Discovering the Real Jesus in Monroe

(Lake Michigan sunset at Warren Dunes State Park)

This summer Linda and I vacationed for a few days on the beach at Warren Dunes State Park in SE Michigan. This is one of our favorite Michigan places. We brought beach chairs, beach umbrellas, and books to read. We sat for 3 days looking out on Lake Michigan and enjoying each other’s company.

I brought C.S. Lewis’s book The Problem of Pain. I last read this book about 35 years ago, and thought I’d give it a re-read. Lewis is a brilliant and creative writer. I found PP to be, for me, better than when I first read it.

I’m going to make a few posts on PP, giving some Lewis quotes and then commenting on them.

Lewis writes: “Christianity is not the conclusion of a philosophical debate on the origins of the universe: it is a catastrophic historical even following on the long spiritual preparation of a humanity which I have described. It is not a system into which we have to fit the awkward fact of pain: it is itself one of the awkward fqacts whioch have to be fitted into any system we make. In a sesne, it creates, rather than solves, the probolem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless, side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteous and loving.”

Here are some bullet-point comments on this.

•  Lewis, in PP, writes to come to grips with the philosophical and intellectual problem of pain. He does not give us advice on how to physically or emotionally cope with pain. He wants to answer the question “Why pain at all?”
• If there is no God then there is no intellectual/philosophical problem of pain. This is because, as Bertrand Russell famously wrote, if no God then we live our lives “on a foundation of unyeield despair in a universe which had no prevision of us or our purpose.” Put simply: no God, no purpose…  for anything.
• For those of us who are Christians pain poses a problem. We have here a clash of two truths: 1) God is all-loving and all-powerful; and 2) pain is real. As Lewis writes, we have the assurance and expectation “that ultimate reality (i.e., God) is righteous and loving.” If this is so, then why pain at all?