St John's Extra
St John’s Extra: The End of Suffering
The Christian faith, including the Christian understanding of suffering, centres on the good news of Jesus: his life, death and resurrection. Last episode we discussed the amazing truth that God experiences pain and suffering in the person of Jesus. God understands our suffering, not in a merely theoretical way, but experientially. But the Christian faith offers us more than a God who has experienced our pain. That is amazing and comforting but it doesn’t solve the problem of suffering and…
St John’s Extra: God’s experience of Suffering
The heart of the Christian faith is the good news about Jesus: his life, death and resurrection. It is this which shapes the Christian understanding of suffering too. Perhaps the key thing that Christians can say about suffering is that God is not remote or removed from human suffering. Christians believe that God himself took on human flesh in the person of Jesus. He lived as one of us, he experienced all the highs and lows of human existence, and…
St John’s Extra: Suffering within our Story
As we wrestle with the problem of suffering, we need to think about how suffering fits within the story that we are living in. Humans are storytellers and we understand the world we live in through a ‘big story’ (the fancy name is a metanarrative) which provides a framework for understanding and interpreting reality. For Christians, our big story is contained in the bible and the first two ‘episodes’ of this story helps us understand the problem of suffering in…
St John’s Extra: Taking God out of the Equation
In these episodes of St John’s Extra we are wrestling with the problem of suffering. Last week we acknowledged that suffering is a real problem but not everyone would agree with this. For an atheist suffering is not a problem at all because it is just the way things are in a materialistic universe and there is no point trying to grapple with it and explain it. This is the way that the prominent atheist Richard Dawkins puts it: ‘In…
St John’s Extra: The Problem of Suffering
We need only look at a news feed or social media to see that the world is full of suffering. Around the world there are wars, violence, sickness, and starvation. There are natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and tsunamis. Closer to home, we experience serious sickness and disability, relationship breakdown, and the death of people we love. Suffering is very real. The challenge for us as Christian people is how we respond to this suffering. Let’s be honest, it’s…