The Christian Understanding of Suffering

Abstract

I will begin with two extended comments that articulate at the outset some of the assumptions and the perspectives under which this subject is here addressed. First of all, it seems evident to me that each religion represents a unique overview or vision of all of reality, an overview that concentrates itselfthough it does not confine itself to this-on the deepest problem of human existence as it sees it, and on the answer to that problem as it had received or uncovered that answer. Each religious tradition also represents a unique access to that answer, to power, if you will, the power to receive, to share or to embody that answer. In this sense, to use Christian language, each religion represents both truth and grace. Clearly such a vision-and this is here our concern -is expressable in a number of diverse ways: there are different interpretations of Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity. Nevertheless, each represents a version of or perspective on that unique vision or overview of the whole. In turn this vision is expressed in and through the symbols (exodus, election, people, messiah; creation, incarnation, church eschatology, etc.) that make up the ideational content of that religion; when formulated, this cluster of symbols becomes its truths, its teachings, its doctrine. This content can be delineated by those within and without the community; reflection on it, and construction or reconstruction of it is the task, I would take it, of theology. In such a cluster or gestalt of symbols, each symbol (e.g., creation or revelation) is affected and shaped by its relation with other symbols within that gestalt. They form a relatively coherent unity, and thus do they serve, in part, to define one another. None can be understood in isolation, for part of the meaning of each comes to it as much from its role in the cluster that makes up the whole as it does from the character of relevant experience itself. Sin in Christian understanding cannot be understood except in relation to the Christian concepts of creation and redemption, just as it cannot be understood in exclusion from the experience of Christians. In this sense, all of systematic theology is implicit in any responsible delineation of a part of it-as is even the case with S0ren Kierkegaard!