Our theology of suffering is often generically theistic rather than specifically Christian, triumphalistic rather than providing guidance for going through suffering, and focused on defending God rather than focused on people’s needs.
– M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall, “A Trinitarian Theology of Suffering”

My husband likes to joke that I’ve never really suffered in my life. He’s not entirely wrong; I’ve had my struggles, but life for the most part has been a straight shot down the lane of my dreams and desires. Nothing has ever seriously challenged the alignment of cause and effect in my life, the supremacy of my own capabilities and efforts—until now. Until, in the forty-third year of my life, a cancer that all the experts agree had no cause to exist was found flourishing in my body.

When suffering strikes, you don’t have time to assemble an acceptable framework in which it can exist. All you have are the beliefs internalized over the course of your life, beliefs which become a functional doctrine that suffering does not so much construct as reveal. That is what Elizabeth Lewis Hall found when she interviewed nearly one hundred Christians on their experience facing cancer diagnoses: the meaning we give to suffering reflects the robustness (or lack thereof) of our theology. Some participants expressed theologically problematic views, seeing suffering as punishment from God or a ritualistic test. Other views were flavored by religious subcultures: Christians from historically Black congregations, for example, had well-defined “testimonies” emphasizing God’s control over suffering. Catholics practiced active surrender by focusing on Christ’s suffering; evangelical Protestants focused on the role of suffering in bringing about personal growth.

Hall argues that too commonly, our Christian view of suffering is incomplete. We take Romans 8:28 out of context to claim that God redeems all suffering for “good” in a way which trivializes the process and experience of suffering. We suggest that suffering exists primarily to change us for the better, when the end-goal of sanctification is not self-improvement, but intimacy with God for his glory. We tend towards “broadly theistic” views drawing only upon God the Father, rather than a Trinitarian view of the Father working by conforming us to the image of his Son with the help of the Spirit.

In Christ, suffering becomes not just a way of following but of becoming, an increasing in intimacy, fellowship, and likeness with the triune God we were created to love and be loved by. The Spirit intercedes for us and guides us in truth, shapes our longings and gives us comfort and confidence. “The all-powerful, good God the Father will only allow suffering that can move us toward the ultimate goal of loving intimacy with Him,” Hall writes. “The Triune God looks forward to the glory to come and works to bring it to pass.”  The thicker our understanding of this Biblical message, the more adequate our theology of suffering will be for confronting and growing through the suffering we experience.

My own experience of this varies by the day. Sometimes, this all seems to have cracked me open, leaving me tender to all the small glories, swayed by all the small beauties. Christ plays in ten thousand places / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his, as Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, and it seems my whole single-minded, self-absorbed life has left me blind to it before.

But other days I wake up leaden and lachrymose. I can do little but move sluggishly through the day, swimming through molasses, and all the doctrines and theology classes in the world can’t change how I feel. I am alone, bereft of any ability or desire to explain myself to others. But it is especially then that the cross gains reality as an act of intellectual humility. Alister McGrath writes, “[The] theology of the cross draws our attention to the sheer unreliability of experience as a guide to the presence and activity of God. God is active and present in the world, quite independently of whether we experience him as being so. Experience declared that God was absent from Calvary, only to have its verdict humiliatingly overturned on the third day.” I don’t have to feel it, or feel like I know it, for the cross to be true. That in itself is part of its lesson.

“I am a Christian,” writes Christian Wiman, a poet diagnosed with a rare blood cancer, “because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? … the point is that God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering. I am a Christian because I understand that moment of Christ’s passion to have meaning in my own life, and what it means is that the absolutely solitary and singular nature of extreme human pain is an illusion.”

An illusion. Suffering cuts to the bone, it cleaves us apart, separating illusion from reality, laying it all bare: do we have a faith based on platitudes and prosperity? Or do we have a theology thick enough to encompass pain and fear? A telos clear enough to carry us through the days of light and lead? Suffering can destroy us, but in Christ, it can transform us, as nothing else really can.