mankind.

Accordingly, the question presents itself as follows: "Why

should we be asked to believe and trust in a good God, thereby

flying in the face of all—or at least a good deal of—the con-

temporary evidence?" One physicist put it as follows: "Why

does God value faith in him so much as to make it the very

condition, according to the Christian way of life, of entry into

his kingdom? It seems most unfair to me. For faith means

believing right in the face of contradictory evidence. Faith, to

me, is merely the result of forcing myself to believe and trust

in God's goodness and care when a goodly part of the evidence

on hand leads me to reject such trust. Most preachers seem to

preach faith as though it were the faculty of believing some-

thing which is not true—forcing oneself to believe and act in

38

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Pain

spite of evidence to the contrary. Why should God value a

faith which acts against all common sense and evidence? Such

action short circuits one of our highest faculties: the ability to

weigh evidence and then act on it. Faith believes what is can-

not see; it accepts evidence it cannot weigh. Why should God

make as a condition of entering his presence and kingdom our

ability to short circuit, abuse, and render null and void the

very logic and evidence-weighing faculty with which the Bible

says he endowed us? God gave us logical ability. Why does he

demand that we act and think illogically in faith as a condition

of entering his kingdom?"

To return to our first line of approach to this problem, then

the question is: If the same Being planned both the good and

the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the sadistic and the loving,

then all serious, logical, reasoning thought about him becomes

impossible with our thinking faculties.

ANOTHER APPROACH

What does the Bible teach about this apparent state of illogic?

Remarkably enough, neither the New nor the Old Testament

sees any illogic in the situation! For example, in Romans 1,

which deals with this question in detail, Paul the apostle

teaches in a clear and uncompromising manner that creation

doesn't show the slightest sign of contradiction in these

matters. It gives only one plain line of thought: that the whole

creation reveals that God is a glorious, omnipotent Creator—

and nothing else. Paul says, "Because that which may be

known of God is manifest in them; for God have shewed it

unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of

the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that

are made [nature], even his eternal power and Godhead; so

that they are without excuse."1

Thus, the Bible teaches, as do many ancient sources, that

when a man regards nature, he is seeing, as in a mirror, the

Creator. The Bible doesn't ignore the apparent problems of

39

The

Pink

Professor

war, disease, poverty, pain and chaos. It says quite a lot about

these subjects and even suggests cures for some of them. But it

does not see them in the light in which my professor saw

them. The Bible does not think that these things cloud the

issue about the Creator, as do many thinking people. Rather, it

teaches that the man who regards nature as it is today and

does not see the power of a glorious, invisible Godhead in

nature—with no clouding of the issue by the mixture of good

and evil we all see—that man is "without excuse" for not

believing! This is surely a rather strong pill to the modern

intellectual who pleads intellectual difficulties for his disbelief

in God.

Adding insult to injury, the Bible goes one step further in

teaching that not only should a man see the Godhead, the

glorious Creator, when he sees mixed nature, but, seeing it, he

should be filled with thanks to God, glorifying him for reveal-

ing his wisdom and power in the creation. So, apparently I

should have told my professor that he was not only "without

excuse" but also a "thankless" person—if I had been ready to

give him a biblical view of himself. Somehow, I don't think he

would have appreciated that! Certainly at that time I did not

have the necessary maturity to say such a thing without

causing a major incident—and a lot of misunderstanding.

Paul continues the argument by maintaining that a sense of

wonder and reverence should fill every observer of the present

confused creation. Offsetting this wonder should be a sense of

our own vanity and foolishness, pervading us and all who do

not see the creation in this light. Finally, all these feelings on

observing God's handiwork should make the observer a "wor-

shiper" (glorifying him as God). If I had told my professor

that he had all the evidence necessary to make him fall on his

knees (or face) and worship God, undoubtedly he would have

thought me a lunatic.

But Paul insists that if those reactions to the creation don't

take place in us, we are abusing our reasoning power. As a

40

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consequence of this abuse we shall become totally unable, in

the course of time, to use our higher reasoning faculties and

logical powers. Paul expresses this thought by saying our

"heart" will become "darkened" and our "imagination" will

become "vain." Also, he maintains that, under such circum-

stances, even sexual morality will die in us. Men will begin to

sexually abuse their own bodies—homosexuality will arise, and

normal sex relations will be stifled. Certainly my professor

would not have appreciated this step of the argument in the

least, for he appeared to be a moral man.

In summary, at least parts of Holy Scripture do not appear

to sympathize greatly with the intellectual difficulties dis-

cussed here. The Bible says a look at nature as it is should be

enough to make man a convinced, thankful, worshiping be-

liever. The question remains: why does the Bible take this

stand, seeing that at least some thoughtful modern people in

the Western world today have found that the observation of

the universe has by no means made them worshipers or be-

lievers. (Here I am not thinking of Taoists, etc.) On the con-

trary, those who have studied the universe in the natural sci-

ences and other disciplines have often felt the most difficulties

with respect to worshiping and believing. Indeed, quite a

majority have simply turned away from any thought of God.

Investigation of "that which is seen" has not revealed to

them "the unseen" but has often turned them from believing

in anything divine and unseen. In no way has it made them

worshipers of some unseen Being. For what they've seen shows

so many paradoxes and apparent contradictions that, judging

the unseen by what they see, it becomes either ridiculous or

superfluous for further serious thought.

Since intellectuals conclude that if the seen can give no

credible picture of the unseen—if there is an unseen—being a

Christian is synonymous with being a third-rate intellectual.

They assume that the Christian is intellectually incapable of

comprehending the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in

41

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Pink

Professor

the allegedly rather naïve and intellectually impossible Chris-

tian faith.

Clearly, the basic difficulty confronting both the Christian

and the intellectual in aligning matters of belief with matters

of the intellect is intimately tied up with the question of the

origin of evil. If we could account for the origin of evil with-

out impugning God's omnipotence, love and holiness, then we

would be able to go a long way toward solving these difficul-

ties. A future chapter deals with this basic problem of the

origin of evil.

chapter

3

Fallacies in the Atheistic and Agnostic Positions

Are there any really irreconcilable intellectual difficulties in-

volved in believing in God, or are they only imaginary when

carefully examined? I don't believe the ancients were on a

lower intellectual plane than we moderns. Even though we

have excelled them in technology, we see no evidence of intel-

lectual lethargy on their part. Yet, perhaps a considerable per-

centage of them believed that the universe showed God's

handiwork, whereas most moderns do not.

This difference in approach is not in any way a reflection on

the total intellectual capacity of either the moderns or the

ancients. Rather, it is a reflection of the increasing mass of

knowledge with which every human being in every succeeding

generation has to contend. An ancient could have been a

master of all that was then known in the combined fields of

physics, chemistry, mathematics, geometry, medicine, biology

and algebra. Today the mass of knowledge is so great that no

human brain can possibly cope with even a fraction of it.

Therefore, a fragmentation of knowledge has occurred. But

44

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Pain

this massive increase has tended to take place in the watertight

compartments of the various disciplines into which knowledge

has become divided in order to fit the capacity of single brains.

The result is that a synthesis of all modern knowledge is rapid-

ly becoming less and less possible. This perfectly natural ten-

dency has had some far-reaching consequences which must be

examined before one considers the question of the origin of

evil, since the two problems belong together.

Just over a century ago Darwin, Wallace and Huxley pro-

pounded the view that long time spans and chance reactions,

coupled with natural selection, would account for all visible

living nature without the necessity of involving the volition of

any divinity. Huxley thought he could prove this with his

appeal to probability laws and his famous six monkeys typing

at random for millions of years on six typewriters. The mathe-

matical formulae for the possibility of this view were bandied

around and the principle was accepted as true. The natural and

logical consequence of the view was that the postulate of

divinity behind nature was rendered superfluous. Immense

time spans plus chance and natural selection would do the

work hitherto attributed to God. Thus the world of science

became a world depending on chance as a direct result of the

views of these men (though Darwin himself did not see that

far).

The patient work of scientists simultaneously competent in

several disciplines—biology, mathematics and chemistry—has

been required to show that Darwin's basic assumptions were

chemically, mathematically and biologically untenable.1 The

vastness of today's scientific knowledge makes it obvious that

it is a rare scientist who is able to do original work in all these

fields simultaneously. As a result, until recently no synthesis

between the various fields had been achieved. Instead, water-

tight compartmentalization had developed. Biologists were un-

able to test the mathematics of the problem in hand, and the

chemists could not critically assess the biologists' work.

45

Fallacies

in the Atheistic

and Agnostic

Positions

The biologists announced with all due thunder that they

could replace God with chance and long time spans plus

natural selection. But no mathematicians sufficiently versed in

chemistry and biology were forthcoming to assess mathe-

matically and thermodynamically what the biologists were

shouting about. As a result, one discipline, in this case biology,

has been building on false chemical, thermodynamic and

mathematical premises. There was no one to check them. The

author has written elsewhere of the catastrophic development

of this kind of compartmentalization of science.2

Thus, in ancient times learned men possessed a good,

synthetic, overall view on life and the then-known universe.

Although there were certainly errors, grave errors sometimes,

in what they believed, yet, viewing the universe as a whole,

they saw it as the product of an omnipotent divinity with a

creative will. They knew that certain forms of order could

only be attributed to personality and intelligence, and they

proceeded to apply this general principle to the ordered uni-

verse.

In modern times, however, things have been drastically

different in the realm of scientific and intellectual matters. It

has become so difficult to synthesize knowledge to form a

coherent whole that very few biologists studying Darwinism

(or any other specialized subject) could check his mathe-

matical or chemical assumptions. Thus, when Darwin and

Huxley announced that living nature showed nothing of the

divine in it or its origin, allegedly demonstrating their

announcement with quite simple and apparently sound mathe-

matical formulae, men who were being raised in compart-

mentalized knowledge simply believed them. Darwin's actual

doctrine was very simple, and highly comfortable to those who

considered the idea of a God to be primitive.

Therefore, ancient intellectuals with their simple but rela-

tively synthesized knowledge attained a total view of the uni-

verse and its problems within their limited scientific knowl-

46

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Pain

edge. As a result, they could believe what the apostle Paul said

about the universe demonstrating the nature of the Godhead.

It was reasonable, simple, all-embracing and clear. It agreed

with what they knew about mathematics and biology—even

though the idea of spontaneous generation, then widely be-

lieved, might have offered difficulties on the question of crea-

tion.

What is not generally realized is that modern man could

believe, as did the ancients, that the universe shows God's

nature and still remain within the limits of all the scientific

knowledge gained since ancient times—if his knowledge had

not become so great that it had to be wrongly compart-

mentalized. For when the various compartments are carefully

examined, the fact emerges that each still speaks one language

today, as it did thousands of years ago: that "the heavens

declare the glory of God," in spite of the mixture of good and

bad.3

In spite of this surrounding evil and the mixed picture show-

ing both evil and good, we can believe in a good loving, per-

sonal, holy and compassionate God behind it all. There never

was any difficulty about believing he made the good. But what

about the evil? Is he the author of that? The Koran teaches

that God made "the mischief of creation" too.4 Is God the

author of the mixed picture? Is such a synthesis of knowledge

possible?

THE GOTHIC CATHEDRAL

Before the Second World War, I often visited the huge and

beautiful Gothic cathedral at Cologne on the Rhine in Western

Germany. I used to admire this fine example of the architec-

ture of many hundreds of years ago, with its graceful flying

buttresses, a superb high-domed roof, its famous two towers,

and the medieval stained-glass windows. Hearing the thunder-

ous peals of organ music filling the huge edifice transported

me in thought to passages such as Isaiah 6.

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The more I admired the cathedral, the more I found myself

admiring the architects and masons who had originated the

whole structure. Over the centuries they had patiently planned

and built. All the graceful lines and sturdy foundations had

obviously been carefully planned by experts possessing sound

knowledge of building mathematics and mechanics as well as a

keen appreciation of how to combine both to produce a beau-

tiful total edifice.

That it had so well withstood the ravages of the centuries

showed that the workmen and designers not only understood

the principles behind beauty, but also those of ensuring endur-

ance. Their craftsmanship was first class in every way. Thus I

found myself admiring our forefathers as I admired their work-

manship. Considering that they had few mechanical devices

such as a modern architect would consider essential for con-

structing such a masterpiece, the masons and architects of that

day certainly did work wonders.

The structure of that cathedral, centuries after it had been

built, showed without the slightest doubt something of the

mind or minds behind it. Its very compact and organized de-

sign made one wonder what sort of drawing offices the builders

had at their disposal and how they made their blueprints. To

imagine that such a well-conceived edifice simply arose with-

out enormous planning effort would be to invite the just

derision of anyone remotely familiar with the construction

industry. Even calculations of the strengths of the various con-

struction materials had to be made with old-fashioned arith-

metic, and not just handed over to a computer. Thus, an

almost flawless work showed sharply the minds and hands of

its creators. But the picture did not always remain as clear.

COMPLICATING THE ISSUE

During the war, Cologne suffered perhaps the most intensive

air bombardment of any city in Western Europe. Reportedly,

bombs fell on about every two square yards of the entire inner

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city. Now, the cathedral stands almost directly in the railroad

station yard. Cologne is a very important rail center where

many lines meet, particularly those connected with the huge

and concentrated Ruhr industrial area. Naturally the Allies

bombed the railroad yards on many occasions and, not sur-

prisingly, many bombs missed their mark and destroyed near-

by housing and property. A number of heavy bombs hit the

cathedral, doing immense damage.

In the fall of 1946 when I returned to Germany for the first

time after the war, I was greatly dismayed at the sight of the

cathedral. It seemed symbolic of the rest of Europe and her

spirit. Almost irreparable damage had been done in five years

of combat. However, as I approached, the two famous towers

were still visible through the morning mist.

Practically every building in the vicinity was razed to the

ground; the cathedral alone stood majestically in the midst of

the carnage. Coming nearer, however, I could see huge, gaping

holes in the sides of the two towers. The holes revealed the

massiveness of the masonry, for any other building receiving

glancing blows from such high-explosive bombs would have

collapsed entirely. But the cathedral, though, badly damaged,

was not destroyed. Hundred of tons of concrete and bricks

had been used to plug a huge hole high up in one tower,

partially replacing the ancient masonry which had been blasted

away by an aerial bomb.

The ancient roof was indescribably damaged. Huge rafters

and beams, once its glory, hung perilously down over the

bomb-pocked floor. As the wind blew through the wreckage,

small bits and pieces fell to the ground, building up the piles of

rubble. A hole marked the place where the organ had once

pealed out its accompaniment to worship.

This miserable picture of chaos made a deep impression on

me as I stood in the same place where I had once admired the

order and beauty of the original edifice. As those memories of

former beauty passed through my mind, one idea never even

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occurred to me. Never did I connect the chaos of the formerly

beautiful cathedral with any inefficiency or designed purpose

on the part of the constructing architects or masons! They had

not constructed it for such maltreatment.

Similarly, I never began to doubt the existence of the men

who designed and constructed the cathedral simply because I

could now see so many contradictions in their handiwork. The

place was a ruin. But in its ruination it still bore the marks of

design. In fact, its design and original beauty were even more

emphasized in some respects. For the huge gaping holes in the

walls revealed the excellent construction even better than did

the remaining undamaged walls. There was no fill or rubbish

behind false walls, such as if found in many modern buildings.

It was all solid handiwork built to last for centuries. The

mighty flying buttresses were still there; the graceful Gothic

arches were still standing. But the solid design which was built

into the parts of the construction normally hidden from view,

was now laid bare for all to see how well those craftsmen had

done their job.

In summary, even the general ruin and chaos showed (1) the

existence of and (2) the excellent work of both architects and

craftsmen. Furthermore, the ruined structure itself showed in

some ways even better than the intact one the existence and

skill of the originators. In fact, the whole picture reminded me

of the purpose of dissection in learning the anatomy of ani-

mals, man and plants. In order to see the order—and beauty—

of some aspects of biology, the destroyed or dissected animal

or plant serves better than the intact one. The cathedral had

certainly been dissected, and its entrails laid bare.

INEFFICIENT ARCHITECTS?

Obviously no one was going to accuse the architects and

craftsmen of designing and producing a ruin. The cathedral

had been constructed to last—almost forever. Something had

happened to it which had not been planned or even conceived

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of. And yet, even in its ruination, it was generally quite easy to

distinguish between the unplanned ruin and the actual archi-

tecture. Although the cathedral at the same time displayed

both perfection and ruination, certainly a mixed picture, this

fact would never allow either of these conclusions: (1) that,

because the cathedral was a ruin, a mixture of chaos and order,

there could therefore be no mind, no volition, no architect,

behind it; and, (2) that, because the edifice was a mixture of

ruin and order, one could therefore no longer hope to recog-

nize any characteristics of a mind behind it. It would not

occur, surely, to anyone that one mind had planned and

carried out both the construction and destruction of the edi-

fice. That would be sheer nihilism!

The ruined cathedral presents a mixed picture—chaos and

order mixed up inextricably with one another, just as the

world around us presents a picture full of good and evil,

beauty and ugliness, order and chaos, love and hate. No one in

his right mind ought to deny that life as we see it is a hopeless

hodgepodge of such ingredients. However, we should remem-

ber that it would be just as illogical to say that the mixed

picture of the cathedral proves there was no architect behind it

as to say that the ruined, mixed picture we see of life about us

proves that there is no God behind it. My professor, rightly

seeing the hodgepodge before him, concluded that therefore:

1. The edifice of creation has no mind or architect behind

it. This is the position of all atheists who hold the same views.

For the atheist maintains that because he sees nothing but

contradictions in nature, therefore there is no mind or God

behind it. The Germans call this a Denkfehler, a short circuit

in the logic of thinking. And so it is. But it is one seldom seen

through today.

2. No characteristics of a mind behind nature can be dis-

tinguished because the picture is so mixed. This again is a

Denkfehler because, as we have already pointed out in the case

of the ruined cathedral, as long as any signs of order have

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escaped complete destruction in the general ruin, these

"broken bits and pieces remaining of the flying buttresses and

Gothic arches" will still show what sort of men planned them.

Thus, even widely separated little pools of beauty, love, joy,

order, healthy bodies, and virtue which are remaining in the

general hate, war, destruction, chaos and ugliness of the world

of nature in which we live, still point unflinchingly to the

architect who designed and produced it before ruination set in.

In fact, as seen in the cathedral, when chaos replaces order,

it can often dissect and lay bare the original order even better

than could the intact orderliness of an organism, or unruined

nature itself. The study of cancer cells—a good example of the

"ruination" to which living entities can easily come—has laid

bare many secrets of the healthy intact cell which would never

have been even suspected had we had only normal healthy

cells under our microscopes.

SUMMARY

Therefore, we can maintain that even though the creation

around us is certainly a hodgepodge of good and bad, ugly and

beautiful, love and hate, and even though life certainly does

present a badly mixed picture, it is still untenable to conclude

with my professor that this means no architect is behind it,

and that it was all due to chance and long time spans and

would therefore be expected to be a hopeless mess. Any little

pool of love, order, kindness, beauty or design in the general

rubble heap of nature must lead us to a mind or designer

behind that pool, no matter how small and smothered in

rubble it may be. For that pool will still unswervingly reflect

its designer's character, even though representing one-

thousandth of a percent of the amount of rubble. Thus, a

synthesis is possible.

And yet, it is the position of atheists and agnostics the

world over that nothing can be known about whether a creator

exists, or what sort of character he might have, simply because

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the nature of the creation he made is now a mixed-up hodge-

podge of good and bad. But any little tidbit of beauty or

order—no matter how great the surrounding rubble—reveals

the fallacy of this view. One would have thought that the

illogical nature of the whole atheistic and agnostic position

would have become clear long ago. The only refuge it can

really try to hide behind is the modern one which Kirkegaard

and the new theology have already taken, namely, that there is

no such thing as a logical thought process which might be valid

in such arguments. But, taking that position, we are imme-

diately led straight to absolute nihilism in thought, so we

might as well start dissecting all the gray matter from our

brains so that thought itself will no longer be necessary to

arrive at any conclusions!

Surely this is one reason why Romans 1 is so dogmatic. The

creation, even though it is undoubtedly mixed now, being full

of the rubble of hate, sin, ugliness and violence, still does show

some pools of love, kindness, beauty and virtue, thereby pro-

claiming (1) that there is an architect behind these pools, and

(2) that his very character is shown by these pools, small

though they be. In fact, the Bible teaches from cover to cover

that illness, death, hate and ugliness are all signs and outward

manifestations of a state of "ruin" which overtook a once-

better world. It also teaches that the signs of "ruin" are easily

distinguished from the "pools" of order, love and virtue which

still bear testimony to the state of the original edifice.

Thus, even today, the teaching of Romans 1 that the uni-

verse—even the fallen, damaged or ruined universe—when

inspected reveals enough of its Maker to bring any honest-

thinking, logical person to his knees in thankfulness and

worship, still holds true. The surprising thing is that our fore-

fathers, until the middle of the last century, recognized this

mode of thought. Only the advent of a concept of origins of

creation, which ascribed the order we see to a spontaneous

origin in chaos, unseated the earlier views. But take away the

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view that order can arise spontaneously from chaos, as Dar-

winians and others have taught with impunity for over a

hundred years and which is utterly untenable in the light of

modern mathematics, physics, thermodynamics, as well as

chemistry, and the older views become immediately tenable

again, and indeed, unavoidable, even today. For if order—no

matter how minute—did not arise spontaneously from chaos—

which physics, mathematics as well as chemistry will not

allow—it must have arisen in a mind. Thus we can still main-

tain that Romans 1 represents a true statement of fact, and

that inspection of nature must lead to recognition of its Maker

and his character. Atheists and agnostics are still "without

excuse."

Obviously, some difficulties remain in illustrations of this

type. Some of these are examined in the following chapter as

we pursue our synthesis.

chapter

4

The Origin of Evil

Difficulties of the type discussed in chapter 2 led Baudelaire,

the French art historian and poet, to exclaim, "If there is a

God, he is the devil!" As F. Schaeffer rightly points out, such

a statement is the direct result of believing that man has

always been as he is, that he was so designed originally. In that

case, the architect (if there is one) designed the mixed picture

andvis therefore responsible for designing the bad as well as the

good. This is the Muslim position.

Theistic evolutionists cannot avoid the same difficulty when

they maintain that God used evolutionary processes to pro-

duce the world of nature as we see it today. If he did, then his

methods made the bad with the good, as Baudelaire maintains,

and he therefore must be the devil as well as God. Everything

pivots on whether we believe nature was once "good" and

then subsequently ruined. That is, whether we believe in the

fall of man as laid down in Genesis. By tampering with the

structural details of Genesis, we are likely to garble the whole

reason for the present state of man—and the whole plan of his

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salvation which will take him out of the present disastrous

mess. Genesis presents an integral whole on which the total

plan of Scripture is firmly founded. This includes the fact of

man's fall, bringing with it the ruination of all nature with his

ruin. Baudelaire's tremendous conclusion throws light not only

on what art historians like himself must believe if they are

logical, but also on what theistic evolutionists conclude.

Let us return to the cathedral illustration of chapter 2. It is

superfluous to point out that all illustrations and analogies are

imperfect and have their weaknesses if pressed too far. Our

illustration of the cathedral is no exception. One of its imper-

fections lies in the fact that the architects who designed and

built the cathedral are long-since dead and therefore could not

prevent the bombing of their masterpiece. Then is God dead,

too? Was he dead when his masterpiece, nature, was

"bombed" into ruin?

Today many assume God to be, in fact, dead and resolve the

question that way. But this is an escape exit for several rea-

sons. Although it might explain God's creative work in the

past and its subsequent ruination, it would never explain the

present maintenance of nature and creation. Such maintenance

demands, in current jargon, a full-time living maintenance ser-

vice! No dead God could take care of that. Christians rightly

believe that he is not only the living Creator but also the living

Maintainer of nature—and of us. By very definition, the "God

is dead" theory will not fit in here. For maintenance implies

activity and life.

So the question now becomes: Why didn't an almighty God

who made, maintains, and presumably loves his masterpiece,

the creation, prevent its "bombing"? Here the parable of the

cathedral can do us no more service.

People who continually ask the question, "Why doesn't God

stop it?" are often those who don't bother to ask what

"stopping it" would entail. Some specific details must be

examined before attempting to solve the larger principles

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involved if God were to "stop it."

Consider any virture of which a person is capable. Love,

kindness, honesty, faithfulness, chastity, or any of the virtues

named in Galatians 5 will do. Select a virtue which pleases us

all—love—and ask the following question: "What is the nature

of love in particular, and virtue in general?"

NATURE OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

This subject of the nature of love and virtue is vitally impor-

tant because the Christian way of life maintains that God him-

self is love. Christians in the Western world often do not real-

ize the tremendous import of this statement. I have given

other religions, including Islam, some thought, and have

studied Islam's holy book, the Koran, which designates Allah

as the compassionate, forgiving one. As far as I know, nowhere

in the Koran does Allah figure specifically as an embodiment

of love. He may threaten, he may be merciful, omnipotent,

compassionate and omnipresent. He may offer the faithful a

place in the gardens of paradise with as many dark-eyed houris

as they wish.2 But love never figures in the Koranic "revela-

tions" of Allah's nature. A designation of God as "love" stands

unique in the Bible.

Right in the center, then, of the Christian position is this

virtue vve call love. It must be of vital importance for that very

reason. Nevertheless, I find myself at an extreme loss when I

am asked to rationally explain anything at all about God's

love. I know that "God so loved the world that he gave his

only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but

have eternal life,"3 and I am profoundly grateful for this. But

God, even though loving, is also infinite. Therefore, he exceeds

anything my thinking apparatus can handle. So I do not pre-

tend to be able to plumb the depths of either his love or

character. To think rationally about that love is far beyond

me.

I suspect it is for this reason that when the Scriptures speak

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of God and his love, usually man's love—particularly man's

love to a woman and vice versa—is used to drive home the

point at an anthropomorphic level. It is like using real-life

illustrations to clarify abstract and abstruse points of chem-

istry to unscientific people. Thus-, God provides us information

on himself and his love in a human setting of human love in

order to really communicate with us. The example we all

understand best in human relationships—the love of a young

man for his bride—can illustrate something about love in gen-

eral. The information we thus obtain by "cutting down the

high voltage of God's love" to the "low voltage of human

love" we will then apply to our main problem.

The first question in analyzing human love is: "How did this

love between bride and bridegroom originate?" The history of

most such relationships provides the answer. The young man

one day met the girl and sooner or later began to feel attracted

to her. The attraction is better experienced than described.

Very often the girl feels attracted to him at the same time,

although she would at this stage probably be more hesitant to

display her feelings. Normally, any open expression of this

almost noncommunicable relationship springing up between

the pair comes from his side, not hers. He begins the action

side of the relationship by looking for suitable ways to court

or woo her. But, until he begins that courting, the whole love

affair is one-sided, or lopsided. A one-sided relationship in

which attentions are not returned can be extremely painful.

Certainly it is neither happy nor satisfying to either party.

At this stage there is one burning question which every

prospective bridegroom would like answered as soon as possi-

ble: Does she love me? Is my attraction to her reciprocated?

Does she feel toward me as I do toward her? One purpose of

courtship is to give the girl a chance to settle the question in

her own mind. For, once she notices the man's attentions and,

therefore, attraction toward her, she has to make a momen-

tous decision: Do I and can I return his affection? If she is

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wise, she may turn for advice to a trusted girl friend, or per-

haps to her parents, who have already traveled this road and

are therefore more experienced than she. If she finally thinks

she may return the affection, then she must decide if she can

love him. Here she must rely on her own heart, as well as on

her common sense and the principles of life to which she

adheres. After due consideration, then, she may decide she

does and can return his attraction toward herself. An under-

standing is reached between the two. A radiant couple

emerges, and great are the happiness and joy of two hearts that

have entrusted themselves in mutual love and faithfulness.

In order to answer the question of why a God of love just

doesn't "stop it" we must analyze the process of falling in love

in order to draw some reason out of what often appears to be

an entirely unreasonable happening.

First, the young man must court the girl of his choice. She

will be unhappy if he doesn't, and he will be unmanly if he

doesn't know how! Now, courtship is a very fine art, besides

being a very necessary one. Some of our finest poetry, music

and art have arisen as by-products of this art! Most important,

perhaps, is that it is a so-called gentle art, which brings us to a

cardinal point in our analysis.

The moment force takes the place of wooing, both love and

the joy of love cease. They are often replaced by hate, recrimi-

nations and misery. For the whole structure of love is built on

absolute mutual consent and respect for the sovereignty of the

person and character of the loved one. In other words, the

structure on which human love between a bride and bride-

groom is squarely based is freedom to love—mutual consent or

absolute free will on the part of both partners to give one

another their entire and exclusive affection.

Most civilized societies recognize precisely this structure in

their marriage services. The two persons intending marriage are

both given the public opportunity of making a free-will con-

sent in saying "I will" before the assembled congregation. Old

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Testament cultures stand for exactly the same principle, as the

following well-known history emphasizes.

REBEKAH

When Eliezer, Abraham's servant, asked Rebekah to become

Isaac's wife (Gen. 24), he became so assured that he had found

God's choice for his master's son that he was ready to cut

corners in the process of taking the bride home. The evidence

that Rebekah was God's choice was so overwhelming that he

wanted to speed things up so he could take her home trium-

phantly. He just wanted to take off immediately with the girl

and forget about all the formalities or ceremonies.

However, Rebekah's relatives saw immediately that this was

no basis for marriage, even though the Lord might be in it.

What a good thing it would be if young couples saw this point

too, instead of just starting to live together with no ado and

ceremonies. It is to emphasize the necessity of mutual public

consent before love and lifelong married joy, the greatest rela-

tionship in our earthly life, that Rebekah's relatives got to-

gether and said that even though God might be in it all,

Rebekah must first be publicly questioned on the matter. She

had to give her own opinion and decision before they would

let her go to Isaac. So they called her in before the family and

their friends to ask her whether she wanted Isaac. Only after

she had given her public consent, based on her own free-will

decision, did they agree to the marriage. They knew that no

other basis was good enough, even though it was obviously

God's will even without such public decision-making.

THE AMNON AND TAMAR AFFAIR

Thus, the first point arising out of this analysis of the basis of

bride-bridegroom relationships and love is that such a partner-

ship is based firmly on public mutual consent or free will.

The second point deals with the consequences of neglecting

the above point. The shocking "love affair" between Amnon

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and Tamar (2 Sam. 13) illustrates this danger in a crass way.

Amnon fell madly in love with the king's beautiful daughter

Tamar. He was so infatuated with the fair girl that he just

could not wait to woo her and win her consent. As a result,

what could have made an excellent love story became a scan-

dal to the whole royal court.

By guile Amnon arranged to be alone with the girl. Feigning

sickness, he received the king's permission for Tamar to come

and cook for him in his apartment. Having gotten rid of every-

one else, he proceeded to force the poor girl because he was so

madly "in love" with her. "Love" that cannot wait to woo is

abnormal. It often metamorphoses before our eyes into what

we call "lust."

The consequence of this haste and trickery was that

Amnon's "love" turned in a twinkling into hate for her. He

brutally threw the weeping and brokenhearted Tamar out of

his room, bolting the door behind her. The eventual result was

murder, for her relatives had Amnon murdered later for his

brutality and treachery. Of course, Tamar suffered terribly

under the shame and heartbreak, and she "remained desolate

in her brother Absalom's house" (2 Sam. 13:20).

FREE CHOICE

Therefore, in order to love in this sense—not merely physical

union, which can result from mere lust—we must experience

the mutual attraction and union of body, soul and spirit in an

exclusive personal relationship. Mere physical union, if not

accompanied by the corresponding union of that whole

trinity, plus the personality, of which man and woman consist,

brings a travesty of the laws of nature governing the relation-

ships between a bride and her bridegroom. The practice of the

union of the female body with the male, with nothing else

involved, reduces man to a beast. Whoredom sears his whole

psyche and causes many problems of the mind. A large per-

centage of mental illness can be traced to such practices.

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Today, because the physical consequences are easily dispensed

with since no children need result, intercourse on this basis is

perhaps more widely practiced than ever before—with ever

increasing psychic illness.

If the basis of mutual consent in the love relationship is

removed, if there is no freedom to love, if freedom is replaced

by force, then all possibility of loving is removed. Love can be

replaced then by its opposite—hate. In other words, to be able

to really love there must be genuine freedom to love. This

implies, of course, the further step of logic: where there is true

freedom to love, there is also true freedom not to love. For, if

this freedom to say no were not really present, there would

ipso facto be no freedom to say yes and to love. The "no" or

the ability to say no, must be just as genuine as the ability to

say yes if true mutual consent is to be achieved, which is the

basis of the whole structure of the love of a man for his bride.

As we have seen, the Bible teaches that God himself is love,

and his love is often likened to the bride-bridegroom relation-

ship. Our third conclusion is that if his love to us is to be

compared in some way with our human nuptial love, then the

principles governing the two loves can be expected to be com-

parable in some ways. We should expect God, on this basis, to

be the grand wooer. That being the case, we should expect him

to be looking for our response to his wooing. To receive and

experience his love we should expect the mutual-consent basis

to decide everything—my consent to him in answer to his

"attraction to and love for" me.

Thus, we conclude that if God is love in this sense of the

word, he will be looking for answering love from me. Love is

only satisfied if it is answered or returned. He woos us by

many means, mainly by having sent his Son, the second Person

of the Trinity, to justify us by dying and being resurrected for

us.

Being love, we would not expect him to demand or attempt

to force love. That would be a contradiction. The very attempt

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to do so would destroy the very basis of all love. As our true

lover he does everything to show the genuine nature of his

love—even to becoming a fellowman, heir to our lot as well as

bearing our sin. In keeping with his character of love, Jesus, of

his own free will went to the cross to demonstrate that his love

to fallen man was no flash in the pan. He was serious about

it—serious even to death. Greater love has no man than that he

lay down his life for his friend. In his efforts at wooing man-

kind, Jesus Christ went further than that, for he lay down his

life for the very people who demonstrated themselves to be his

enemies by crucifying him. This all fits in with his character

when it is described as being that of love.

THE CASE OF THE ROBOT

Consider one more vital point. What would have happened

if God had so constructed man that he could not make a true

free-will decision himself, but was capable only of automat-

ically doing God's will, just as a lock opens when one turns the

correct key in it? Or just as an automatic vending machine

delivers the bar of chocolate when one inserts the correct coin.

If man had been so constructed that, when a certain "button"

in his mind was depressed he delivered "love" just as auto-

matically as when the coin sets off the mechanism of the

vending machine and delivers the cup of coffee, would love-

real love—be in fact delivered? If we were constructed like

marionettes, complete with strings, the pulling of certain

strings would make us go through definite motions which

might resemble the outward "motions" of love. But could a

marionette love? Is it capable of love? Of course the answer is

negative, simply because a marionette is not a person with all a

person's dignity of free will. The fact that it is not endowed

with the qualities belonging to a person, such as free will,

make it incapable, "congenitally" incapable, of love. This is

simply because it cannot say or mean either "yes" or "no" in

any real sense of the word. It has no will, no personality, and

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therefore is not capable of any virtues, least of all the virtue

called love.

None of us would be interested in "loving" the outward

forrh of a partner who, every time we touched a certain

"button," put chocolate in its mouth or stroked its hair, and

automatically intoned the sentence, "I love you." In fact,

could any system be so constructed as to deliver any "virtue"

on command? If such a system were conceived or constructed,

it would have to be subhuman or machine by nature. For to

try to construct it so that it delivered "virtue" or "love" on

command would of necessity mean that it be devoid of

humanity, and therefore personality, and as a result it could

deliver nothing of the kind. Assume that God, in order to be

sure of our love and to make sure that we were "virtuous" in

every way, made us like marionettes. He would have taken

from us the possibility of really exercising our free will in

order that we could not exercise it wrongly. Wanting to be so

sure that we loved him and our fellowmen, he would have

made us so that we could not do otherwise. Whenever he

presses the button, we would "deliver the goods" just like a

vending machine. Could such a setup involve real love in any

way?

THE GRAND RISK

This brings us right up to the great principle. If God wanted

creatures that really loved him and their fellow creatures, he

was, by the very intrinsic nature of love, obliged to recognize

the truth (though it sounds strange to use such phraseology

and maintain that God was forced to do anything—his own

moral nature brings with it the consequence that he will or

must act according to that nature) that love and virtue demand

freedom, absolute freedom, to love and exercise virtue. Other-

wise there could be neither love nor freedom. Such a necessity

lies in the very structure of love and, indeed, of any other true

virtue. Thus, to create the possibility of love, God had to

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create free personalities just like himself, for he is love and

made us to love.

For God to plan at all for true love involved the built-in risk

of the proposed free partner in love not loving at all. To have

built the love partner so that he would be "congenitally"

obliged to respond would have been to destroy the whole

purpose of designing a creation where love could reign. God

wished—and still wishes—to set up a kingdom of love on earth

and in heaven. But to do so involves the above-outlined risk of

the free partners choosing not to love, but to do the opposite,

of their own free will—and not respond to love by being

indifferent to the divine wooing—or even hating. The practical

result of being indifferent to or hating is the same from the

divine partner's point of view. For there is no positive response

to his love in either case. And love aims at a response of love.

Thus, love either grows by responding, or it dies.

The risk involved in planning a creation where love could

reign is a built-in risk. It is the risk of wooing not being

responded to, the risk of the proposed partner not loving back

in response. It is usually that class of person who does not

consider implications of this kind who is always so keen on

having God play the role of the "dictator" and use brute force

to "make things better." Of course, he could if he wanted to.

He is omnipotent; he is Lord. "Allah" tends to be this type of

lord. But, although the Christian God is just and sees the

wrongs to be righted, they will always be righted in the light of

the fact that he is love—right up until the day of judgment

dawns.

ALMSGIVING AND THE SOCIALIST STATE

Exactly the same risk is involved in planning every and any

virtue. Take, for example, the virtue of almsgiving. In Turkey

one sees hundreds of needy beggars. There are the blind hold-

ing their certified photographs of their suffering wives and

children who need support. There are those lying in the gutters,

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with their misshapen bodies uncovered so that all who pass by

can see they are not counterfeiting. There is the poor man who

has feet where his knees should be, loudly and slowly repeating

selected passages from the Koran. There is the old man suffer-

ing from Parkinsonianism, whose saliva continually runs over

his poor old dirty face as he holds out an empty trembling

hand all day long. Seeing this misery causes one to exercise

compassion and give a coin so that they can eat a slice of good

Turkish bread. Naturally one is convinced that something

much more fundamental should be done for these thousands

of people so representative of suffering humanity. But a coin

will at least guarantee that the immediate plague of gnawing

hunger will be assuaged.

So one gives something to the young mother sitting in rags

underneath the mailbox at the post office, with her week-old

unwashed baby on her ragged lap. In so doing one exercises a

virtue—that of almsgiving. The immediate reward is an extra-

fervent prayer to Allah for the giver's salvation. The joy on the

recipient's face would be reward enough. To exercise any vir-

tue is a free-will operation which brings joy to the giver and to

the receiver.

If, however, beggars are cared for by taxes, and if the city

authorities send me a tax bill to help support the poor and

needy, then I must pay. It is my duty. It may be a good thing

to organize matters in this way. Many maintain that this

method is less degrading for the poor, and that the burden is

more equally distributed. I agree with them, as far as they go.

But let us be clear about one of the overlooked consequences.

In paying my taxes which are used to support the poor and

needy, I no longer exercise the virtue I did when I gave the

alms to the poor young mother. I might have paid about $10

in taxes for the poor, or I might have given the poor young

woman $10 to buy her baby something better than dirty rags.

The sum of money actually involved makes little difference. In

one case I exercise the virtue of almsgiving (and reap a bless-

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ing) while in the other case I pay my taxes and do my duty,

grumbling perhaps about the waste perpetrated by the bureau-

crasy of the tax office, with no consequent blessing, even

though I may be perfectly right.

In one case I exercise no virtue, even though the poor man

or woman may receive exactly the same sum of money from

me by way of the city authorities. In the other case, where I

give of my own free will in almsgiving, I may give exactly the

same sum of money, but I exercise a virtue—simply because I

do not have to act. Therein lies the difference: in the one case,

having to do one's duty and pay taxes; and in the other, not

being obliged to do anything, and therefore being able to exer-

cise a virtue. What it means is simply that forced "chanty" is

no charity—and forced "love" is no love. Love and virtue melt

in the grip of force just as ice melts under the pressure of a

vice.

If I force my children to be "good" when we are out

visiting, they may be outwardly exemplary—sometimes they

are! I am thankful for this, but I recognize the fact that most

fathers will be familiar with—that this "goodness" may not be

even skin-deep. Force itself, unaided, can make no one good.

It cannot make anyone exercise a virtue. This is not saying

anything at all against the use of force as a punishment in

education or wrongdoing. Here force may be the only solution

and the only corrective. But in itself it does not make anyone

good, and virtues tend to melt away in its presence.

These considerations disclose one of the fatal weaknesses of

our increasingly socialized world. All "charity" and "works of

love" tend to become organized by the state, which rightly

wishes to eliminate the humiliation to which the poor are

subjected in accepting certain kinds of "charity." Some unfor-

tunate people do give, either to build up a mythical bank

balance in heaven, or even to humiliate those who receive their

money. But, no matter what ends are in view, acts of pure

charity are abolished, to be replaced by the compulsion of

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taxes and state "relief." The joy and virtue of true charity and

love disappear immediately when the forced tax replaces the

free-will offering. The Lord Jesus Christ himself remarked that

it was more blessed to give than to receive, thus emphasizing

the "blessedness" or happiness accompanying the free act of

giving.

The exercise of any virtue ennobles and enriches the char-

acter, giving real joy and radiance to him who exercises it,

whereas the mere unwilling taxpayer may pay his taxes be-

cause he must. He often does so begrudgingly because he

knows a large amount is wasted in bureaucracy, which fact and

state of mind exclude the élan of the "freeman" who in his

freedom nourishes his character and mind on the happiness

accompanying the exercise of love. Thus the socialized state

often robs its citizens of the flights of exuberance to which

free exercisers of love and charity are heir.

GEORGE MULLER'S ORPHANAGES

Over a century ago in Bristol, England, George Müller set up

his orphan homes which were run and staffed entirely by the

free-will offerings and services of Christians in sympathy with

his aims. Witnesses of Muller's work said that those homes full

of the victims of suffering were real havens of love, joy and

rest to thousands of orphans. Today many such orphanages

(not Müller's) have been taken over by the state. The state

institute is often merely a matter of rates and taxes, and the

person in charge is sometimes a career person who makes no

attempt to be a "mother" or "father" to the children. Often

the atmosphere of such an institution is as cold and devoid of

love as the concrete bricks of which it is constructed. Scien-

tists have shown that children in such institutions die from

lack of love as often as they die from disease.4

The welfare state, in taking over everything to remove a few

real abuses, too often kills love and the other virtues which

make up the atmosphere of a home. Removing the freedom of

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service, the voluntary basis, causes love to evaporate. Not only

do the children or other inmates of such institutions suffer.

The ennobling of character which the staff members would

themselves receive by free-will service is lost by their too be-

coming merely career people. The more the world loses this

right to freely exercise true charity, the harder, colder and

more bitter it must get. Too few people will be in the process

of receiving ennoblement of character by exercise of their free-

dom to do good.

This disastrous effect on the character of modern nations is

nowhere more clearly seen than in the most socialized and

organized nations. The motive behind the socialization was,

without a doubt, entirely good. It was that of organizing

poverty out of this world. As such, we must recognize the

motivation to have been thoroughly good. But its mode of

operation is robbing our civilization of warmhearted personal

care and love. In fact, it is producing everywhere just what

Hitler produced in Germany by the same means: depersonali-

zation—people who may do their duty but who will not raise a

finger to help close a concentration camp if it involves per-

sonal risk. Their characters have not experienced the en-

nobling, strengthening effect which results from the exercise

of freedom. Hitler was a living example of a man who was

naïve enough to attempt to demand and command the love

and affection of his people. He may have realized at the end

that love evaporates under just such a pressure. The strength of

character necessary to withstand any tyrant is not likely to be

built in any generation without the ennoblement of character

resulting from long exercise of the various human virtues we

have discussed. Such strength will also overcome the various

vicissitudes of life which often complicate the career of any-

one strong enough in will to be ready to suffer for his own

conscience's sake.

The tendency today in most modern socialized states is to

take away any private opportunity or initiative for the exercise

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of private virtue, and to push everything onto the community.

This results in private character impoverishment. We all know

the person who "doesn't want to get involved." The second

tendency, contingent partly on the first, is to bring up every

child to conformity so that only the will of the community

and majority counts. Unfortunately, the majority is not always

right. Thus the steel of a private conscience, independent of

conformity to the mass, does not develop. In Hitler's Germany

this was seen at its extreme development. People saw corpses

drop out of vans coming from a concentration camp as they

passed through a big city. But fear had so eroded characters

that no one did anything—it was too dangerous to get in-

volved!

In Chicago two years ago as I was walking from the Chicago

and North Western Railway Station I saw a man in a car liter-

ally plow his way through a group of old ladies as they crossed

the street on a pedestrian crossing with the green light. He

knocked one old lady down, injuring her. I took the license

number of the car, which did not stop, and asked for wit-

nesses. Many young men and women going to work in a neigh-

boring shoe factory had seen the incident. But all backed

away, muttering something about not getting involved. I didn't

get a single witness.

The idea of the community providing for everyone's need

"from the cradle to the grave" may be excellent from purely a

humanitarian point of view. But, insofar as it takes away per-

sonal initiative, the realization of the scheme will never pro-

vide sterling characters ready and willing to suffer for con-

science's sake and to stand alone, if necessary. For the whole

scheme erodes character.

THE CREATION, SEEN AND UNSEEN

The Bible reports that when God contemplated the creation of

the worlds seen and unseen he wished to construct them so

that they reflected his very own nature and character. To do

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this, he had to build on freedom of action. He is free, so he

made man and angels free too. Man was made "in his image"—

that is, as a free personality, just as God himself is. For even

"his service is perfect freedom" and therefore founded and

maintained in love. Accordingly, the angels who serve him,

including their chief, Lucifer, the light-bearer, were given

natures capable of genuine love to their Creator and toward

their fellows. They were capable of wooing his love and being

wooed by him so that the perfect joy of love could reign in

that kingdom. But this very possibility of a perfect, joyous,

loving kingdom had to include the possibility of the rejection

of both. There were no puppets.

The Bible reports, quite as a matter of fact, that a large

proportion of that unseen host showed that it really was capa-

ble of the joy of that kingdom of love and—by a very real

proof—by rejection! Therefore, Lucifer did, in fact, show that

he could love, in that he began, for reasons of pride, to reject

the one perfect lover, his Creator. Turning his back on him

who is the sole good, he became the epitome of the bad. So

arose the cursed, loveless and hateful ones who, in the exercise

of their characters, now turned away from the good toward

the bad, and proceeded to "bomb" and destroy the good

earth, the good creation. Men become "devils" by exactly the

same process. Obviously God, his nature being love, did not

immediately take away all freedom of action and choice from

his creatures, thus removing the possibility of a return to love.

He allowed them still further freedom of choice, which meant,

in their case, still further "bombing" activities being per-

mitted. If he had taken away this possibility of freedom of

choice at the first sign of rejection of love, he would have

destroyed any further possibility of a return to love. So he has

given us all a long time of freedom of action, that is, freedom

to love, so that the kingdom of love can still begin again to

rule, if man and angel want it. To "have stopped it all" at once

by the strong hand of "dictatorship" would have automat-

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ically destroyed the very purpose for which the Creator had

created his universe—in order to set up a kingdom of love in

the seen and the unseen.

Therefore, this very existence of evil in a world created by

an almighty but also a loving God actually illustrates that the

good and the virtue within it really are genuine, bona-fide

good. Love in such a kingdom really is love and not anything

else. Sometimes it is taught that love is a covert form of

egoism, etc. The state of our fallen world really shows this to

be impossible—the love of God in a world of blood is genuine

enough!

Destroyers and haters usually want company in their activi-

ties. So when the chief, Lucifer the light-bearer, had become

the destroyer and the hater, he immediately approached Eve

to make her and her husband become a part of his company of

destroyers. The pair was also capable of true love. They

possessed true freedom of choice, as is shown by the actual

choice they made. They too turned their backs on the good,

the only good, automatically becoming polarized to the bad,

the chronically bad. So the whole seen and unseen creation of

love became a creation of the wrong choice—the choice which

turned its back on the source of all ultimate good. In leaving

open a chance for seen and unseen creation to return to the

ultimate good, God did not "stop the bad." The free choice

was still left open, leaving the ruination and its cause still

intact. And that is the reason why God allows it—to give a

genuine chance for the return of love in general.

THE DIGNITY OF MAIM

But does not all this lead to one main conclusion? Does it not

all go to show the truly high esteem in which God holds his

creatures, man included? It means that God really takes our

decisions, our thoughts, and ourselves seriously. He even goes

to the length of wooing us to make our decisions ourselves. He

does not so construct us that we are puppets who have all

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decisions preprogramed—even though many physical processes

in the body are preprogramed.5 True love is, in this respect,

always the same—it always esteems and respects its partner. It

takes the partner seriously.

The same thought also expresses why God bothers to woo

men by "the foolishness of preaching"6 and not by sending, as

he could, mighty angels or superintelligent creatures from

other regions with his message. Perhaps they would only

succeed in terrifying poor humanity if they appeared in their

supernal splendor. God's purpose is to win man's simple trust

and confidence, to win our devotion and genuine love. There-

fore, he uses the natural methods available to win our decision

for him. If he overawed us in any way, that might make craven

slaves of us rather than wholehearted sons. If he were to brow-

beat us into submission, he would only gain what Hitler did—

the abject, groveling fear (if not secret hatred) of his would-be

partners.

Thus a God of love avoids like the plague the dictator's

methods in dealing with man, the object of his love, and uses

the lover's better method. It is very fundamental to see that

one cannot terrorize people into love. Consider the miracles

Jesus performed in this light. He never used a show of divine

power in healing to frighten people into belief. In most cases

after doing some mighty healing deed which gave sight to the

blind or life to the dead, he admonished those who had seen

the deed or experienced it to keep very quiet about it. Jesus'

warning "tell no man" is almost proverbial in this respect. The

fact is, God does not wish to force our intelligence or our will

to bend us to the state of cringing slaves. He wants redeemed

sons who, of their own free will, love, respect and gladly serve

him.

THE DEGREE OF MAN'S FREEDOM

Thus we conclude that man must be free indeed if he is ever to

be able to love indeed. There is a consequence to all this which

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the reader will have surely noted already. It is this: Is man so

free that God has abrogated all authority over him? Can man

do exactly and precisely as he likes as long as he likes so that

he can be said to possess a totally unfettered freedom in all

directions as far as he himself choses? Need he never fear that

his Creator will intervene and fetter him—all in the interests of

man's ability to love and exercise virtue?

Although the Bible teaches that man has a bona-fide free

will and can certainly say no to his Creator's will and plan (the

very state of our poor world shows that this is de facto the

case), yet it teaches too that there are limits to that freedom

just as there are limits to God's wooing activities of man.

These wooing limits, it will be remembered, were founded in

God's counsel from his side and, in time, from man's side. In

the first place, God in his inscrutability sets a time limit for his

wooing of our free will. Thus it cannot be said that we have

perfect free will to accept or reject his wooing at any time.

Our free will interacts with his free will to woo us; and if he

chooses to stop the courting process, our free will can do

precisely nothing about the new situation. Here it is no longer

unfettered. Second, the repeated rejection of the goodness of

God's courting sears the psyche of man and makes it less and

less receptive. This, too, is a process we cannot alter; it is like

the second law of thermodynamics at work in our inward man,

and our free will cannot alter it.

The same principle applies throughout man's kingdom in its

relationship to man's Creator. Man can say no to his Creator

for a certain time by expressing free will. But this process of

our saying no of our own free will to God interacts with God's

free will and may produce a no from his side. For us depen-

dent creatures this is the same thing as judgment supervening

after grace. We all can turn our back on him and run away

from him and his goodness—until we reach what may be

looked upon as the end of our tether. The tether represents

the change in God from grace of judgment. How long that may

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take in each individual case of God's dealings is unknown to

his creatures. This state of affairs is well seen in the case of the

apostle Paul when he was on the Damascus road and filled

with hatred toward Christ and his followers. Paul had enjoyed

perfect unfettered free will to rebel against Christ, and had

done so very successfully, until even he reached the end of the

tether God had allowed him. Then God intervened severely,

blinded him, and reduced him to the dependence of a child in

his helplessness. But even in a drastic intervention of this type,

the judgment of God was mixed with great mercy and it led to

Paul's seeing the grace of God in restricting his field of un-

fettered free will. But perhaps his free will in the strictest sense

of the term was not touched. Perhaps his knowledge was in-

creased.

If we do not recognize some definite limits to our freedom,

we risk abrogating God's ultimate authority and, indeed, sov-

ereignty. Yet these limits in no way alter the conclusions we

have drawn about the vital nature of freedom if we are to be

able to love—or to rebel. One reason for this fact is that we

ourselves do not know where the limits we are talking about

lie. Since we have no idea at all where they lie, we are, to all

intents and purposes, unlimited ourselves in our freedom

viewed from our own perspective. From our own point of view

we are free to act, wander, decide, rebel or love as under-sov-

ereigns within a small area of God's sovereign kingdom. And it

is just within this area of real unrestricted freedom that real

love and virtue can and do rule in us. For, not knowing any

limits that have been secretly set for us, we are free in the total

areas of life known to us. Outside these unseen limits are areas

of judgment and no-freedom. But since they are unknown to

us, they are, for practical purposes, fictitious for us and thus

of no concern in our decisions to rebel or to love. The fact

that God knows these limits does not impair our freedom

within the area known to and experienced by us. Thus the fact

of these divine limits does not in any way mar true human

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freedom to exercise the right to respond or reject the divine

courtship. Man's freedom is all he knows until he suddenly

(and mostly unexpectedly) stumbles up against the divine wall

which limits us and establishes the divine sovereignty in its

totality.

The very fact that man has never succeeded in devising a

formal proof of God's existence, shows how completely God

can and does hide himself and his limits from our eyes. This

being the case, most men act within the area of their own lives

as completely free agents as far as their intelligence is con-

cerned. This makes their decisions in that frame of mind com-

pletely free will and therefore valid from the point of view

exercising true virtue. We conclude, then, that the limits God

has set for all mankind, do not alter our decisive free will and

its accompanying power of love or rebellion. And these very

limits maintain God's sovereignty while allowing man free

agency in the area of his own conscious life as a mortal.

One thing more deserves mention at this point. The

"tether" we have referred to as God's restricting hand on our

free will should not be regarded as something fixed or static. It

is not of a set permanent "length." It is my belief that the

more devoted a man is to God's will for him, the longer the

"tether" will become. That is, the greater will be the radius of

freedom of action. To stick to our analogy of a tether, we

might say that its elasticity depends upon our will being con-

gruent with his divine will. To use the words of the apostle

Paul, to "win Christ" and to attain to his confidence in us is

the same thing as saying that the more we attain to the width,

depth and breadth of God's will, the more we attain to his

sovereign freedom too. As one prayer book has it, "His service

is perfect freedom. "

chapter

5

The Problem of Rebuilding

Just what would we expect a God of love to do after his

creatures had taken the wrong road—turning their backs on the

only good? Once the "bombing" of his creation had occurred,

what steps would we expect him to take?

The Scriptures say that even before the wrong choice had

been taken either by man or angels, God, because he is omni-

scient, knew all about it. He had even drawn up careful plans

in advance to cope with the situation that would arise, even

though he was in no sense responsible for it, nor did he cause

it (cf. Rev. 13:8;Eph. l:4;Heb. 4:3; 1 Pet. 1:19-20).

This last fact—that God, if he is God, must obviously have

been omniscient with respect to the fall long before it

happened—has been a stumbling block to many. Actually, few

real intellectual difficulties are involved in this matter if it is

considered carefully.

If I observe a person very carefully during a period of time,

I may notice some of his little idiosyncrasies. He may say

"Ah," for example, as a prelude to every difficult word he has

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to pronounce. Or he may twitch his eyebrows (or his ears)

before relating a good joke. Gradually I learn to predict just

what he is going to do before he actually does it. My previous

observations allow me to do this with a fair amount of

accuracy.

However, my ability to foretell his actions in no way makes

me responsible for them when he acts. Similarly, the fact that

God was able to foresee what Adam and Eve, the angels and

mankind in general, would do, does not necessarily implicate

him in the sense that it makes him responsible for initiating

their actions and choices. The only implication is that involved

in his having given them a gloriously free choice of action in

order to have the possibility of their love. So God certainly

foresaw the fall of both angels and man. He foresaw it so well

that he made careful preparations for it, even before the very

foundation of the world (Rev. 13:2). Yet, many imagine that

this foreknowledge, the result of his very omniscience, must of

necessity implicate God in the guilt of the fall. Quite the con-

trary, the genuine possibility of free choice which he conferred

upon us in order to construct us in his image (he is the great,

free superperson) so that we would be persons too, capable of

really loving and exercising genuine virtue, decides forever the

creatures' guilt and Creator's love and righteousness.

THE PROBLEM OF THE CONSEQUENCES

At this point many will maintain that, if God saw in advance

the chaos, misery and suffering which would certainly follow

the gift of the possibility of love (involving free choice) why

did he proceed with his plans to create if they would result in

the creation of such a miserable universe? Was he not rather

sadistic to have persisted in those plans, knowing the conse-

quences in advance? Would it not have been better to have

ditched the plan if it was all going to work out as it has?

In principle the same type of questioning arises every day in

our own lives, but seemingly we don't recognize the fact. Con-

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sider, for example, the decision we must make on whether to

marry. Even the marriage ceremony emphasizes rather dras-

tically that the same question is involved, for the clergyman

says our marriage vows are binding us until death do us part.

Surely there is scarcely greater grief than that experienced by a

really devoted couple when separated by death. We could, of

course, avoid this terrible grief by the simple expedient of not

creating a marriage relationship at all! Avoid marriage and its

love relationship and no grief of parting by death will ever

overtake you.

Yet, we rightly go into marriage with our eyes open. We

know that, in normal circumstances, death and all its sorrows

will overtake us and will separate us. Most of us fear this more

than we could ever say. In spite of all this, we marry because

we believe that the joy of love and the ennoblement of giving

ourselves to another in the abandon of devotion even for a day

(and forty or fifty years pass like a day) is better than no love

at all. It is written of Jesus Christ that he endured the sorrows

of the death on the cross for the sake of the joys which would

result from that sorrow. * The same principle is involved here.

The joy of love, even "short" love, because it stems from a

God of love, compensates for even the sorrow of a cruel death

such as that which Jesus suffered for all mankind, and the

death which will separate all lovers.

The enrichment and the ennoblement of the human char-

acter brought about by the experience of even the brief joy of

love, as God intended it to be, compensate for the certain

future death, separation, and present trials. It is a question of

balance. Those who know the love of God in Christ and those

who have experienced just a faint taste of that same quality of

love in God-given marriage will confess that it is worth the

certain severe suffering which it brings with it. The principle is

that even a little, short-lived love is better than none at all. A

few days of love—even at the price of the disaster of separation

and ceasing of mortal love—is worth more than none at all.

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The reason is that even mortal love changes the eternal human

psyche. A man takes the psyche changed by love with him

when this life is over and keeps it forever.

Evidently the Creator, being love personified, thinks this

way too, for he did indeed create us and the rest of the fallen

creation, in spite of the foreseen mess and separation. Al-

though we experience many trials and tribulations, he obvious-

ly knew that the love which we can and do experience—even

for a short time—more than balances the scales. Love even for

a day imprints itself eternally on our psyche and is, obviously,

in his eyes worth more than no love at all, which would have

resulted if he had desisted from creating us free, for fear of the

consequences of the foreseen fall. We will leave our trials and

sufferings behind us at death, but we will forever possess the

richness of love in our character. So, whichever way we look at

the question of the decision to create, we must decide that,

from the standpoint of love or no love, it was worth it. After

all, we cannot really blame God for having created and risked

the chaos, suffering and anguish in which the world finds it-

self, when we, in essence, make the same decision when we

marry. It is the same type of decision when we have children.

All the same, many people—sometimes including ourselves

—feel tempted to say "God, forgive God"2 when contem-

plating the dire mess in which the world finds itself. Yet, if it

is true, as the Scriptures assure us,3 that temporal sufferings

can and do bring eternal recompense, if it is true that suffering

and anguish are not necessarily punitive but can be remedial as

well, then, relying on the Scriptures, we are able to accept the

anguish, just as God did when he crucified God to remedy the

fall of man. This question is examined further in chapter 5.

The next question is: What would we expect God to do to

pull us out of the mire?

THE PROBLEM OF GOD'S ANSWER

Now that the fall has taken place and sin and anguish are in

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the world, what would we expect God's answer to be? The

answer we give will depend entirely on our conception of

God's character. Remembering that our premise is that God is

love, let us ask ourselves what we would expect such a God to

do about the mess in which creation finds itself.

If God is a God of love, then he is our loved one. What

would we expect a true loved one to do who had been mis-

understood and rejected? Perhaps the scriptural answer is the

best one here: Love "suffereth long, and is kind ... is not

easily provoked, thinketh no evil . . . beareth all things . . . en-

dureth all things . . . [love] never faileth."4

Surely that is the reaction we'd expect of someone who

truly loves us. Love is long-suffering, it is kind, it is not easily

provoked, it endures all things in the hope of ultimate success

in the wooing process of love. God saw man's wrong choice,

and all of its consequences which would lead to chaos and

anguish, long before the wrong choice was made. When it did

come, however, we would not expect a real God of love to

impatiently and disgustedly dismiss and destroy the object of

his love. Many who have difficulties with these points appar-

ently expect God to act like a hard-hearted, unforgiving tyrant

rather than a forgiving father. Such an expectation probably

arises from the fact that such action is typical of short-fused

people like ourselves. But, then, we are no examples of real

love in being short-fused.

In actual fact, we would expect a God of love to try to

salvage what he could out of the carnage. It takes the patience

of genuine love to set about this process. He had warned in

faithfulness and sternness of the consequences of the wrong

choice—men would surely die of it—but neither angel nor man

heeded. One thing God would not be expected to do, once the

wrong choice had been taken, would be to block the way back

to himself—our heart's love—by attempting to threaten, cajole,

or force us back. Force cannot restore anything in the way of

love. That would be to cut off all possibility of a way back.

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HOW TO RESTORE LOVE

Thus, in order to restore to love, there remains only one way

open—the exercise of further patient love. Accordingly, God

exercises long-suffering and patience in trying to win us freely

back to love and reason. This same process culminated in the

sending of his own Son to lay down freely his life for us all.

Therefore, we should expect a God of love, confronted by

the situation in which we find ourselves, to patiently wait and

quietly woo, or attempt to woo, us back. We should expect

the consequences of the fall, then, not to be "fire and thun-

der," but rather the "still, small voice" in the attempt to real-

ize the word said about God by the apostle: "Who desires all

men ... to come to the knowledge of the truth."5

But this attitude of quietness and perseverance can be mis-

taken for passivity or even inactivity. A large part of the Scrip-

tures is devoted to just this point, in fact. God is not inactive;

he is not indifferent. He is certainly not dead: "The Lord is

not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slack-

ness; but he is longsuffering to usward, not willing that any

should perish, but that all should come to repentance."6 This

means just what it says. It does not mean that all men will

repent and come to a knowledge of the truth. But it confirms

that God is a God of love and patience who is ready and

willing to receive all who do turn to him.

The fact, then, that he has waited so long after the "bomb-

ing" of his handiwork before judging the "bombers," both the

original one and those who have carried on the same work in

every generation (which includes me) is, in reality, another

indication of God's true character—loving-kindness, patience,

long-suffering, not being easily provoked. Only by looking at

the situation in this way can I see any explanation of why

God, the almighty, omniscient, omnipresent, righteous one,

has not long since exercised withering, general judgment on all

of us and set up a "puppet state" on earth and in heaven to

slavishly and immediately carry out his every command, just as

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every dictator would do, if he could, particularly if his will had

been thwarted as God's will certainly has been.

THWARTING GOD'S WILL

Some will feel shocked. Can, then, God's will be thwarted?

The fatalistic Muslims think not. Is it possible that his will may

not be done on earth as it is in heaven? Anyone who is not

sure about this point should ask himself whether God planned

any act of sadism that has taken place. Was it his will to kill six

or seven million Jewish men, women and children in gas cham-

bers for no other reason than that they were Jews? Those poor

people were ordered to strip themselves naked, fold their

clothes, put their shoes neatly on the floor, and then were told

in four or five languages that coffee and cookies would be

served them "after their communal bath." Then they were

forced into a room fitted with nozzles to deliver prussic acid

instead of water directly onto their naked bodies. Any chil-

dren who had been forgotten in the crowd were thrown in

through the windows, only openable from outside, even after

the gassing had started. Often the screams lasted for fifteen

minutes after the slaughter had begun. Was that not thwarting

God's perfect will? And does not any other sin also thwart it?

Sinning is one way of thwarting his will. Another way

would be to set up a dictatorship to "restore order to the

chaotic creation." If this route to rebuilding the creation were

adopted, it would just as effectively thwart God's real purpose

of setting up a kingdom of love. Under the present circum-

stances of freedom to do good or bad there are still a few men

who see the situation as it really is and who turn to God to be

refreshed by his love, even in the midst of the general anguish

of creation. Even a little of such love and refreshment is better

than none at all. If the Lord had judged immediately after the

fall or after any other sin, how many who have since drunk of

the water of the well of life and love would have been lost to

him and his kingdom of love forever? His patience has been

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rewarded with responding love which would have been impos-

sible if immediate judgment had supervened.

KING GEORGE VI OF ENGLAND

A story is told about King George VI of Great Britain and how

he won Elizabeth. As a young man the future king fell in love

with the charming young Scottish lady. After a long time of

reflection he plucked up his courage and approached her on

the subject, although he was rather shy, especially with the

opposite sex. He had never been much of a lady's man and was

neither very robust nor strongly masculine in the film-star

sense of the word. Moreover, he had a slight speech defect,

which added to his difficulties. His proposal was rejected.

The young prince, greatly upset over this rebuff, asked his

mother, Queen Mary, for her advice. The queen listened

sympathetically to her son's tale of woe. Then she told him

she wanted to ask just one question before advising him. Did

he really love Elizabeth only? would he be able to find a

substitute if Elizabeth proved reluctant? After a moment's

consideration, he replied that he would marry Elizabeth or no

one else. "Well, then," said his mother, "there is only one way

open to you. Go and ask her again."

So the young prince put his pride in his pocket, gathered up

his remaining courage, and arranged another interview with

Elizabeth. He probably stuttered as he repeated his proposal,

remembering what had happened to him the first time at her

hands. She refused him again.

Not knowing what to do then, he returned to his mother,

Queen Mary, for advice. Again she listened quietly—some say,

severely—to the whole story. She showed him every sympathy

and, after hearing all he had to say, indicated that she had one

question to ask before she could advise him. The question was:

"Do you really want her after this rebuff? There are plenty of

other young ladies around who would be delighted to have a

prince as a husband. I myself could show you some." But poor

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George was quite clear about his feelings. It was Elizabeth or

no one at all. "Then," said his mother, "in that case there is

only one way open to you. Go and ask her again."

So, after a considerable period of mental preparation, the

young prince approached the pretty young Scottish lady the

third time. In the meantime, she had noticed how serious the

prince was. His love and determination to win her had indeed

been constant. She saw that the great effort he made in com-

ing the third time, putting his pride in his pocket, demon-

strated his singleness of purpose. And she began to recognize

something new in herself. His undoubted love toward her was

beginning to kindle an answering fire in her own heart. His

warmth of love, even though he was awkward and not very

good at courting a young lady's affection, was beginning to

warm her affection toward him. In short, his love began to

kindle her love, and she began to transmit some of the love

which she received from him. She began to feel she was able to

say that she loved and admired him in his singleness of purpose

and constancy. Thus, the story goes, began one of the really

happy families in the annals of royal households. And this love

lasted until the king's death.

Love begets love. But it often has to be very patient, long-

suffering and kind until the fire is kindled in the prospective

partner's heart. The Scriptures say that God woos in one way

or another every man and woman ever born.1 Through the

circumstances of life, or through the Scriptures, he quietly

goes on as the years pass, until we begin to return to him some

of the warmth of love which he has for us. For we are told

that God has his delight among the sons of men.8 He loves us,9

rejectors though we have been of his overtures toward us. He is

working toward the day when we may begin to return to him

the same love, and to delight in his friendship as he will delight

in ours.

Once kindled, this love must be regularly tended in order to

maintain the warmth of the blaze which God intends our love

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to be—warming and refreshing to both partners, so that both

can rejoice in the happiness which love brings. God is love and

we were so constructed in his image that we can only flourish

when bathed in such love—breathing it in and giving it out.

But, it would be one-sided to leave the story here. All love

stories do not end this way. We must look at one other less

pleasant possibility.

THE FINAL REFUSAL

There comes a time in every love affair when a final answer

toward the wooer must be made. This final answer may be

either yes or no. One day the wooed one may make a rejection

which, although she perhaps did not know it, was the final

one. It turns out to be permanent. In the one case she may, of

course, die. That finishes the wooing of a mortal man—when

immortality lays hold of the prospective bride.

Another possibility is that the wooer may cease to woo. The

"wooed" is not the only one who has a free will to accept or

reject the wooer. God as the wooer has a free will too—to stop

or to continue wooing according to his infinite wisdom. He

can decide how long to woo and be rejected and also when to

stop wooing altogether. Even this final decision to stop wooing

will, we are told, be made on the basis of love. It will, accord-

ingly, be put off as long as at all possible.

There is a third and last possibility. If the wooed marries

another, then further courtship by the first suitor would be

thoroughly out of order and outside the confines of love. The

Scriptures say quite clearly that this state of affairs may be

reached in the spiritual sense. There comes a time when a man

"marries this world," and after that, God no longer offers his

salvation, his "marriage relationship" to him. His Spirit strives

with him no longer. A man's spirit and God's Spirit become

forever estranged, for man's spirit finally "marries another,"

selling itself to this world and its rebellion against the Most

High. A man can close his ears finally to the "still small voice"

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that so long had whispered to him to return—he then "marries

another" and the pleading rightly stops forever.

We humans can seldom clearly see when such a final act

takes place. We cannot determine when God's Spirit gives a

man up forever. But that such does occur is perfectly clear,

even though it is invisible to man's mortal eye. As Wesley's

beautiful hymn put it, Jesus is the lover of man's soul. He is

the patient lover. But there comes a time when all courtship

ceases and when a man can irrevocably "marry another" and

cut off God's striving permanently. This can be done in many

ways. We can give ourselves entirely over to material things

such as a career, money, or social standing. It may be the love

of things more definitely sinful that cuts us off. In extreme

cases we can "sell ourselves to the devil" quite consciously—as

many Nazis did when they knowingly cooperated with Hitler

in liquidating human beings in the interests of their own pro-

motion within the party. Many do the same just as effectively

when they value promotion in their jobs before promotion in

the kingdom of heaven. They do not seek "the kingdom of

heaven first."10 Some men resolve never to discuss spiritual

matters again because "they disturb." For them, the courtship

is over; they're married to another.

The New Testament letter to the Hebrews speaks of that

cessation. "Today, when you hear his voice, do not harden

your hearts as in the rebellion, on the day of testing in the

wilderness, where your fathers put me to the test and saw my

works for forty years. Therefore I was provoked with that

generation, and said, 'They always go astray in their hearts;

they have not known my ways.' As I swore in my wrath, ''They

shall never enter my rest.' "n

The context of this statement shows that the Lord spoke

and spoke again, and wooed and wooed again, but the

Hebrews of that generation closed their hearts and inward ears.

In the end God gave them up, and that generation, except for

Joshua and Caleb, never entered the promised land but per-

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ished in the wilderness. This serves as a parable for us, to

whom God also speaks. We can be so occupied with the trials

and joys of this life that we, too, do not hear. We, too, can

miss the joy and rest of his love by acting as did the Hebrews.

"For it is impossible to restore again to repentance those

who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly

gift, and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have

tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the

age to come, if they then commit apostasy, since they crucify

the Son of God on their own account and hold him up to

contempt."12

This warning is to those who have at one time responded to

God's wooing, and have therefore tasted his goodness, and

then cease to respond. A time comes when it is impossible to

renew them, for the striving of God's Spirit with them ceases.

Another Scripture passage speaks in exactly the same tenor:

"For if we sin deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the

truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful

prospect of judgment, and a fury of fire which will consume

the adversaries. . . . How much worse punishment do you

think will be deserved by the man who has spurned the Son of

God, and profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was

sanctified, and outraged the Spirit of grace? ... It is a fearful

thing to fall into the hands of the living God."13

I take this warning for myself, believing that I can learn

from all of Scripture. The point is, God can and does speak to

men; he does woo. If they respond he allows them to taste in

this life the things of his kingdom of love. But his wooing is

dynamic, and it is dependent on our daily response. Continual

spurning may end in our "marrying another forever." Then his

wooing stops, for we have committed the sin of spurning the

Son of God. Rejecting God's grace in Christ simply means

declaring ourselves as candidates for no grace, which is the

same thing as being ripe for judgment.

This raises the whole question of judgment at the hands of a

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so-called loving and gracious God. Can we accept this? Is all

suffering a judgment? Or must suffering and judgment be kept

apart in our minds? Suffering certainly accompanies judgment,

but is all suffering judgment?

chapter

6

Suffering and Anguish-

Any Reasonable Interpretation?

RESENTMENT AGAINST PURPOSELESS SUFFERING

Many people as they undergo suffering resent what is happen-

ing because they can often see no constructive purpose behind

it. Is it cosmic sadism? When we can see a good reason for pain

or suffering, as in surgery or the dentist's drill, we can endure

it without resentment, even though the actual pain may be

worse. The relief of knowing why is tremendous and can

change resentment and impatience into anticipation and pa-

tience.

"Senseless" suffering, such as we see when innocent chil-

dren are destroyed or mutilated in war, sickness, plague or

famine, makes our anger and impatience rise. The impatience

increases when we see pain which is not only "senseless" or

"random" but apparently designed and calculated, or even "re-

fined," as is the pain at the root of malaria, for surely that

pain looks directly sadistic in its very mechanism, as we have

already mentioned. When senseless pain is apparently not

merely adventitious, but designed, the average honest-thinking

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person tends to lose restraint in considering it.

A good example of this arises in considering, as did C. S.

Lewis, the deafness of a musical genius such as Beethoven.1

An absolute master of the art and science of sound struck

down with stone deafness! Could a greater refinement of

apparent sadism be conceived? Hence the impatience of many

when they merely begin to consider the problem of suffering.

Yet, on the other hand, anyone who considers himself to be

a Christian is warned on every side to expect both joy and

suffering as normally as summer and winter. Both are, accord-

ing to Scripture, integral parts of the Christian experience. Just

because he is a Christian he is not excused from suffering with

the rest of mankind. Rather, he is promised additional suffer-

ing just because he is a Christian. The apostle Paul says ex-

plicitly that the Christian must enter the kingdom not only in

joy but also through the gates of many trials, tribulations and

sufferings, being forsaken of man, and apparently by God too,

before reaching the final gate of death.2

Why? If we could only get a reasonable answer, our misery

could be borne with more patience and less rebellion. Surely a

good, loving, omnipotent and kind God could have found

some method of reducing the sharpness of the dreadful reali-

ties of living and dying. Can he be both good and just while

quietly sitting by and letting the slaughter and anguish go on

and on, generation after generation?

IF GOD IS GOOD, WILL HE HURT US?

Lewis puts this very question in another light when he writes,

"If God's goodness is inconsistent with his hurting us, then

either God is not good or there is no God; for, in the only life

we know he hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all

we can imagine."3 Plainly, this means that if we believe in God

at all, we must believe that it is consistent with his perfect

nature, kindness and love to hurt us and to leave us wallowing

in our own blood, as it were, right up to the end.

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Lewis adds a rider to his statement which asks, in effect: If

we accept that in this life God can hurt us beyond all that we

can imagine, and that this hurting is consistent with his good-

ness, have we any valid reasons for believing that he should

not, if necessary, continue hurting us in the same way after

this mortal life is over?4 Obviously there is no moral reason

why he should not, if spirits can endure suffering as mortal

men do. Numerous passages of Scripture need to be examined

carefully in this connection. Neither Lewis nor we are sug-

gesting that the torments of hell are universal after death! The

real question is whether suffering serves any purpose in this

life and in that to come.

We can, however, go one step further and still remain on

safe ground. If God has reasons—other than sadism, which we

cannot attribute to thim—for hurting us now in this mortal

life, he might, conceivably, have equally good reasons for con-

tinuing the same process afterward, in death. Clarity on such

questions will only come by first asking ourselves, "What does

the Scripture say?" And second, from our answer to why he

hurts us now and what he intends to achieve by it in this life

and beyond.

WAS CHRIST EVER IN MAN'S POSITION?

It is often helpful in dealing with such questions to find out

whether Christ the Man was ever in the same position as we in

regard to suffering. If he was (and in other matters he plainly

was, except in questions of sin), then the investigation of what

suffering achieved in him will, perhaps, provide the answer as

to what it is supposed to achieve in us.

Accordingly, looking at one of the most obvious cases of

Christ's suffering—the cross—may help to solve the problem.

God the Father "stood passively by," as it were, while men

crucified his own beloved Son. There can be no doubt about

the fact that Christ was the Son of his love, the second Person

of the Trinity in whom he was well pleased. The Son loved the

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Father and the Father loved the Son, for the disciples and

others heard the voice from heaven saying so. Yet, it is also a

fact that God remained "passive" while the awful deed was

done, just as he remained "passive" while millions of Jews, his

own people, were gassed in brutal cynicism.

To make matters worse, the Scripture says this brutal act

was the culmination of the prophecy that Christ was the Lamb

of God slain from the foundation of the world. Thus, the

cruel cross was an eternally foreseen event—an event which

God presided at eternally in a purely passive manner in that he

did not stop it. Therefore, the hurting of the beloved one must

have been consistent with God's eternal character. In fact, God

himself suffered, for he was in Christ as he suffered (2 Cor.

5:19), so he was not really passive, for he actively suffered—

and suffers—too.

THE CROSS AND GOD'S LOVE

This means that if the central doctrine of the Christian faith,

the cross, is true, then it is obviously also true that it must be

consistent with God's eternal love to hurt those he loves best

—including himself—even to the point of what we would call

barbarism, for the cross is barbaric. Considering the barbarism

of the cross, which God eternally allowed, one is tempted with

Lewis to say: "God forgive God."5

The conclusion we must draw, then, from the fact that

Christ did suffer the cross is that God allowed Christ, his be-

loved one, to be "put under the harrow" (to use Lewis' terms)

from which there was no escape, even to death. In fact, God

was in Christ as he allowed this act. The same applies to the

whole human race and to biology, which can also be said to be

"under the harrow" in a large way.

Whichever way we look we find the same picture in princi-

ple. Christ on the eternal cruel cross and a so-called God of

love behind him and, indeed, in him. Humanity and biology

for millennia "under the harrow" too, and yet, allegedly,

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according to the Scripture, a God of love behind us, who is

until now entirely passive at the spectacle. Confronted with

this situation, what Lewis feared was not so much a loss of

belief in any God at all with its concomitant victory of pure

materialism in him. That solution would have been too easy,

for it would have meant that a simple overdose of sleeping pills

at any time could have gotten him out from "under the

harrow" forever. Far too simple! What worried Lewis was that

the "harrow" might mean that man and biology were all

trapped, as it were, in a laboratory in which God might be the

eternal vivisector and we the rats!6 Lewis says that the despair

in which the Son of God died when he cried out, "My God,

why hast thou forsaken me?"7 might have been the result of

Christ finding out that the cross was, in reality, a carefully

baited laboratory trap which sprang at death and from which

there was no escape after God had lured him into it.

Looked at dispassionately, surely even an admittedly fallen

person like myself, possessing scarcely a trace of the love I

attribute to a God of love, could not have stood passively by

while they crucified him—or gassed the millions of Jews with

prussic acid. Even a person like myself, who is no example of

love in any sense, would have tried to arrange things better

than that and would not have allowed my dearest to be treated

thus, right to the bitter end! But, then, if we take that view,

God must be morally inferior—even to me—which is com-

pletely nihilistic. We shall have to scrap that view too, for it

leads straight to the destruction of all rational thought on the

subject.

Of course God is more compassionate than I. But why then

was he so relentlessly passive at the cross? Why doesn't he

relent at all the millennia of human and biological agony? At

the slow starvation of millions? At the sight of the cancer

victims, dying while they yet live? At the sight of children and

old people losing eyes or limbs at play or on the street? If all

this monstrous situation is allowed by a God who is good, and

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therefore not sadistic, what is all the grief and anguish about?

HURTING IN ORDER TO HEAL

Can the key to the sore problem be found in the following

considerations: Can we allow that to do good there may be

occasions when we must apparently do that which looks as

though it were bad? Put another way, can we hurt to heal?

Obviously we can allow that, for every good surgion and den-

tist does so regularly and routinely, nobody even raising an

eyebrow about it, for it is so obvious. To be a really good

surgeon or dentist one has to be perfectly relentless quite regu-

larly in hurting in order to do good. If, every time I flinched,

gripped the dentist's chair, or drew back my head in pain at

the relentless drill, he were to stop and consider ending the

torture and filling up the still dirty cavity with amalgam, he

would be less than a good dentist. He would not be being

good, or even kind or loving to his patient if he were anything

but absolutely unrelenting in his thoroughness in inflicting this

therapeutic suffering. We would all be in trouble again in no

time if he did relent. And then all the pain he had already

inflicted in the early drillings would have been in vain. Thus,

to be good he has to be absolutely relentless in his infliction of

suffering. He has to be apparently passive to the pain he is

causing. Not only does he not stop the pain but he goes on

inflicting more distress on me. Does he seem devoid of feeling?

In reality, of course, his passiveness to suffering, his apparent

lack of feeling and his relentlessness are merely motivated by

common sense and consideration for his patient, even though

the intolerable pain might persuade me otherwise.

For anyone who has undergone root treatment of a molar

tooth, two further points will emerge to throw light on this

problem. The bacterial infection not only causes excruciating

pain, but the toxins released into the blood will poison the

patient to such an extent that his very consciousness may

become clouded. He may scarcely know what he is doing be-

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cause of the pain and poison. Then the dentist begins work

with his awful drill. The pain becomes more excruciating until

the center of the infection is reached. Then the poison pres-

sure is released, and immediate relief is felt, though it is not

yet complete. As soon as no more poison is being released into

the blood, the head begins to clear and the pain to subside.

First, then, in order to remove the hurt of decay, sometimes

more pain has to be inflicted—worse than that of the original

sickness. But the worse pain acts curatively on the first pain

and purges it away. Second, only when the basic trouble be-

gins to be cured does clarity of thought return.

THE SCRIPTURAL POSITION

Scripture teaches, in essence, precisely this view on the mean-

ing of suffering. The fall introduced the "decay" of humanity

and nature which results in the hurt which afflicts us. Thus

arose the pain of the festering tooth pulp. To cure this fester-

ing mess, the Bible says a good but relentless surgeon is needed

to drill and drill until reality is too horrible to bear, until flesh

and blood can no longer take it—until we believe we're for-

saken by God and man. The Bible describes in detail both the

setting in of the decay and its radical if painful cure. Our

species has decayed from its original state and become, as it

were, a lower or decayed species, as I have described else-

where.8 To cure this decay and loss of species requires radical

and drastic treatment involving, first of all, the reaching of the

"focal point of infection," and then the "removal of the de-

formities produced by the decay." Christ's death and resurrec-

tion "reached the focal point" of the trouble, as it were. But

the "deformities of the decay" have also to be corrected, and

that takes time and can be expected to be painful.

One of these "deformities" is connected with the "clouding

of the intellectual and rational process" which accompanies

the fall. The apostle Paul described them in Romans 1 as a

"darkening of the mind" so that the normal, logical thought

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processes for which we were designed became garbled. One of

the by-products of suffering is seen here. For although suffer-

ing and toxins may "knock us silly," the removal of the latter

can bring clarity of thought. It is a fact that sin darkens the

mind. The corollary that redemption and holiness enlighten

the mind is also true. For salvation not only redeems us from a

lost eternity; it also redeems us from a lost, clouded, be-

fuddled life at present. It makes the face and intellect radiant

and removes the darkness, even intellectually speaking. By

taking away our sin, we become saved for eternity. But we

must not forget that this same saving process brings light and

radiance to the heart and intellect right now, the process being

one of growth—growth in this life.

ACCURATE SURGERY OR WHOLESALE BUTCHERY?

Can the skilled, accurately aimed work of the dentist on a

tooth, with its concomitant pain and healing, be compared

with the wild, undisciplined, purely destructive agony which

afflicts much of mankind today? Can we believe that war, the

wholesale gassing of the innocent, and the mutilation of chil-

dren and the aged are the work of a "surgeon" in curing man-

kind? Here again, for any satisfactory answer, we must turn

back to the archetype of all barbarous suffering, namely, the

cruel cross.

Is it possible to believe that when wicked men, inspired by

hatred and jealousy, decided to take Jesus, hold a mock trial,

scourge him with their equivalent of a cat-o'-nine-tails, display

him all night for the raucous amusement of the troops, and

then finally drive iron stakes through his hands and feet,

raising him on a cross to bleed to death by exhaustion—can we

reasonably hold that such a performance was the work of a

skilled surgeon in his efforts to cure the world of its disease?

THE EXACT THERAPY OF THE CROSS

The Christian position is frankly that this was the case: that

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God, with the butchery of the cross, did cure the world of its

disease, and that the cross was the work of a skilled surgeon,

even though it looked from the human point of view like the

exclusively destructive and adventitious work of the ribald

Roman soldiers and hateful Pharisees. It looks so very much

like this that the cross was considered by the Greeks to be so

unworthy of divinity that it was a sheer "scandal." But the

fact is, outward appearances may deceive. They certainly did

in the case of the Son of God dying the death of a common

criminal. May not outward appearances deceive also in our

particular cases of suffering?

The reason for this deception is simple. Outwardly wicked

men cruelly put him to death and that was all that man ever

saw of the process. But behind the scenes the great surgeon did

an unseen work through Christ's suffering. Unseen by men,

Christ took into his own body the very "virus" which was at

the root of man's sickness—the turning of man's back upon the

only good one and his perfect will. The Bible says that this

turning is "sin." It is as though Christ in his death took the

organism of decay (sin) away from me, as well as the products

of decay (the egoism, hate, impatience, untruthfulness, etc.,

which result from and are produced by a sinful attitude),

which are the toxins (sins), and allowed the organism to be

cultured in his body until it killed him. A parasite may kill the

host organism, as when the influenza virus kills the man it lives

on as a parasite. But in killing the host it also kills itself at the

same time. So Christ took on both the causative organism (sin)

together with its "toxins" (sins), such as my hates, lies and

general unrighteousness, so that mankind and I could be freed

from both by embracing his act. In taking into his body the

lethal organism, as well as the products of its activities (meta-

bolism, if one will), he himself had to die. But, in that the

"parasite" (sin) killed the "host organism," the parasite killed

itself too.

This was the secret surgery or therapy which went on un-

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seen to the human eye when they crucufied him. Thus, the

senselessness of the cross is only superficial—superficial to the

uninitiated. Its senselessness becomes sense to those who

probe to the bottom of the mystery and find that he did, in

fact, bear their sin and sins in his own body on the tree. This

fact accounts for the reality of their experience at the begin-

nings of the secret but healing therapy wrought for them at

Calvary.

The actual mechanism of this secret therapy is quite simple.

The "virus" which schemed and killed the human race and

brought the fall to our universe was known as disobedience to

the known good will of God. That is, it was a turning away

from the only good, which automatically brought with it an

embracing of the bad. The organism which introduced death

to man and biology was characterized by turning away from

the sustainer and Creator of life itself.

Christ at Calvary simply reversed this process of rejecting

God's known will by turning to, embracing and doing God's

known will, even though it meant his own suffering and death.

Man's act in turning away from God was reversed by Christ

when he embraced God for us anew with his will. However, he

embraced not only the basic cause of the ill—the turning away

—but he took on himself the consequences, the "metabolic

products," as it were, of that fatal wrong choice. He took my

sickness and my sicknesses on himself. No one watching at the

cross actually saw him do this. No one knows just how he did

it, that is, just what mechanism he used. All we know is that

we could not do it, for none of us could die in a valid way

before God for the sin of another. All we know is that the

Father gave his permission and command to Christ to lay

down his life as a ransom for many. And Christ obediently did

just that. The man Christ reversed man's disobedience.

A LESS UGLY WAY?

This is, I suppose, the legal way of looking at the therapy

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Christ accomplished for me at the cross. As such, it is of vast

importance, providing, as it does, the basis of salvation from

the guilt of sin for eternity. Some will say it is horrible. It is.

To think that God could find no other method than a bloody

cross, cruel iron nails through hands and feet, before he could

redeem me from Adam's fatal mistake, fills me with dismay.

Surely a more genteel, aesthetically acceptable method could

have been found for such a momentous piece of therapy.

This brings us to the second point we must make on this

subject. It concerns the blood, the sweat, and the forsakenness

of the cross of Calvary, in short, the ugliness and horror of

such a piece of restorative therapy. For the utter cruelty of it

shocks even wicked men. Let us look then at this second great

problem of the cross—its ugliness.

It is written of Christ: "In the days of his flesh, Jesus

offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears,

to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard

for his godly fear. Although he was a Son, he learned obedi-

ence through what he suffered; and being made perfect he

became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him."9

That is an almost incredible statement for the writer of the

letter to the Hebrews to have made. The Son of God had

always been perfect from eternity until he came into time at

the incarnation. And during the incarnation he was without

sin, and therefore, still perfect. What the writer is teaching

here will answer our question as to why God chose such a

cruel, ugly and bloody method of redemptive therapy.

MADE PERFECT

The process of "being made perfect" referred to here means,

in this context, being "made mature." If a child is perfect in

mind and body, there is nothing we can complain about. But

his perfection as a child needs to grow into the mature perfec-

tion of an adult. This process is one of growth in body, mind

and experience. There is no quick way around it. To be genu-

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ine, it must be gone through experimentally.

This is exactly what Christ went through experimentally as

a man. He was perfect from a child onward. But the Bible says

he grew in wisdom and stature—that is, he matured by his

experience as a man. Even though he was the second Person of

the Trinity, he was perfected by growing up as a man, for he

gathered actual experience of manhood which he lacked ex-

perimentally before the incarnation. He certainly knew all

about manhood before he became a man, because he was

omniscient. But now he experienced manhood in the body—

and matured or became experienced, and therefore perfected,

in it.

Now notice what some of this manhood experience involved

for Christ—something he, as God, had not experienced as a

man before: "In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers

and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was

able to save him from death." God the Son had never had that

experience, common to all men, while he was God the Son and

had never yet experienced the incarnation. It was the fight

between the will to be obedient and the terrible reality of a

bloody death on the tree. This was a new experience. Here we

have anxiety, anguish and suffering—right up to bloody

sweat—in anticipation of the abyss of such a death. He

matured as a man by the experience of anguished prayer in

faith to him who could deliver him. We are assured that he was

heard because of his godly fear. But he was only saved from

death by going down through death and thus being led out of

it after tasting it.

The result, then, of this seemingly unreasonable and cruel

death of the cross and the anguish which preceded it was that

although he was a Son, yet he learned obedience through what

he suffered. Of course, he had always been obedient to the

Father's will—the two wills were always congruent and the

Father loved the Son and the Son the Father. But here was a

new experience for God the Son, the experiencing of the

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anguish of facing death such as all creatures, but not God,

face. The God of life was to die for all his creatures and share

ail their ugly experiences.

The anguish and suffering of the cross and the preceding

events demonstrated that Christ was perfectly obedient to the

Father in all things. The experience of the unnameable pain,

anguish and forsakenness of the cross did something to the

incarnate Son of God which would have been impossible be-

fore the incarnation. The discipline, the setting of his face as a

flint to go to Jerusalem to face it all, the refusal of even the

analgesic (the myrrh) before the nails were driven through

him, all that perfected even him, the Son of God—as Man.

Thus, the fact of the cross laid down the legal basis for our

salvation, but the bloody cross showed what suffering and

anguish can do if accepted as Jesus accepted them. His death

was expiatory for sin. But the manner of his death served at

the same time as a teacher of obedience to God the Man; it

was a maturer, a perfecter of the perfect one. If the Son of

God as man was matured in his experience and learned obedi-

ence by it, then we find yet another secret, hidden element in

the mode of "therapy" God introduced by his Son to cure the

creation of its fatal malady.

It will be obvious then, that, purely legally, Christ's bare

death—by any method—would have secured our salvation for

eternity. However, it was, perhaps, not immediately obvious

why such a shocking and barbarous route to death needed to

be taken—a route which made the cross a scandal to the

Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews. No wonder so few

of the Greeks or Jews could understand it without the extra

information given on the subject of suffering by the New

Testament—and by experience too.

SUFFERING-NOT SENSELESS

Thus, the anguish and suffering of the cross are not senseless.

They are a refined even though drastic therapy, hidden to the

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eyes of the mortal man in general. But their function teaches

us why the whole Bible is full of references to pain, suffering

and anguish. Every person who embraces the death of Christ

(and his resurrection) as his basis for eternal salvation is

warned to expect, as a matter of routine, sufferings of some

sort. Christ having suffered in the flesh, he is told, is warning

enough for us to arm ourselves with the same mind—that is, to

be on the lookout for the squalls of suffering which certainly

await the consistent Christian.10 In giving us salvation, Christ

suffered. In accepting that salvation, suffering will certainly

find us out.

Further, we are told that the disciple is not above his Master

even in these matters.11 This means that, in this context, if

the perfection or maturation of the Master could not be

effected without the anguish of suffering, neither can the

maturation or perfection of the disciple be accomplished by

any other means. The Christian who thinks he can get through

the Christian life without this sort of perfecting is living in a

fool's paradise. The disciple is not above his Master even in

learning matters.

The New Testament is full of teaching of this kind, teaching

which is seldom even touched upon today, for by its very

nature it is unpopular to the natural human. Paul the apostle,

when writing to the Philippians, informed them that "it has

been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not

only believe in him but also suffer for his sake."12 Surely it

would have been unnecessary for Paul to have told the Philip-

pians that it had been granted them not only to believe but

also to suffer if just believing without suffering was an ideal

state. Clearly, no one wants suffering. But, in the light of the

above, it must be a special privilege. Christ did not relish it. He

sweat blood in anticipation of it. But he endured it as a privi-

lege in view of the glory of the maturity gained by it.

This means, again, that even for us mortals "senseless"

suffering need not be pointless. It may be more than the mere

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adventitious agony produced in a mortal body of flesh and

blood. It can be the gateway to special results in our char-

acters. In any case, it is poor policy to avoid suffering by

disobedience, for Christ embraced trials and suffered because

of obedience, thus being matured and perfected thereby. It is

the Christian path to try to follow the same policy. For by

following this policy Christ has been matured and exalted by

the Father to his right hand. He has committed the entire

government of the world into Christ's capable hands—hands

rendered capable, mature and fit for the job by being obedient

even to letting them be pierced at the cross.

Is it because the fruit of suffering is so little known in the

Western churches that we have so few "giants" in the land

today? In the East, behind the Iron and Bamboo curtains, the

total number of Christians has been reduced greatly by suffer-

ing. But the proportion of "giants," mature Christians, has

certainly greatly increased there.

PROMISED TRIBULATION

The Bible—both the Old and the New Testaments—is crammed

with references to suffering, anguish, tribulation, grief, trial

and affliction.13 For example, there is this rather neglected

text by the apostle Paul: "But whatever gain I had, I counted

as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss

because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my

Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and

count them as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ and be

found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, based on

law, but that which is through faith in Christ. . . that I may

know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his

sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I

may attain the resurrection [out] from [among] the dead."14

THE REASON WHY

It is clear from the letter to the Romans that Paul knew and

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experienced salvation on the basis of a gift of God and not on

the basis of any works he had done. Nothing he could do

could save him from the penalty of sin. On the Damascus road

he had learned that his own works could not help him but that

Christ's work could and did. Why, then, does Paul now insist

so much on the value of the work of suffering he had done in

losing everything for Christ's sake? Those losses would never

save him.

As we read the cited passage carefully it becomes obvious

that Paul is referring to the value of sufferings and losses in

gaining a knowledge of the surpassing worth of knowing

Christ. He is referring to a process which can only be described

as one of Christian maturity or perfection. He suffered the loss

of every privilege which he had possessed as a well-respected

Pharisee in order to be obedient to Christ. No doubt this

caused anguish. But his losses were not only abstract. He was

whipped, imprisoned, mishandled, shipwrecked and generally

treated as the offscouring of the world for Christ's sake. He

couples these experiences with the greater experience which

resulted directly from their knowing the surpassing worth of

Christ. Most of us Western Christians know little of this. Is it

because we have not sought out the only maturing process

known in Scripture leading to this knowledge—and to Christ?

Paul's obedience, like Christ's obedience, in suffering while

doing the will and Word of God is the key to such depth of

experience.

But more about the maturing process is to be discovered in

Philippians 3. Christ was exalted to power because he was

fitted for it by the things he obediently suffered. Paul says in

effect precisely the same of himself and his own exaltation.

For he couples his loss and his suffering with a capacity to

take part in what he calls the "out-resurrection" (exanastasis)

which he regarded not as a matter of course for every Christian

but as that which depends on Christian maturity. We all

know—as do the Muslims—that all of us, small and great,

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wicked and good, rich and poor, will be resurrected at the

great day of final judgment to receive the things done in our

bodies. But before the day of general "anastasis" there will be

an "exanastasis" of rising of the dead, not in a general, but in a

special, resurrection. This will be at the time of the return of

our Lord in glory to set up his kingdom on earth and reign. In

order to rule and reign, Christ is looking for men and women

among his redeemed who have allowed themselves to be

matured for this high office—by means of the same process by

which he was made fit for it—by anguish and suffering.

Apparently Paul's aim was to obediently accept the same

type of loss and suffering that his Master had gone through in

order to become prepared for high office with Christ. All this

is based upon the free gift of salvation by the blood of Christ.

But in building upon this sure basis of free salvation, a matur-

ing or a perfection process occurs by means of suffering in the

will of God, foreseen both by Christ and by Paul. Paul's atti-

tude of heart is confirmed by his instruction to Timothy: "If

we have died with him, we shall also live with him; if we

endure, we shall also reign with him; if we deny him, he also

will deny us."15 This surely clinches the matter. The Christian

owes his redemption to the free gift of God. But he owes his

degree of exaltation to close knowledge of the surpassing

worth of Christ and close association with him and his pur-

poses in his kingdom, and to the maturation processes which

fitted even the Son for his supreme office in the kingdom. The

experiences of suffering, endurance and anguish in obedience

to the will of God, no matter how outwardly senseless and

adventitious they may appear, are the therapeutic instruments

God used on his Son and uses on all his redeemed who declare

themselves willing for the process.

The same process produces not only the surpassing knowl-

edge of his will, but it also makes us useful to others. "For

because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able

to help those who are tempted.''''16 On this basis, who could

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be better fitted to help mankind than the Son of Man who has

been through the same kind of temptation—though far more

acute? This establishes a bond of confidence between us and

him. He understands because he has experienced the fire of

anguish. Therefore he can help us because his is a sympathy

engendered by understanding. Our lot and his as mortals were

once congruous. It gives me confidence toward him. If I suffer

I can help those who are suffering, even as Christ has helped

me.

PERFECTION

This leads us to the third point. The first point was that Christ

died and rose again to justify and redeem us, giving us the basis

for fellowship with a holy God. The second point was that his

sufferings and endurance were the means of qualification and

maturation for his exaltation to the right hand of God the

Father. In a parallel manner, the sufferings of Christians (for

the gospel's sake and in general) are calculated to mature them

for high office with him in his kingdom. The third point is also

directly concerned with suffering and its consequences. Peter

develops the subject in saying, "Since therefore Christ suffered

in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same thought [mind or

will], for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from

sin, so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer

by human passions but by the will of God."17

Peter was referring to "suffering in the flesh" which, he

says, leads to ceasing from sin in the flesh. But the same princi-

ple also applies to matters not necessarily directly connected

with the flesh, as he also confirms: "For one is approved if,

mindful of God, he endures pain while suffering unjustly."18

This simply means that any discomfort we have to endure

because of our faithfulness to God's will eventually leads to

our being "approved." In fact, Peter says that as Christ suf-

fered the same kind of discomfort for our sakes, so he left us

"an example, that you should follow in his steps."19 This,

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then, is the line of action to which we "have been called."

Therefore, according to Peter, suffering leads to ceasing

from sin, and approval before God. Is it then any wonder that,

after his death and resurrection, Christ asked the disciples

questions which bring the whole problem of suffering into

focus: "Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these

things and enter into his glory?"20 "The Christ should suffer

and on the third day rise from the dead."21 The same subject

was the theme of Paul's three-week argument with the Jews in

Thessalonica: "And Paul went in, as was his custom, and for

three weeks he argued with them from the Scriptures, explain-

ing and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer

and to rise from the dead."22 Among other things, suffering

made Christ "approved."

It is generally conceded that Christ's death is basic to the

Christian's salvation. But the suffering type of death is not

usually emphasized. Perhaps it is too barbaric for our cultured

society to bear. Regardless of our reactions to the awfulness of

the death on the cross, God chose it in order to bring to

mankind a full salvation—not only from the guilt of sin but

also from its power, not only to save us from eternal damna-

tion but also to demonstrate to us how to become approved in

the same way that Christ became approved. In fact, it was to

teach us how to cease from sin.

REJOICING IN SUFFERING

Paul sums it all up: "So we do not lose heart. Though our

outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being re-

newed every day. For this slight momentary affliction is pre-

paring for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all compari-

son."2* Clearly, Christ's death and resurrection are the corner-

stones of any salvation that will take us to heaven. But Paul is

talking about something built as a superstructure on the

foundation of salvation. It is an eternal, incomparable weight

of glory founded upon salvation, God's free gift. And it is our

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temporary afflictions, the suffering and pain borne in the will

of God, which make us approved for incomparable glory, just

as afflictions and sufferings brought approval to Christ after he

had patiently and triumphantly borne them. Temporary afflic-

tions exchanged for an incomparable weight of glory! Paul

considered it a bargain. So he acted on it immediately!

A POSSIBLE MISUNDERSTANDING

Of course, one might say that if suffering and afflictions are so

useful and well rewarded in the will of God, then let us afflict

and scourge our fellowmen all we can and seek suffering our-

selves. We are doing them a favor by hurting them or ourselves.

This seems to echo the old argument: Let us sin willfully so

that grace may abound. Let us seek and provoke suffering!

God forbid! The dentist does not willfully or wantonly bore

holes anywhere and everywhere in our teeth to stop the future

possibility of decay. God is the surgeon, so let him operate just

where he finds it necessary. He may and will use wicked men

as his scalpel. He has promised to reward them for their evil

intentions because they afflict others just for the sake of hurt-

ing and killing. Though he uses that same evil for his own

purposes, that doesn't give us the right to sin so that grace may

abound by hurting others or ourselves unnecessarily.

To indiscriminately inflict pain is wanton. Jesus himself

never regarded pain and suffering as good things in themselves,

for he abolished them by healing on many occasions. He also

told us to do the same. The Scripture speaks of death itself as

the last enemy. Pain falls into the same category. Pain and

death entered into the world by the fall, when man turned his

back upon God. The point is that God reverses the evils of

pain and death to produce a glorious result—to glorify his Son

and to glorify man when they both withstand and endure pain

and death in doing his will. This is how God triumphs over

evil—not by "stopping" it, but by using it to his greater glory.

In another book I have attempted to describe the character

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of the Man Jesus and have used the Sermon on the Mount to

illustrate some of my points.24 He said of himself that he was

"meek" and "humble" of spirit. Such an attitude of mind

would scarcely be compatible with his having created the

world by the principles of chance and natural selection of the

stronger specimens as laid down by Darwin. For Jesus did not

destroy the sick, the weak nor the importunate beggars, un-

fitted for the commercial life of his day, as Darwin's principles

would demand.

GENTLING PROCESS

A minister wrote to me, after reading the book cited, about

the subject of the meekness of Jesus, pointing out that the

word meek is often misunderstood. In the context used in the

Sermon on the Mount the word translated by meek really

means "gentled" or "broken in " as those terms are applied to

horses trained to work in harness. The minister recounted

how, as a boy, he had worked on a farm and helped with

"gentling" horses, breaking them in for farm work. Later the

horses were often used for pulling out tree stumps prior to

preparing wasteland for arable purposes.

The untrained wild horses were useless for doing the skilled

work necessary for removing tree stumps. They had to be

thoroughly "tamed" before they could work constructively

with other horses in teams. The taming or breaking-in and

"gentling" process was a prior necessity for useful work. Once

they had been submitted to the sometimes harsh process of

breaking in, which involved whipping and punishment as well

as rewards, they worked productively the rest of their lives and

obviously enjoyed it thoroughly. As their experience grew, the

reins could be left on their necks and they would go by them-

selves from tree stump to tree stump, assume the correct posi-

tion, wait for the chains to be hitched to the trunk, and then

with all their strength—nipping and nudging one another in the

process—pull out the stump. If a stump did not come up at the

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first pull they would move to a more favorable angle and try

again.

Affliction and suffering can work as a "gentling" process,

fitting us for God's work in the present world and the next.

This is the true meaning of the word meek as Jesus used it.

What if the abysmal suffering of mankind and of nature, a

result of the fall into sin, is now being used in God's good

hands to "gentle" us all—even as it "gentled" his Son? The

stakes are indeed high. Suffering makes us kind to others who

suffer. But what if a bloody war, a rule of tyranny (while

being recognized as culpable sin on the part of their perpetra-

tors, who are promised a just reward for their deeds) is really

working out an incomparable weight of glory for all those who

allow themselves to be "gentled" and disciplined thereby? If

this is so, it would be a fatal blow to the despair and nihilism

into which our generation is so obviously falling. If eternal

glory were to result (and the Bible says it will), then we could,

with the Christians of old, rejoice in suffering and jubilate with

the apostle Paul: "We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that

suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces charac-

ter, and character produces hope, and hope does not disap-

point us, because God's love has been poured into our

hearts."25

AGAIN, WHY ALL THE BARBARISM AND CRUELTY?

Some time ago I had the pleasure of discussing this and related

questions with a U. S. Air Force chaplain. We came to two

main conclusions which, as we shall see, throw light on the

above problem:

1. We all have some sort of freedom to choose among the

paths in life which are made available to us. Our freedom,

which incidentally proves that we're real persons, allows us

choices of paths in one way or another almost continuously.

But we never have any freedom of choice as to the conse-

quences of any path we choose. For these consequences are

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cause of the pain and poison. Then the dentist begins work

with his awful drill. The pain becomes more excruciating until

the center of the infection is reached. Then the poison pres-

sure is released, and immediate relief is felt, though it is not

yet complete. As soon as no more poison is being released into

the blood, the head begins to clear and the pain to subside.

First, then, in order to remove the hurt of decay, sometimes

more pain has to be inflicted—worse than that of the original

sickness. But the worse pain acts curatively on the first pain

and purges it away. Second, only when the basic trouble be-

gins to be cured does clarity of thought return.

THE SCRIPTURAL POSITION

Scripture teaches, in essence, precisely this view on the mean-

ing of suffering. The fall introduced the "decay" of humanity

and nature which results in the hurt which afflicts us. Thus

arose the pain of the festering tooth pulp. To cure this fester-

ing mess, the Bible says a good but relentless surgeon is needed

to drill and drill until reality is too horrible to bear, until flesh

and blood can no longer take it—until we believe we're for-

saken by God and man. The Bible describes in detail both the

setting in of the decay and its radical if painful cure. Our

species has decayed from its original state and become, as it

were, a lower or decayed species, as I have described else-

where.8 To cure this decay and loss of species requires radical

and drastic treatment involving, first of all, the reaching of the

"focal point of infection," and then the "removal of the de-

formities produced by the decay." Christ's death and resurrec-

tion "reached the focal point" of the trouble, as it were. But

the "deformities of the decay" have also to be corrected, and

that takes time and can be expected to be painful.

One of these "deformities" is connected with the "clouding

of the intellectual and rational process" which accompanies

the fall. The apostle Paul described them in Romans 1 as a

"darkening of the mind" so that the normal, logical thought

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processes for which we were designed became garbled. One of

the by-products of suffering is seen here. For although suffer-

ing and toxins may "knock us silly," the removal of the latter

can bring clarity of thought. It is a fact that sin darkens the

mind. The corollary that redemption and holiness enlighten

the mind is also true. For salvation not only redeems us from a

lost eternity; it also redeems us from a lost, clouded, be-

fuddled life at present. It makes the face and intellect radiant

and removes the darkness, even intellectually speaking. By

taking away our sin, we become saved for eternity. But we

must not forget that this same saving process brings light and

radiance to the heart and intellect right now, the process being

one of growth—growth in this life.

ACCURATE SURGERY OR WHOLESALE BUTCHERY?

Can the skilled, accurately aimed work of the dentist on a

tooth, with its concomitant pain and healing, be compared

with the wild, undisciplined, purely destructive agony which

afflicts much of mankind today? Can we believe that war, the

wholesale gassing of the innocent, and the mutilation of chil-

dren and the aged are the work of a "surgeon" in curing man-

kind? Here again, for any satisfactory answer, we must turn

back to the archetype of all barbarous suffering, namely, the

cruel cross.

Is it possible to believe that when wicked men, inspired by

hatred and jealousy, decided to take Jesus, hold a mock trial,

scourge him with their equivalent of a cat-o'-nine-tails, display

him all night for the raucous amusement of the troops, and

then finally drive iron stakes through his hands and feet,

raising him on a cross to bleed to death by exhaustion—can we

reasonably hold that such a performance was the work of a

skilled surgeon in his efforts to cure the world of its disease?

THE EXACT THERAPY OF THE CROSS

The Christian position is frankly that this was the case: that

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God, with the butchery of the cross, did cure the world of its

disease, and that the cross was the work of a skilled surgeon,

even though it looked from the human point of view like the

exclusively destructive and adventitious work of the ribald

Roman soldiers and hateful Pharisees. It looks so very much

like this that the cross was considered by the Greeks to be so

unworthy of divinity that it was a sheer "scandal." But the

fact is, outward appearances may deceive. They certainly did

in the case of the Son of God dying the death of a common

criminal. May not outward appearances deceive also in our

particular cases of suffering?

The reason for this deception is simple. Outwardly wicked

men cruelly put him to death and that was all that man ever

saw of the process. But behind the scenes the great surgeon did

an unseen work through Christ's suffering. Unseen by men,

Christ took into his own body the very "virus" which was at

the root of man's sickness—the turning of man's back upon the

only good one and his perfect will. The Bible says that this

turning is "sin." It is as though Christ in his death took the

organism of decay (sin) away from me, as well as the products

of decay (the egoism, hate, impatience, untruthfulness, etc.,

which result from and are produced by a sinful attitude),

which are the toxins (sins), and allowed the organism to be

cultured in his body until it killed him. A parasite may kill the

host organism, as when the influenza virus kills the man it lives

on as a parasite. But in killing the host it also kills itself at the

same time. So Christ took on both the causative organism (sin)

together with its "toxins" (sins), such as my hates, lies and

general unrighteousness, so that mankind and I could be freed

from both by embracing his act. In taking into his body the

lethal organism, as well as the products of its activities (meta-

bolism, if one will), he himself had to die. But, in that the

"parasite" (sin) killed the "host organism," the parasite killed

itself too.

This was the secret surgery or therapy which went on un-

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seen to the human eye when they crucufied him. Thus, the

senselessness of the cross is only superficial—superficial to the

uninitiated. Its senselessness becomes sense to those who

probe to the bottom of the mystery and find that he did, in

fact, bear their sin and sins in his own body on the tree. This

fact accounts for thé reality of their experience at the begin-

nings of the secret but healing therapy wrought for them at

Calvary.

The actual mechanism of this secret therapy is quite simple.

The "virus" which schemed and killed the human race and

brought the fall to our universe was known as disobedience to

the known good will of God. That is, it was a turning away

from the only good, which automatically brought with it an

embracing of the bad. The organism which introduced death

to man and biology was characterized by turning away from

the sustainer and Creator of life itself.

Christ at Calvary simply reversed this process of rejecting

God's known will by turning to, embracing and doing God's

known will, even though it meant his own suffering and death.

Man's act in turning away from God was reversed by Christ

when he embraced God for us anew with his will. However, he

embraced not only the basic cause of the ill—the turning away

—but he took on himself the consequences, the "metabolic

products," as it were, of that fatal wrong choice. He took my

sickness and my sicknesses on himself. No one watching at the

cross actually saw him do this. No one knows just how he did

it, that is, just what mechanism he used. All we know is that

we could not do it, for none of us could die in a valid way

before God for the sin of another. All we know is that the

Father gave his permission and command to Christ to lay

down his life as a ransom for many. And Christ obediently did

just that. The man Christ reversed man's disobedience.

A LESS UGLY WAY?

This is, I suppose, the legal way of looking at the therapy

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Christ accomplished for me at the cross. As such, it is of vast

importance, providing, as it does, the basis of salvation from

the guilt of sin for eternity. Some will say it is horrible. It is.

To think that God could find no other method than a bloody

cross, cruel iron nails through hands and feet, before he could

redeem me from Adam's fatal mistake, fills me with dismay.

Surely a more genteel, aesthetically acceptable method could

have been found for such a momentous piece of therapy.

This brings us to the second point we must make on this

subject. It concerns the blood, the sweat, and the forsakenness

of the cross of Calvary, in short, the ugliness and horror of

such a piece of restorative therapy. For the utter cruelty of it

shocks even wicked men. Let us look then at this second great

problem of the cross—its ugliness.

It is written of Christ: "In the days of his flesh, Jesus

offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears,

to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard

for his godly fear. Although he was a Son, he learned obedi-

ence through what he suffered; and being made perfect he

became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him."9

That is an almost incredible statement for the writer of the

letter to the Hebrews to have made. The Son of God had

always been perfect from eternity until he came into time at

the incarnation. And during the incarnation he was without

sin, and therefore, still perfect. What the writer is teaching

here will answer our question as to why God chose such a

cruel, ugly and bloody method of redemptive therapy.

MADE PERFECT

The process of "being made perfect" referred to here means,

in this context, being "made mature." If a child is perfect in

mind and body, there is nothing we can complain about. But

his perfection as a child needs to grow into the mature perfec-

tion of an adult. This process is one of growth in body, mind

and experience. There is no quick way around it. To be genu-

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ine, it must be gone through experimentally.

This is exactly what Christ went through experimentally as

a man. He was perfect from a child onward. But the Bible says

he grew in wisdom and stature—that is, he matured by his

experience as a man. Even though he was the second Person of

the Trinity, he was perfected by growing up as a man, for he

gathered actual experience of manhood which he lacked ex-

perimentally before the incarnation. He certainly knew all

about manhood before he became a man, because he was

omniscient. But now he experienced manhood in the body—

and matured or became experienced, and therefore perfected,

in it.

Now notice what some of this manhood experience involved

for Christ—something he, as God, had not experienced as a

man before: "In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers

and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was

able to save him from death." God the Son had never had that

experience, common to all men, while he was God the Son and

had never yet experienced the incarnation. It was the fight

between the will to be obedient and the terrible reality of a

bloody death on the tree. This was a new experience. Here we

have anxiety, anguish and suffering—right up to bloody

sweat—in anticipation of the abyss of such a death. He

matured as a man by the experience of anguished prayer in

faith to him who could deliver him. We are assured that he was

heard because of his godly fear. But he was only saved from

death by going down through death and thus being led out of

it after tasting it.

The result, then, of this seemingly unreasonable and cruel

death of the cross and the anguish which preceded it was that

although he was a Son, yet he learned obedience through what

he suffered. Of course, he had always been obedient to the

Father's will—the two wills were always congruent and the

Father loved the Son and the Son the Father. But here was a

new experience for God the Son, the experiencing of the

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anguish of facing death such as all creatures, but not God,

face. The God of life was to die for all his creatures and share

all their ugly experiences.

The anguish and suffering of the cross and the preceding

events demonstrated that Christ was perfectly obedient to the

Father in all things. The experience of the unnameable pain,

anguish and forsakenness of the cross did something to the

incarnate Son of God which would have been impossible be-

fore the incarnation. The discipline, the setting of his face as a

flint to go to Jerusalem to face it all, the refusal of even the

analgesic (the myrrh) before the nails were driven through

him, all that perfected even him, the Son of God—as Man.

Thus, the fact of the cross laid down the legal basis for our

salvation, but the bloody cross showed what suffering and

anguish can do if accepted as Jesus accepted them. His death

was expiatory for sin. But the manner of his death served at

the same time as a teacher of obedience to God the Man; it

was a maturer, a perfecter of the perfect one. If the Son of

God as man was matured in his experience and learned obedi-

ence by it, then we find yet another secret, hidden element in

the mode of "therapy" God introduced by his Son to cure the

creation of its fatal malady.

It will be obvious then, that, purely legally, Christ's bare

death—by any method—would have secured our salvation for

eternity. However, it was, perhaps, not immediately obvious

why such a shocking and barbarous route to death needed to

be taken—a route which made the cross a scandal to the

Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews. No wonder so few

of the Greeks or Jews could understand it without the extra

information given on the subject of suffering by the New

Testament—and by experience too.

SUFFERING-NOT SENSELESS

Thus, the anguish and suffering of the cross are not senseless.

They are a refined even though drastic therapy, hidden to the

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eyes of the mortal man in general. But their function teaches

us why the whole Bible is full of references to pain, suffering

and anguish. Every person who embraces the death of Christ

(and his resurrection) as his basis for eternal salvation is

warned to expect, as a matter of routine, sufferings of some

sort. Christ having suffered in the flesh, he is told, is warning

enough for us to arm ourselves with the same mind—that is, to

be on the lookout for the squalls of suffering which certainly

await the consistent Christian.10 In giving us salvation, Christ

suffered. In accepting that salvation, suffering will certainly

find us out.

Further, we are told that the disciple is not above his Master

even in these matters.11 This means that, in this context, if

the perfection or maturation of the Master could not be

effected without the anguish of suffering, neither can the

maturation or perfection of the disciple be accomplished by

any other means. The Christian who thinks he can get through

the Christian life without this sort of perfecting is living in a

fool's paradise. The disciple is not above his Master even in

learning matters.

The New Testament is full of teaching of this kind, teaching

which is seldom even touched upon today, for by its very

nature it is unpopular to the natural human. Paul the apostle,

when writing to the Philippians, informed them that "it has

been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not

only believe in him but also suffer for his sake."12 Surely it

would have been unnecessary for Paul to have told the Philip-

pians that it had been granted them not only to believe but

also to suffer if just believing without suffering was an ideal

state. Clearly, no one wants suffering. But, in the light of the

above, it must be a special privilege. Christ did not relish it. He

sweat blood in anticipation of it. But he endured it as a privi-

lege in view of the glory of the maturity gained by it.

This means, again, that even for us mortals "senseless"

suffering need not be pointless. It may be more than the mere

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adventitious agony produced in a mortal body of flesh and

blood. It can be the gateway to special results in our char-

acters. In any case, it is poor policy to avoid suffering by

disobedience, for Christ embraced trials and suffered because

of obedience, thus being matured and perfected thereby. It is

the Christian path to try to follow the same policy. For by

following this policy Christ has been matured and exalted by

the Father to his right hand. He has committed the entire

government of the world into Christ's capable hands—hands

rendered capable, mature and fit for the job by being obedient

even to letting them be pierced at the cross.

Is it because the fruit of suffering is so little known in the

Western churches that we have so few "giants" in the land

today? In the East, behind the Iron and Bamboo curtains, the

total number of Christians has been reduced greatly by suffer-

ing. But the proportion of "giants," mature Christians, has

certainly greatly increased there.

PROMISED TRIBULATION

The Bible—both the Old and the New Testaments—is crammed

with references to suffering, anguish, tribulation, grief, trial

and affliction.13 For example, there is this rather neglected

text by the apostle Paul: "But whatever gain I had, I counted

as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss

because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my

Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and

count them as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ and be

found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, based on

law, but that which is through faith in Christ. . . that I may

know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his

sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I

may attain the resurrection [out] from [among] the dead."14

THE REASON WHY

It is clear from the letter to the Romans that Paul knew and

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experienced salvation on the basis of a. gift of God and not on

the basis of any works he had done. Nothing he could do

could save him from the penalty of sin. On the Damascus road

he had learned that his own works could not help him but that

Christ's work could and did. Why, then, does Paul now insist

so much on the value of the work of suffering he had done in

losing everything for Christ's sake? Those losses would never

save him.

As we read the cited passage carefully it becomes obvious

that Paul is referring to the value of sufferings and losses in

gaining a knowledge of the surpassing worth of knowing

Christ. He is referring to a process which can only be described

as one of Christian maturity or perfection. He suffered the loss

of every privilege which he had possessed as a well-respected

Pharisee in order to be obedient to Christ. No doubt this

caused anguish. But his losses were not only abstract. He was

whipped, imprisoned, mishandled, shipwrecked and generally

treated as the offscouring of the world for Christ's sake. He

couples these experiences with the greater experience which

resulted directly from their knowing the surpassing worth of

Christ. Most of us Western Christians know little of this. Is it

because we have not sought out the only maturing process

known in Scripture leading to this knowledge—and to Christ?

Paul's obedience, like Christ's obedience, in suffering while

doing the will and Word of God is the key to such depth of

experience.

But more about the maturing process is to be discovered in

Philippians 3. Christ was exalted to power because he was

fitted for it by the things he obediently suffered. Paul says in

effect precisely the same of himself and his own exaltation.

For he couples his loss and his suffering with a capacity to

take part in what he calls the "out-resurrection" (exanastasis)

which he regarded not as a matter of course for every Christian

but as that which depends on Christian maturity. We all

know—as do the Muslims—that all of us, small and great,

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wicked and good, rich and poor, will be resurrected at the

great day of final judgment to receive the things done in our

bodies. But before the day of general "anastasis" there will be

an "exanastasis" of rising of the dead, not in a general, but in a

special, resurrection. This will be at the time of the return of

our Lord in glory to set up his kingdom on earth and reign. In

order to rule and reign, Christ is looking for men and women

among his redeemed who have allowed themselves to be

matured for this high office—by means of the same process by

which he was made fit for it—by anguish and suffering.

Apparently Paul's aim was to obediently accept the same

type of loss and suffering that his Master had gone through in

order to become prepared for high office with Christ. All this

is based upon the free gift of salvation by the blood of Christ.

But in building upon this sure basis of free salvation, a matur-

ing or a perfection process occurs by means of suffering in the

will of God, foreseen both by Christ and by Paul. Paul's atti-

tude of heart is confirmed by his instruction to Timothy: "If

we have died with him, we shall also live with him; if we

endure, we shall also reign with him; if we deny him, he also

will deny us."15 This surely clinches the matter. The Christian

owes his redemption to the free gift of God. But he owes his

degree of exaltation to close knowledge of the surpassing

worth of Christ and close association with him and his pur-

poses in his kingdom, and to the maturation processes which

fitted even the Son for his supreme office in the kingdom. The

experiences of suffering, endurance and anguish in obedience

to the will of God, no matter how outwardly senseless and

adventitious they may appear, are the therapeutic instruments

God used on his Son and uses on all his redeemed who declare

themselves willing for the process.

The same process produces not only the surpassing knowl-

edge of his will, but it also makes us useful to others. "For

because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able

to help those who are tempted."16 On this basis, who could

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be better fitted to help mankind than the Son of Man who has

been through the same kind of temptation—though far more

acute? This establishes a bond of confidence between us and

him. He understands because he has experienced the fire of

anguish. Therefore he can help us because his is a sympathy

engendered by understanding. Our lot and his as mortals were

once congruous. It gives me confidence toward him. If I suffer

I can help those who are suffering, even as Christ has helped

me.

PERFECTION

This leads us to the third point. The first point was that Christ

died and rose again to justify and redeem us, giving us the basis

for fellowship with a holy God. The second point was that his

sufferings and endurance were the means of qualification and

maturation for his exaltation to the right hand of God the

Father. In a parallel manner, the sufferings of Christians (for

the gospel's sake and in general) are calculated to mature them

for high office with him in his kingdom. The third point is also

directly concerned with suffering and its consequences. Peter

develops the subject in saying, "Since therefore Christ suffered

in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same thought [mind or

will], for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from

sin, so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer

by human passions but by the will of God."17

Peter was referring to "suffering in the flesh" which, he

says, leads to ceasing from sin in the flesh. But the same princi-

ple also applies to matters not necessarily directly connected

with the flesh, as he also confirms: "For one is approved if,

mindful of God, he endures pain while suffering unjustly."18

This simply means that any discomfort we have to endure

because of our faithfulness to God's will eventually leads to

our being "approved." In fact, Peter says that as Christ suf-

fered the same kind of discomfort for our sakes, so he left us

"an example, that you should follow in his steps."19 This,

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then, is the line of action to which we "have been called."

Therefore, according to Peter, suffering leads to ceasing

from sin, and approval before God. Is it then any wonder that,

after his death and resurrection, Christ asked the disciples

questions which bring the whole problem of suffering into

focus: "Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these

things and enter into his glory?"20 "The Christ should suffer

and on the third day rise from the dead."21 The same subject

was the theme of Paul's three-week argument with the Jews in

Thessalonica: "And Paul went in, as was his custom, and for

three weeks he argued with them from the Scriptures, explain-

ing and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer

and to rise from the dead."22 Among other things, suffering

made Christ "approved."

It is generally conceded that Christ's death is basic to the

Christian's salvation. But the suffering type of death is not

usually emphasized. Perhaps it is too barbaric for our cultured

society to bear. Regardless of our reactions to the awfulness of

the death on the cross, God chose it in order to bring to

mankind a full salvation—not only from the guilt of sin but

also from its power, not only to save us from eternal damna-

tion but also to demonstrate to us how to become approved in

the same way that Christ became approved. In fact, it was to

teach us how to cease from sin.

REJOICING IN SUFFERING

Paul sums it all up: "So we do not lose heart. Though our

outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being re-

newed every day. For this slight momentary affliction is pre-

paring for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all compari-

son."23 Clearly, Christ's death and resurrection are the corner-

stones of any salvation that will take us to heaven. But Paul is

talking about something built as a superstructure on the

foundation of salvation. It is an eternal, incomparable weight

of glory founded upon salvation, God's free gift. And it is our

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temporary afflictions, the suffering and pain borne in the will

of God, which make us approved for incomparable glory, just

as afflictions and sufferings brought approval to Christ after he

had patiently and triumphantly borne them. Temporary afflic-

tions exchanged for an incomparable weight of glory! Paul

considered it a bargain. So he acted on it immediately!

A POSSIBLE MISUNDERSTANDING

Of course, one might say that if suffering and afflictions are so

useful and well rewarded in the will of God, then let us afflict

and scourge our fellowmen all we can and seek suffering our-

selves. We are doing them a favor by hurting them or ourselves.

This seems to echo the old argument: Let us sin willfully so

that grace may abound. Let us seek and provoke suffering!

God forbid! The dentist does not willfully or wantonly bore

holes anywhere and everywhere in our teeth to stop the future

possibility of decay. God is the surgeon, so let him operate just

where he finds it necessary. He may and will use wicked men

as his scalpel. He has promised to reward them for their evil

intentions because they afflict others just for the sake of hurt-

ing and killing. Though he uses that same evil for his own

purposes, that doesn't give us the right to sin so that grace may

abound by hurting others or ourselves unnecessarily.

To indiscriminately inflict pain is wanton. Jesus himself

never regarded pain and suffering as good things in themselves,

for he abolished them by healing on many occasions. He also

told us to do the same. The Scripture speaks of death itself as

the last enemy. Pain falls into the same category. Pain and

death entered into the world by the fall, when man turned his

back upon God. The point is that God reverses the evils of

pain and death to produce a glorious result—to glorify his Son

and to glorify man when they both withstand and endure pain

and death in doing his will. This is how God triumphs over

evil—not by "stopping" it, but by using it to his greater glory.

In another book I have attempted to describe the character

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of the Man Jesus and have used the Sermon on the Mount to

illustrate some of my points.24 He said of himself that he was

"meek" and "humble" of spirit. Such an attitude of mind

would scarcely be compatible with his having created the

world by the principles of chance and natural selection of the

stronger specimens as laid down by Darwin. For Jesus did not

destroy the sick, the weak nor the importunate beggars, un-

fitted for the commercial life of his day, as Darwin's principles

would demand.

GENTLING PROCESS

A minister wrote to me, after reading the book cited, about

the subject of the meekness of Jesus, pointing out that the

word meek is often misunderstood. In the context used in the

Sermon on the Mount the word translated by meek really

means "gentled" or "broken in " as those terms are applied to

horses trained to work in harness. The minister recounted

how, as a boy, he had worked on a farm and helped with

"gentling" horses, breaking them in for farm work. Later the

horses were often used for pulling out tree stumps prior to

preparing wasteland for arable purposes.

The untrained wild horses were useless for doing the skilled

work necessary for removing tree stumps. They had to be

thoroughly "tamed" before they could work constructively

with other horses in teams. The taming or breaking-in and

"gentling" process was a prior necessity for useful work. Once

they had been submitted to the sometimes harsh process of

breaking in, which involved whipping and punishment as well

as rewards, they worked productively the rest of their lives and

obviously enjoyed it thoroughly. As their experience grew, the

reins could be left on their necks and they would go by them-

selves from tree stump to tree stump, assume the correct posi-

tion, wait for the chains to be hitched to the trunk, and then

with all their strength—nipping and nudging one another in the

process—pull out the stump. If a stump did not come up at the

112

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first pull they would move to a more favorable angle and try

again.

Affliction and suffering can work as a "gentling" process,

fitting us for God's work in the present world and the next.

This is the true meaning of the word meek as Jesus used it.

What if the abysmal suffering of mankind and of nature, a

result of the fall into sin, is now being used in God's good

hands to "gentle" us all—even as it "gentled" his Son? The

stakes are indeed high. Suffering makes us kind to others who

suffer. But what if a bloody war, a rule of tyranny (while

being recognized as culpable sin on the part of their perpetra-

tors, who are promised a just reward for their deeds) is really

working out an incomparable weight of glory for all those who

allow themselves to be "gentled" and disciplined thereby? If

this is so, it would be a fatal blow to the despair and nihilism

into which our generation is so obviously falling. If eternal

glory were to result (and the Bible says it will), then we could,

with the Christians of old, rejoice in suffering and jubilate with

the apostle Paul: "We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that

suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces charac-

ter, and character produces hope, and hope does not disap-

point us, because God's love has been poured into our

hearts."25

AGAIN, WHY ALL THE BARBARISM AND CRUELTY?

Some time ago I had the pleasure of discussing this and related

questions with a U. S. Air Force chaplain. We came to two

main conclusions which, as we shall see, throw light on the

above problem:

1. We all have some sort of freedom to choose among the

paths in life which are made available to us. Our freedom,

which incidentally proves that we're real persons, allows us

choices of paths in one way or another almost continuously.

But we never have any freedom of choice as to the conse-

quences of any path we choose. For these consequences are

129

Appendix

date the fact that the two are congruent and not exclusive. To

cut out predestination so as to be able to maintain free will is

like cutting out the wave-function description of light so as to

be able to maintain corpuscular theory. To effect such a "sim-

plification" is to introduce a false picture of reality. Both

concepts are complementary and are a part of reality even

though, to our restricted view, they appear to be contra-

dictory.

Thus, we maintain that free will is a reality and so is pre-

destination. It is our limited means of description which makes

them appear to be mutually exclusive. Reality contains both,

and both describe reality. But we must note one important

consequence of this. If free will is a reality, in spite of predesti-

nation, then all the consequences of free will described in this

book operate in full vigor—in spite of predestination which

exists alongside it.

Thus, I know that I, of my own free wil, when confronted

with Christ, chose not to say no to him. But having said yes to

him, I learned afterward that my yes was, in the eternal

counsels of God (ultimate reality) a foreknown and pre-

destined yes. "No" is foreknown but, as far as I know, not

predestined in the Bible. To eliminate either free will or pre-

destination is to rob reality of one of its aspects which needs

to be described by these terms. It is important to realize the

difficulties of description in regard to infinity and eternity-

phenomena with which our language and thinking apparatus

both deal inadequately. But, obviously, for the purposes of

this book the one aspect of the truth, that of free will, had to

be emphasized to clarify the message. But it would be tenden-

tious to try to eliminate the other side of the coin. If bona-fide

free will exists, as the Scriptures and experience maintain it

does, then it exists in its full force and with all its conse-

quences as outlined.

It will be obvious from the foregoing that, if God courts

man's free-will decisions, he is aiming at influencing him for

130

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Pain

good. This activity is entirely legitimate and does not interfere

with our freedom of action.

The Scriptures teach that there is more in this question than

merely influencing our wills for good. There is, working

against God's Holy Spirit, also a contrary activity striving to

influence man for evil. Just as a personal good one (God)

courts our will for good, so a personal evil one (Satan) courts

us for ill. The Bible teaches that men do not fight only against

flesh and blood in this life but also against spiritual wickedness

in "high places." The stark reality of this fact in the struggle

for man's will and man's good is underestimated in this day

when the masses of people really believe neither in God nor

the devil. But a whole book would be necessary to attempt to

deal adequately with this struggle.

notes

CHAPTER 1

1 Julian Huxley, ed., The Humanist Frame, p. 42, as cited by Francis

Schaeffer, The God Who Is There (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1968),

pp. 26-27.

2See Acts 17:2; 18:4, 19; 24:25.

3Gited by Schaeffer, p. 34. Cf. Ps. 30:9-11.

CHAPTER 2

Rom. 1:19-20

CHAPTER 3

*Cf. A. E. Wilder Smith, Man's Origin, Man's Destiny (Wheaton, 111.:

Shaw, 1968), and The Creation of Life (Wheaton, 111.: Shaw, 1970).

2Ibid.

3SeeIbid.

4The Glorious Koran. Dawood trans. (New York: Daybreak, Penguin

Classics, 1968), p. 23. See also Prov. 16:6.

CHAPTER 4

^ee Schaeffer, p. 100.

2The Glorious Koran, pp. 115, 167.

3John3:16, RSV.

4Rene A. Spitz, the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (New York:

International Universities, 1945), 1:53; 2:113.

s Wilder Smith, The Creation of Life.

61 Cor. 1:21.

CHAPTER 5

^eb. 12:2.

2C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: Seabury, 1961), p. 25.

32 Cor. 4:17.

41 Cor. 13:4-8.

5lTim. 2:4, RSV.

62 Pet. 3:9.

7John 1:9; Rom. 1:19-21.

8Prov. 8:31.

9John3:16.

10Matt. 6:33.

nHeb. 3:7-11, RSV.

12Heb. 6:4-6, RSV.

13Heb. 10:26-30.

132

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Paradox

of

Pain

CHAPTER 6

'Lewis, p. 31.

2Acts 14:22.

3Lewis, p. 25.

*Ibid., pp. 25-26.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7Matt. 27:46; cf. Mark 15:34; Ps. 22:1.

8Cf. Wilder Smith, The Drug Users (Wheaton, 111.: Shaw, 1969), p. 156.

9Heb. 5:7-9, RSV.

1O1 Pet. 4:1.

"Matt. 10:24.

nVhü. 1:29, RSV.

13Mark 8:31; 9:12; Matt. 17:12; Luke 9:22; 17:25; 22:15; 24:26, 46;

Acts 3:18; 9:16; 17:3; 1 Cor. 12:26; 2 Cor. 1:6; 4:17; Acts 26:23; 2

Tim. 2:12; Matt. 24:9; Col. 1:24; 1 Pet. 5:9; 2 Tim. 1:8; Heb. 11:25,35;

Phil. 3:10; Acts 14:22; Rom. 5:3; 8:35; Gal. 3:4; Phil. 1:29; 2 Thess.

1:5; Heb. 2:18; 5:8; 1 Pet. 2:19, 21; 3:17-18; 4:1, 19. (The sequence is

partly in accordance with the word occurrence.)

14Phil. 3:7-11, RSV.

152 Tim. 2:11-12, RSV.

16Heb. 2:18, RSV.

171 Pet. 4:1-2, RSV.

181 Pet. 2:19, RSV.

191 Pet. 2:21, RSV.

^Luke 24:26, RSV.

21Luke 24:26, RSV.

22Acts 17:2-3, RSV.

^2 Cor. 4:16-17, RSV.

^Wilder Smith, Man's Origin, Man's Destiny, pp. 170-74.

^Rom. 5:3-5, RSV.

^Luke 13:4.

271 Pet. 4:1.

28 Rev. 7:14.

29 Wilder Smith, Man's Origin, Man's Destiny.

^. 21.

bibliography

Arp, Hans. Fur Theo can Doesburg. De Stijl, 1932.

Camus, Albert. Caligula and Cross Purpose. Trans. Stuart Gilbert.

London: Penguin Books, 1947.

Cruikshank, John. Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt. New

York: Oxford U. Galaxy Book, 1960.

The Glorious Koran. Dawood trans. New York: Daybreak, Penguin

Classics, 1968.

Huxley, Julian. The Humanist Frame. New York: Macmillan, 1962.

Lewis, C. S. A Grief Observed. New York: Seabury, 1961.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Les Essais. Paris: Baudelaire Series.

. The Condemned of Altona. New York: Knopf, 1964.

. Iron in the Soul. Trans. Gerhard Hopkins. London: Penguin

Books, 1950.

. Nausea. Trans. Lloyd Alexander. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962.

. The Reprieve. Trans. Eric Sutton. London: Penguin Books, 1945.

Schaeffer, Francis. The God Who Is There. London: Hodder & Stough-

ton, 1968.

Spitz, Rene A. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. 2 vols. New York:

International University, 1945.

Wilder Smith, A. E. The Creation of Life. Wheaton, 111.: Shaw, 1970.

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. The Drug Users. Wheaton, 111.: Shaw, 1969.

In a world ^jVen over to the despair of the irrational and the absurd,

man needs to find intellectually satisfying answers to

the paradox of pain.

This book searches out meaning in the abyss of suffering, evil,

injustice, blood and anguish in which the human race finds itself.

The author discovers that love is the great producer of meaning

even in suffering.

by the same author:

The Drug Users— the psychopharmacology of turning on :

drugs, their clinical effects, and the reasons behind the epidemic of

drug abuse. Cloth, 304 pages, $5.95.

Man's Origin, Man's Destiny—a critical evaluation of the principles

of evolution and Christianity. Cloth, 320 pages, $5.95.

The Creation of Life—a cybernetic approach to evolution,

contains startling evidence from the computer sciences for intelligence

behind the order of life. Cloth, 270 pages, $5.95.

Harold Shaw Publishers

Wheaton, Illinois 60187

HSPI95

Table of Contents

The Paradox of Pain