Trent Horn is a young apologist and speaker for Catholic Answers, and a popular contributor here at Strange Notions. Over the last several years, he's travelled across the country, engaging in debates and discussions regarding atheism and pro-life issues. He specializes in helping people have intelligent and genuine dialogue about these contentious topics.

Trent holds a masters degree in theology from Franciscan University of Steubenville and just released his first book, Answering Atheism: How to Make the Case for God with Logic and Charity.

On February 12, Trent will formally debate Dan Barker, a former Protestant pastor who later lost his faith and became an atheist activist. Dan is now the Co-President of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. We'll be sure to cover the debate here at Strange Notions and link to the video when it's available.

In the mean time, Trent joins me today to discuss some of the topics in his new book, including where it fits alongside other books in the field, how atheists and Catholics can have more productive dialogue, and what he considers is the most formidable argument for atheism.

Watch or download our interview below:

Video

Watch the video here (22 minutes)
 

Audio

Download the interview here (22 minutes)
 

Topics Discussed:

1:57 - What sets Trent's book, Answering Atheism, apart from other books engaging atheism?
5:13 - How can we correct the bad attitudes that plague Catholic/atheist discussion?
9:09 - What are some common misunderstandings regarding the cosmological arguments?
12:30 - What is the most formidable argument for atheism?
17:18 - What value does personal, religious experience have in making the case for God?
 
 

 

 
Follow Trent's blog at TrentHorn.com and find him on Twitter at @Trent_Horn. And be sure to pick up your copy of his new book, Answering Atheism: How to Make the Case for God with Logic and Charity.

If you liked this discussion, subscribe free to Strange Notions via feed reader or email to ensure sure you don't miss future interviews.
 

EDITOR'S NOTE: Today's post comes from our friends at New Apologetics, a movement sharing a similar mission to Strange Notions. They use new media to dialogue about life's biggest questions, and have generated some great conversations on their Facebook page, which currently has over 65,000 followers. The authors of this article have offered to defend it and engage any questions or criticisms in the comment boxes below. So comment away!

As Catholic apologists, we want to do something that our name would suggest we do far more often:

We’d like to apologize.

By that we mean exactly what you would think; we want to say that we’re sorry. We understand that you might be suspicious right now, that you may be thinking that this is another “tactic” for drawing you in. It isn’t. In fact, having tactics is one of the things we’re sorry for.

You see, historically, we haven’t really known what to do with atheists. We felt helpless, and we wanted to do something. So we did something. You pointed out the ugliness in the way we held our beliefs, but we couldn’t see it because we were afraid.

We were afraid of losing ground to you, afraid (even within ourselves) that if we heard you, we would lose our own hope. It wasn’t all bad; there was something within us (under all of the unsound arguments) that we knew and recognized as true, good and beautiful, but we weren’t able to communicate it, and we thought your objections threatened it.

So, now we are going to come clean. And we are now going to come to your defense as human beings without asking anything of you in return.

To Tell You the Truth

 
We’ll just come right out and say it: Modern atheist rhetoric definitively smashes typical theist justifications about there being some divine purpose behind human tragedy. It doesn’t matter if the theist gets the technical win because of a slick argument. Debates on this topic invariably position the atheist in the manifestly righteous defense of the dignity of human persons and the right of innocence to go unmolested, while the well-intentioned, but humanistically impaired (and reaching) theist is left trying to sell a deity with inexplicable innocent blood on his “all-good” and all-powerful hands.

God can take care of himself; he doesn’t need our defense like that. Neither do we need to defend ourselves from looking foolish or from seeing what you see as clearly as you see it.

In response to your questions, a simple “I don’t know, but I believe that he’s good” would have been enough. It’s okay to look stupid if we believe he is defending us.

Time to tell the truth and shame the devil: We don’t really believe in God as much as we say. If we did, we would have had confidence enough to admit we were stumped. We would have remained silent out of respect for God, you, and ourselves: “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9: 24).

We pray to have faith enough to see things from your perspective and still know we are safe.

Christian Apologists vs. Home Depot

 
We once saw a window screen with a sticker reading as follows:

“Warning: Screen will not prevent child from falling out of window.”

If one changes the word “screen” to “God”, then all thinking people who believe in God have a really keen problem. It seems that a pane of glass counts in protecting a child from tragedy, but omnipotence and infinite love do not. All the writings of Christian philosophers piled in a great heap before us do little to take the edge off the meditation introduced by this little sticker. There is no applicable knowledge on the part of the child, no informed consent, the horrendous fact that it’s a real child, an apparent infinity of opportunities for God (all-powerful and all-knowing) to intervene, and yet there is no intervention. Any attempt at explanation which says tragedy of this sort is for a ‘greater good’ is absolutely out of touch with reality.

As Catholics, we do believe that there is a reason for God to not prevent evil, and are assured that he never fails to bring a greater good out of every evil. However, this recognition has nothing to do with God “permitting” evil in the sense of “approving of innocent suffering for some higher purpose”.

We have often used those P-words (permits and purpose) to mean God does not oppose evil perfectly, and we were wrong.

All talk of God permitting the tragic suffering of children as a means to an end or as the intentional ‘shadow’ component in a masterful cosmic painting is such that it cries to heaven for vengeance, but it was the best we knew how to say.

The view of the Catholic Church is not the view of the apologists in this regard, and we were wrong to let you think it was.

“God is infinitely good and all his works are good… We must therefore approach the question of the origin of evil by fixing the eyes of our faith on him who alone is its conqueror.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 385)

Wisdom. Arise. Let us be attentive: The conqueror of evil is not also its architect. And infinite goodness admits of no degree of compromise with evil.

These are not sophisticated, subtle, or hard to grasp theological nuances; they are the basic recollection of that easy and obvious standard of justice which we human beings (made in God’s image) intuitively upheld and radiated as children – before we got intimidated and started making excuses for God we had no right to make.

We believers, in ascribing a divine purpose to things like cancer and freak accidents (thus making God the “architect of evil”) did not intend harm (or blasphemy), but we are deathly afraid of what happens when we let the “other guy” be right.

This is a problem, and you atheists have been right to be offended and worried about us.

A Revival of Purity of Heart

“Purity of heart is what enables us to see.” (Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth)

To have a pure heart is to love what is good and hate what is evil. On the atheist view, people of goodwill can easily hate what is hateful (i.e. childhood cancer), and love what is good (i.e. children). To do so is to attain purity of heart to a large degree. It easy to do, and (let’s be honest) it also happens to be a huge relief. Nowadays, there are a lot of people who care more about suffering people than they care about being cast into hell by a cosmic tyrant, and that’s a heroically good stance.

A revival of “purity of heart” is coming upon our culture without much trying, and this is the biggest reason why people are leaving churches in droves.

And we need not be afraid to see with such purity of heart because God guarantees the outcome: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matt 5:8).

What we need to learn from you is to see is that good is good and bad is bad, lest our hearts remain impure.

A Moratorium on Inhumanity and Blasphemy

“And aren’t we—the lovers of the Word, the people who sing of the Good, we believers—aren’t we the ones who are most sensitive and most upset by our observation and experience of evil?” (Pope Paul VI, General Audience November 15, 1972)

Not really. Did we forget something important?

“The Lord says to his disciples: ‘My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch’ …while it refers specifically to Gethsemane, it also points ahead to the later history of Christianity.  Across the centuries, it is the drowsiness of the disciples that opens up possibilities for the power of the Evil One. Such drowsiness deadens the soul, so that it remains undisturbed by…  all the injustice and suffering ravaging the earth. In its state of numbness, the soul prefers not to see all this; it is easily persuaded that things cannot be so bad..." (Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth)

But it really is that bad, and you were trying to tell us all along.

Our offering has been unacceptable to you for one reason: Because it truly has been unacceptable.

We asked you to believe in a God who took away your hope of simply loving what is good and hating what is bad. And we condemned you for not selling out like we did.

We wanted our offering to be enough. It wasn’t.  And we wouldn’t listen because we thought it was only our right to have the offering.

It is why Cain killed Abel. And Cain’s punishment is the same as that of the apologists:

“If you till the ground, it shall no longer give you its produce. You shall become a constant wanderer on the earth.” (Genesis 4:12)

And this is the cure:

“Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit.” (John 15:5)

While we fell asleep, you atheists who are most sensitive and most upset by your observation and experience of evil have remained with the Lord in his agony. And we’re not asking you to believe us about that. Instead, we confess that we need to learn from you.

“Therefore, do not make any judgment before the appointed time, until the Lord comes, for he will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will manifest the motives of our hearts, and then everyone will receive praise from God.” (1 Cor 4:5)

 
 
(Image credit: Health Coalition)

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then where does evil come from?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
— Epicurus

 
Gruesome and tragic headlines from the past few months have thousands of people of faith scratching their heads, asking: why does God allow this evil to happen? Isn't he supposed to be all-loving and all-powerful? The question is even more pressing for people who are directly involved and suffering enormously.

This problem - known to philosophers as "the problem of evil" - is as old as the book of Job. Many theologians and artists, from Augustine and Aquinas to Dostoevsky and Thornton Wilder, have grappled with this fundamental question. In fact, we can survey the theological problem, its emotional gravity, and its strongest resolutions by looking at a handful of excellent films.

Oxford mathematician and philosopher John Lennox has often emphasized two very important things about this classical problem from the outset. I'll follow his lead here.

First, we have to first acknowledge that there is both an intellectual and emotional component to the problem. Secondly, both components amount to one of the best (if not the best) arguments against God that there is - and believers need to be humble enough to admit it.

With those preliminaries in mind, let's take a look at six films that wrestle with this problem: The Virgin Spring, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Seventh Seal, Signs, The Tree of Life, and Shadowlands:

These two Woody Allen films sum up the intellectual side of the problem of evil (also neatly summed up in the Epicurus quote at the top of the article). In Hannah and Her Sisters, his character - who is in the middle of a profound existential crisis - asks: "If there's a God, why is there so much evil in the world? Just on a simplistic level, why were there Nazis?" In Crimes and Misdemeanors, a jaded humanist at a family Seder says that Hitler "got away with" the slaughter of 6 million Jews. Where was God in the Holocaust? Why didn't he stop it? Or at least punish the wicked after it happened?

Countless theologians and Christian thinkers have wrestled with the problem of evil on this intellectual level, as Woody Allen often does. For example, writer Fyodor Dostoevsky made the suffering of innocent children the sturdy basis of his character Ivan's atheism in The Brothers Karamazov. Theologian David Bentley Hart calls this argument against God "far and away the best argument" (nota bene all you atheists), and the one that occasions his own periodic loss of faith.

In Allen's films, the solution is often just comic diffusion: "How the hell do I know why there were Nazis? I don't know how the can opener works." But there have been noble attempts at solving the problem of evil intellectually, which include emphasizing the notions of free will, the fall of man, and the permission of evil to bring about greater goods. In the movie Shadowlands, Christian intellectual, apologist, and former atheist C.S. Lewis - played by Anthony Hopkins - says that confidently that God allows suffering because "we are like blocks of stone out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men. Blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much, are what make us perfect."

But to the soul of someone whose child was just kidnapped, or who has just been diagnosed with a rare, aggressive form of cancer, such legalistic answers mean little - especially when the suffering looks so senseless, and so preventable. These answers may address why God permits evil in the abstract; but why is he permitting it right now, in this way, to me, to my child? At this point, no amount of intellectual maneuvering will do - the problem is, as philosopher Peter Kreeft calls it, "not just an intellectual experiment," but a "rebellion of tears." This is the emotional side of the problem of evil.

We see this side very clearly in that same movie, Shadowlands. CS Lewis, who was able to speak eloquently about the problem in the abstract, is personally devastated when he has to confront suffering in his own life: the loss of his first and great love, Joy Gresham, to cancer.

"Don't tell me it's all for the best," he says to his colleagues, who are fellow intellectuals and theologians. He anticipates their best answers and doesn't want them. A kindly priest tries anyway: "Only God knows why these things have to happen." But Lewis is totally unsatisfied with this response. "It won't do. It's a bloody awful mess and that's all there is to it."

The power and pain of the emotional side of this problem is also masterfully portrayed in two Ingmar Bergman movies: The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring.

The Seventh Seal, which has the famous scene of a medieval knight (Max von Sydow) playing a game of chess with Death, meditates over and over on the silence of God in the midst of great despair, and even questions his existence - a motif that is obviously very relevant for those going through great suffering.

But The Virgin Spring, which is about a young girl who is unexpectedly raped and murdered, gets right to the heart of the matter. After the horrible act of violence, the girl's father collapses and prays: "The death of an innocent child...you allowed it to happen. I don't understand you." Remembering when he watched this movie for the first time, director Ang Lee said: "I'd never in my 18 years of life seen anything so quiet, so serene, and yet so violent, and so fundamentally questioning God."

To my mind, though, the two films that deal most brilliantly with the problem of evil are Signs and The Tree of Life, for this reason: they provide the hope of a resolution, one which engages both the heart and mind.

Signs, on the face of it, doesn't seem like it's about this philosophical problem at all; the M. Night Shyamalan sci-fi thriller follows a family in a small rural town dealing with crop circles and an imminent alien invasion.

But underlying the film is a profound meditation on the problem of evil. The protagonist Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) is a former Episcopalian priest who renounces God after his wife is killed in a random, horrible traffic accident. For Hess - as for C.S. Lewis and countless others who have wrestled with the problem - theological explanations seem to fall short. Something is missing; it's God's voice, offering some reassurance, where instead there's only silence and what seems like indifference.

The key scene in the film comes in a discussion between Hess and his younger brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) about the arrival of the aliens. Hess explains that there are two groups of people looking at the alien lights in the sky in two different ways: one group feels that they are on their own, and sees everything, including these lights, as evidence of blind luck, coincidence, even chaos; the other feels that "there'll be someone there to help them," and sees signs and miracles where the first group sees coincidences.

When Merrill asks his brother which group he falls into, Hess describes his dying wife's last moments: her innocent body pressed against a tree by a totaled car, her eyes glazed, and her lips saying" See. Swing away." What sign could that be? It was only the random firing of neurons, electrifying the memory of some baseball game right before his wife's unexpected death. From that moment on, he decides: "There is no one watching out for us. We are all on our own."

This is a glimpse into the darkness and despair wrought by the experience of suffering. It's not that God doesn't love us - it's that he was never there at all.

The Tree of Life presents a similar pain and loss. We watch Jack (Sean Penn) wander in a state of spiritual desolation, contemplating the loss of his younger brother at the age of nineteen. In a flashback, their mourning mother is comforted by a well-meaning neighbor, who says: "Time heals...the Lord gives and takes away." But these platitudes are like band aids on a festering wound; they do nothing, heal nothing. "Why?" the mother whispers in a voice over, calling out to God. "Where were you?"

In both of these films, we see that the mind wants explanations about God's ways. But the suffering heart needs to hear his voice, to know that he cares, or that he's even there at all. And both films, in their way, reveal that voice.

In Signs, a bundle of seemingly unconnected and random threads - including Hess' wife's last words - suddenly weave into a big and beautiful tapestry that makes sense of everything. This restores Hess' faith that someone has been watching out for him; that his profound loss and his wife's painful death are ugly threads that will, in some way, end up a necessary part of a perfect whole. As we saw in Shadowlands, this isn't a message Hess could hear from a friend or neighbor - instead, he had to "hear" it from God, and see it in his own life.

Sean Penn's character Jack in The Tree of Life also "hears" God's voice toward the end of the film, through a transcendental vision that points to the "why" of suffering:

This glimpse of the ultimate reality of eternity stirs hope in Jack's heart that "all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well" - not in spite of suffering, but because of suffering. Suffering is the groundwork laid in order to build shared, everlasting love.

Neither Signs nor The Tree of Life denies the problem of evil, or tries to explain it away. There are grim portrayals in both movies of random illness, evil acts, and tragic death - lived realities that hurt like hell.

But when Hess put his clerical collar back on, and when "Agnus Dei" ("Lamb of God") is sung during Jack's vision of eternity, a very particular picture of God is brought to mind: not God as puppet master pulling the strings, or a judicial authority punishing us for our own good, or (as Christopher Hitchens called him) a celestial Kim Jong-il. Instead, we glimpse a "suffering God"; one who, as atheist Slavoj Zizek brilliantly put it, "is agonized, assumes the burden of suffering, in solidarity with the human misery."

The image of God himself beaten, stripped naked, humiliated with thorns, and nailed to a cross to die contains one of the most powerful "words" - the Logos - that suffering people looking for God's voice can see and understand. Why is it such a powerful response to the problem of evil? Because the cross literally connects suffering and weakness and pain with divine life, with God's love. (This doesn't mean that pain ceases to be pain - or that suffering should be idealized for its own sake. As trappist Thomas Merton put it, Christianity faces suffering and death "not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning.")

Even for those with this essential faith, intellectual problems still linger. For example: Why do certain people suffer so much more than others? How could eternity ever "undo" or "excuse" the horrible damage that has been done, especially to innocent children? And what about the suffering of animals - does that go unredeemed?

I think Hess and Jack would continue to wrestle with these questions beyond the final frames, just as we all do in our lives. But we see a fundamental hope taking root in both characters, grounded in a distinct understanding of who God is. This understanding, if we share it, matters; it means that when confronted with atrocious human evils like the Holocaust and asked "where was God," we're compelled to say: right there in the gas chambers, lifting up the suffering.
 

What other films exhibit the problem of evil?

 
 
Originally posted at By Way of Beauty. Used with author's permission.

If some natural, secular purpose could be granted to the man suffering, then his pain would cease to be suffering and begin to be useful pain. The athlete can point to the material purpose of fitness and strength to answer the problem of his sore muscles. The old man who wakes up ever day with inexplicably sore muscles can point to no such thing. Though the pain experienced is the same — down to the last, aching twinge — the old man suffers, and the athlete does not. Suffering, to be suffering, requires the lack of a natural, secular answer.

The secular cannot answer the problem of suffering (as I’ve spoken in depth elsewhere), but suffering is still a problem we naturally want resolved. (If you don’t believe it is, develop leukemia, have a close family member die, and then try being content with not having any answers, meaning, or purpose.) We are obliged to ditch the secular and take up the religious, as a man cutting wood ditches the fork and picks up the saw. Which religion? I cannot speak for all of them, though the very existence of religion as a fundamental human institution does lend support to what I’ve just argued, that we must leave the purely secular if we want answers in this life. I can only speak for Christianity. Think of Christianity as some obscure, New Age cult — so as to judge her fairly — and I will give you her claims:

CLAIM 1: Suffering is the result of sin. If you are an atheist, freaketh not, for we know this on a purely experiential level. When we sin against others — when we steal from them, malign their names, or harm their bodies — we cause them suffering. When we sin against our nature — when we isolate ourselves, or demean our bodies — we cause our selves suffering. Suffering is the result of sin.

CLAIM 2: This verified reality is in fact the reality of the entire cosmos. The very state of human beings and the universe they inhabit is a sinful one.

Again, this is not a religious claim. The word sin is translated from the Hebrew ‘chattah’, which means ‘to miss the mark’. To say that the world is in a sinful state is to say that our world is not all it should be, that it misses the mark, that it is — in a word — imperfect. This is verifiable. We do not wish children to suffer and die, and yet we live in a world in which they do. It is entirely possible that we will have to at some point push spiky balls of calcium through our urethras. The experiences of these natural things as imperfect — to say the least — is a universal experience. We live in a world that “misses the mark” of perfection.

(OBJECTION 1: I suppose it could be argued to the contrary that the world is perfect, but we apply our human standard of perfection upon the world, and are disappointed when she doesn’t meet that standard. Both claims are statements of faith. One says, “I experience the universe as imperfect. I believe this experience corresponds to reality.” The other says, “I experience the universe as imperfect. I believe this experience does not correspond to reality.” Both are statements of belief based on a common experience — the experience of imperfection, found in kidney stones, dying children, 9/11, Katrina, etc.

The latter statement of faith — that the universe isn’t imperfect, we just believe it to be so — means human beings are far too strange to exercise rational thought. To say that what I experience as reality does not necessarily coincide with what reality actually is is to be unable to say anything at all. If what I experience as true does not necessarily coincide with what really is true, then I can hardly say “It is true that the universe is perfect.”
But this is obvious, and I digress going after the few who would argue that children dying is a matter of ultimate indifference, and that it is only our projections that make it seem otherwise.)

So the universe is imperfect. To be imperfect is to “miss the mark” of perfection. To be in a state of missing the mark is to be in a sinful state. The universe is therefore in a sinful state. As we’ve established, suffering is the natural result of sin. Thus suffering is inherent to our sinful universe.

CLAIM 3: As the universe is imperfect, God is perfect, the fullness of Perfection itself. This is first of all a simple matter of definition. If you have in your mind an imperfect God, then he is not God. But there is proof to this claim. As the philosopher Thomas Aquinas says:

“Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But “more” and “less” are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest; so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being.”

If God created all things, and all things are good in varying degrees, than God must be the standard of Perfection from which all things derive their relative goodness.

(Minor objection: Of course, this assumes the existence of God, which I do not aim to prove. Rather I aim to say, if there is a God, he is perfect. (I come dangerously close to bringing up St. Anselm.))

(OBJECTION 2: If the Christian sheeple (I’m joking) believe that God is the fullness of perfection, and that to say that our universe is sinful — or imperfect — is to say that our universe is lacking total union with God, why then, would Perfection allow our imperfection? If God is all-powerful, surely he could forever stop us from sinning, and thus from ever suffering? Is he so cruel as to allow us to suffer, children to die, etc.?

We are allowed to sin — and thus to suffer — because God loves us. If we could not refuse him, the fullness of perfection, we would be puppets attached to his celestial fingers. We could not not love God. But love, to be love, must be freely given. Perfection is meaningless if we have not the choice of imperfection. We are granted, in love, the opportunity to sin.)

CLAIM 4: Christianity answers the problem of suffering with the bizarre claim that a man who was God, the fullness of Perfection, known commonly as Jesus, “became sin”. We must listen attentively to her claim, and suspend at least a minutia of our disbelief, for we’ve already established the impossibility of an answer to the problem of suffering springing from a secular source.

(OBJECTION 3: I understand of course, that I’m not proving that God became Man. This would of course provide proving that there is a God, which is not my goal here. Rather, I beg the atheist to read this and understand that, if there is a Christ, then suffering is granted meaning, and then decide from there whether there in fact is a God, a Christ, etc.)

Jesus “became sin”. Sin is the act of missing the mark, of missing perfection. It follows that Jesus, in totally becoming sin, became totally absent from perfection, a claim verified by the words of Jesus on the cross: ”My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” By becoming imperfection, he is forsaken by Perfection.
We arrive at a paradox. If Jesus is God, and God is Perfection, how could Jesus “become sin” — the absence of Perfection — and thus become the absence of God? How could God become the absence of God?
He could not: He would die. If I were to become the total absence of myself, I would cease to exist. I would negate myself, as a negative number and the same positive number join to make an abyss and a zero.

CLAIM 5: God died.
 

 
All atheism has its ultimate source in Jesus Christ then, for by his death he negated the existence of God. And in his death, sin itself died, for he became sin itself. And if sin died, suffering died, for suffering is the result of sin. And if all suffering died, than death itself — the ultimate human suffering — dies.
But again, we arrive at a paradox. What happens to the man who by his death, destroys sin, and by destroying sin, destroys death? He certainly cannot die, or else he could not have destroyed death. He could not die: He would have to rise.

Claim 6:
 

 
(OBJECTION 4: Why then, if this is all true, do we still suffer, sin and die?

Time is a product of the universe, and if there is a Creator of the universe, he must exist outside of universe, and thus outside of time. The saving action of an infinite God cannot be limited to time.

It’d be a mistake to believe Christ killed death and suffering, freeing from suffering and death only those born after him. Such an expectation assumes that Christ’s sacrifice is limited to the laws of our time, that his action affects only the future, as a human action only affects the future. But his action was infinite, outside of time. He died once, for the entire world, for the past, present, and future, lifting all things to Perfection.

Thus the place without the suffering we are promised cannot be a part of earthly space and time. It must be part of the “time” of an infinite God, a time that contains all our past, present and future. Thus we are told that Christ died that we might have eternal life, life free from suffering outside of earthly time, a place Christianity has given the name Heaven.

But more than this, we suffer now for the precise reason we can sin. God will not force salvation upon us. He will not demand we claim his victory over sin and death. We are not his puppets. We must choose his salvation as we chose to sin.)

And this, finally, is the answer Christianity gives to suffering. Since Christ became all sin, and suffering is the result of sin, Christ took upon himself all suffering. Since his act was for all earthly time, this includes our current suffering. If this is true, no suffering is apart from the suffering of Christ. All is his. I am a Christian because I can acknowledge the reality that my suffering is in fact the suffering of Christ, and thereby “offer it up” with him, giving it meaning and the most glorious of purposes: The end of all suffering.

As Paul says: “Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church.” Our suffering, because it is Christ’s, saves the world.

This changes everything: To see the child with leukemia is to see Christ suffering in that child, suffering to bring the world back to Perfection. To experience agony is to cry out with the strain of lifting this fallen world to Paradise. We are called to recognize this, and to actualize this. This is why I am a Christian.
 
 
Originally posted at Bad Catholic. Used with author's permission.