Susie's Review - The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis

If you've ever asked yourself the question "Why does a loving God allow so much pain to exist?" then you really need to read this book. C.S. Lewis takes all those arguments that stump us (me in particular) and answers them one by one. I have to admit that a big roadblock in my faith has always been the dilemma of "If God were good, He would make His creatures perfectly happy, and if He were almighty, He would be able to do what he wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both." C.S. Lewis explains this in a way that I think anyone can understand and He uses clear Biblical principles.

This book isn't easy to read, the language is very heavy and elevated, but the overall message is a gift that is exceedingly valuable to the person who has always asked the questions I mentioned above.

Lewis' tackles heavy subjects like why God allows pain, why pain is inevitable even though God is powerful, why free will is necessary, and whether or not God is egotistical.

I've had countless arguments with other believers about the subject of pain, and why a loving God could allow it, and whether or not God is egotistical. I remember telling my mom that God must be egotistical, because He created us to praise and worship Him, and in doing so, has put us in a world filled with pain and suffering. We are tempted by sin constantly, yet He demands us to overcome it. It's all some big play that He gets to sit back and watch from a distance; if there is pain and hell then if God loved us so much He should just not have created us at all to save us from these things. That's what I really felt at the time anyway. I was never one to fall easily into the Christian faith. Faith never came naturally to me. I had to know for sure that I really truly believed it, and I wanted facts, not faith. Any loophole to Christianity that could be found, I found it. I wanted to believe, but for a while I gave up because it didn't make enough sense to me. Even though I've been a real legitimate Christian for four years I still have struggled with these questions. For someone like me The Problem of Pain is an invaluable book. Finally questions that have plagued me for my entire life have been made clear, and I really recommend this to anyone else who's had those same questions.

Here are a couple of my favorite quotes from the book. I warn you, they're quite long:

"When we fall in love with a woman, do we cease to care whether she is clean or dirty, fair or foul? Do we not rather then first begin to care? Does any woman regard it as a sign of love in a man that he neither knows nor cares how she is looking? Love may, indeed, love the beloved when her beauty is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal. Love is more sensitive than hatred itself to every blemish in the beloved..."

"Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved; that the mere 'kindness' which tolerates anything except suffering in its object is, in that respect at the opposite pole from Love."

One of the most memorable sections in the book (forgive me, this is long):

"My own experience is something like this. I am progressing along the path of life in my ordinary contentedly fallen and godless condition, absorbed in a merry meeting with my friends for the morrow or a bit of work that tickles my vanity to-day, a holiday or a new book, when suddenly a stab of abdominal pain that threatens serious disease, or a headline in the newspapers that threatens us all with destruction, sends this whole pack of cards tumbling down. At first I am overwhelmed, and all my little happinesses look like broken toys. Then, slowly and reluctantly, bit by bit, I try to bring myself into the frame of mind that I should be in at all times. I remind myself that all these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world and my only real treasure is Christ. And perhaps, by God's grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources. But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys: I am even anxious, God forgive me, to banish my mind theonly thing that supported me under the threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days. Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me....And that is why tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless."