(Parchment & Pen Blog. By C Michael Patton)
This is an unedited excerpt from my upcoming book with Crossway: The Discipleship Book: Now That I Am a Christian. Chapter title: “Pain and Suffering” (book name and title tentative).
The overwhelming majority of Christians who suffer with significant doubts in their faith do so due to the pain and suffering they experience in their lives. The late Christian philosopher Ronald Nash once said that it is completely irrational to reject the Christian faith for any other reason than the problem of evil. This expresses the respect he gives to this issue. The “problem of evil” is the problem of pain and suffering. This is, indeed, a tremendous problem. C. S. Lewis, the great Christian writer, wrote a very academic book on pain, suffering, and evil called The Problem of Pain. It was a wonderful, monumental work and I recommend it without hesitation. But after he wrote this work, he experienced pain and suffering at a different level. It is one thing to evaluate something from the outside; it is quite another to personally experience it. C. S. Lewis lost his wife after a battle with cancer filled with ups and downs. It broke him and brought him to his knees, and he rested for a bit in front of God, asking painful questions which stemmed from his disillusionment. Thankfully, his whole experience is recorded in another book about pain. This one was a very personal book called A Grief Observed. In it he laid himself bare before God, expressing his confusion. I highly recommend this book as well. These are two very different works, one intellectual and one emotional, by the same person about the same subject. MORE
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