Eastside Baptist Church, Winfield, Alabama
Religion & Spirituality:Christianity
Walking with God through Pain & Suffering
By Tim Keller
Chapter 3: The Challenge to the Secular
• Secular philosophies of suffering do not do a good job of actually helping people in the midst of their suffering.
o In the real world, many people ignore the counsel of the secular philosophies.
o Instead, they fall back to the more traditional and spiritual explanations for suffering.
Where Were the Humanists?
• In times of crisis, the humanists are often absent.
• Clear religious and spiritual language is not questioned and is even welcomed in times of tragedy and grief.
• Religion provides more than just “community” in times of grief and suffering.
• Religion gives sufferers larger explanations of life that make sense of suffering and help them find meaning in their pain.
• Secular humanism is incapable of providing true community and is incapable of providing a satisfying theology to help in times of suffering.
• True community is only forged when people unify around something that is more important than their individual self-interests to which all share a higher allegiance.
• “Humanism suffers… from the valorization of the individual” and cannot sustain true community.
Is Atheism a Blessing?
• Atheism claims a superiority in times of suffering because it does not have to wrestle with questions of the goodness of God and the problem of evil.
• Atheism offers consolation to the bereaved by offering “rational truths” such as non-existence and no suffering after death.
• Atheism just moves on and seeks to find a rational and scientific solution to the cause of the suffering.
• Atheism exaggerates the “problem of evil.” It was not a problem before the rise of the “immanent frame” and radical individualism.
• A strong theological foundation is able to wrestle with and handle the presence of evil in a Theocentric world.
• Atheism claims a better response to suffering by advocating for solutions such as “social justice” and “human flourishing.”
• Two problems with Atheism’s claims:
o Issues of social justice have historically been championed more by religious movements than secular ones.
o Atheism’s naturalistic foundation offers no clear or rational basis for morality or justice.
§ Science and empirical reason cannot be the basis of morality, since they can tell us how people live but not how they ought to live.
• Is it really a comfort to the bereaved to tell them that death is the end of everything and “there is no suffering in death”?
• This is “too brutal to be honest.”
• It makes little sense to point to a state in which we are stripped of all love and everything that gives meaning in life and tell people that they need not fear it.
• The secular view of “non-existence” pales in comparison to resurrection.
• When real life suffering comes, historical experience shows us that people find more consolation in religion and spirituality than in the secular view.
• This intuition—that we are not just a concatenation of matter and chemicals but also a soul—is one of the most widespread convictions of human beings in the world today and through the ages.
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