The problem of suffering
By Rod Dreher
Rawlings School of Divinity
CLED 800: Biblical & Theological Foundations of Education
Genevieve Hamer
July 3, 2022
The problem of suffering
The starting point for the Christian understanding of suffering is the messianic self-
understanding of Jesus himself. A temptation to power and self-exaltation lay in the late Jewish
promise of the coming of the Messiah–Son of Man. The Gospel According to Matthew
described the temptation of Jesus by Satan in the wilderness as a temptation to worldly power.
Jesus himself deeply disappointed his disciples’ notions aiming at power and exaltation, in that
he taught them, in accordance with Isaiah, chapter 53, “The Son of Man must suffer many
things” (Luke 9:22). In Jesus’ announcements of suffering the Christian understanding of
suffering is clearly expressed: suffering is not the final aim and end in itself in the realization of
human destiny; it is the gateway to resurrection, to rebirth, to new creation. This idea receives
its clarification from the Christian understanding of sin. Sin as the misuse of human freedom
has led humans into total opposition against God. Turning to God can therefore take place only
when the results of this rebellion are overcome in all levels of human being, all the way to
physical corporeality.
In the early church the sign of the cross was not considered a glorification of suffering but a
“sign of victory” (tropaion) in the sense of the ancient triumphal sign that was set up at the
place where the victorious turning point of the battle took place. The cross was likewise
considered the “dread of the demons,” since as a victory sign it struck terror into the hitherto
ruling demonic powers of the world. An ancient church hymn of the cross spoke of the “cross of
the beauty of the Kingdom of God.” The emperor Constantine, following his vision of a cross in
the heavens, fastened to the standards of the imperial legions the cross, which was considered
the victory sign for the community of Christians hitherto persecuted by the Roman Empire, and
elevated it to a token of military triumph over the legions of his pagan foes that were
assembled under the sign of the old gods.
In the Christian understanding, suffering also does not appear—as in Buddhism—as
suffering simply under the general conditions of human existence in this world; it is instead
coupled with the specifically Christian idea of the imitation of Christ. Individual Christians are
called to follow the example of Christ; incorporation into the body of Christ is granted to those
who are ready to carry out within themselves Christ’s destiny of suffering, death, and
resurrection. The early church’s characterization of the Christian was that of Christophoros
—“bearer of Christ.” Suffering was an unalterable principle in the great drama of freedom,
which was identical with the drama of redemption.
The resurrection of the body
Just as clear is the significance that lies in the Christian understanding of the resurrection. A
dualistic understanding of what it is to be human, which assumes an essential difference
between the spiritual and the material-bodily sides of human existence, necessarily leads to the
idea of the immortality of the soul. The Christian hope, however, does not aim at the
immortality of the soul but at the resurrection of the body. Corporeality is not a quality that is
foreign to the spiritual. Everything spiritual presses toward corporealization; its eternal figure is
a corporeal figure. This hope was expressed by Vladimir Solovyov:
What help would the highest and greatest moral victory be for man, if the enemy, “death,”
which lurks in the ultimate depth of man’s physical, somatic, material sphere, were not
overcome?
The goal of redemption is not separation of the spirit from the body; it is rather the new
human in the entirety of body, soul, and mind. It is appropriate to say that Christianity has
contended for a “holistic” view of the human. The Christian image of the human being has an
essentially corporeal aspect that is based in the idea of the incarnation and finds its most
palpable expression in the idea of the resurrection.
Progressive human perfection
For a long time Christian anthropology maintained that the human was a complete being,
placed in a finished world like a methodically provided-for tenant in a prefabricated, newly built
residence ready for occupation. Redemption was understood just as statically: salvation
appeared in the teachings of church dogma as restitution and restoration of the lost divine
image and often in fact more a patching up of fragments through ecclesiastical remedies than
as a real new creation.
Although their view is not uncontroversial, some theologians have found in the New
Testament a progression of salvation in history. Indeed, there is a progress of both the
individual human being and of humankind as a whole, what might be thought of under some
terms and conditions as a potential for the progressive perfection of the human being. This
characteristic stands out in the proclamation of Jesus when he promises his disciples: “Then the
righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear.”
(Matthew 13:43). In the Gospel According to John, Jesus promises his disciples an increase of
their divine powers that is to exceed even the spiritual powers at work in himself (John 14:12).
Similar expectations are also expressed in the First Letter of John: “Beloved…it does not yet
appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall
see him as he is” (3:2).
The idea of the Christian “superman,” which was expressed by Montanus, is a result of this
view. In connection with the breakthrough of the idea of evolution through Darwin in the areas
of biology, zoology, and anthropology, the tendency asserted itself—above all in 19th-century
American theology—of interpreting the Christian history of salvation in terms of the evolution
and expectation of future human perfection in the form of reaching even higher charismatic
levels and ever higher means of spiritual knowledge and communication.
