On Understanding Suffering Through the Lens of Personal Experience

Andy Naselli, in an interview with Randy Alcorn on his new book If God Is Good: Faith in the Midst of Suffering and Evil, asks the question, "You interviewed many sufferers and tell many people’s stories in the book. Why was that important to you?" His answer is interesting and very helpful:

Stories of people’s personal experience are a mixed bag to me. I love them when they are subordinate to biblical truths and illustrate them rather than replace them. I love them when they help give us a glimpse of biblical doctrines, such as God’s providence, wisdom, patience, justice, common grace, and saving grace. In If God Is Good I tell many such stories, from the interviews and that I’ve witnessed personally and gotten from reputable sources. When I see God’s sovereign grace at work in the lives of suffering people, it touches me deeply, and in my experience it touches most readers.

But I don’t like it when stories are placed above Scripture and become the lens through which we interpret God’s dealings with men. I have seen this happen in books on the problem of evil. Honestly, I think Greg Boyd does this when he tells heartbreaking stories to demonstrate, supposedly, why God cannot know in advance people’s future contingent choices, and how comforting it is to them when they believe He can’t.

Some of the best-selling atheists books by Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens use illustrations that “prove” there is gratuitous evil and pointless suffering. But in fact, they do no such thing. Just because as finite and fallen creatures we are not in a position to see the point of suffering, or the greater good that can come even from terrible evil, does not mean that there is no point or greater good. It simply means that we are creatures, not the Creator, finite and not infinite. I mean, the universe is full of things we don’t know and understand. Why should it surprise us to see evil and suffering we don’t understand? This is where faith comes in to play—believing God even when for the moment we can’t see his purposes.

Read the whole thing.