Making Sense Out of Suffering

Kreeft walks patiently through the answers the tradition has offered, and he is generous with each. There is the free-will defense: much suffering comes from human choices, and a world with real freedom is worth more than a world of well-behaved puppets. There is the soul-making argument, associated with thinkers going back to Irenaeus: pain can deepen us, teach courage and compassion, forge character that comfort never would. There is the appeal to a larger picture we cannot see, in which apparent evils serve goods beyond our vantage point. Each of these, Kreeft says, is true as far as it goes.

And then he shows exactly how far each one goes, which is not far enough. The free-will defense explains cruelty but stumbles over the earthquake, the tumor, the suffering no human chose. Soul-making explains growth but not the pain that simply crushes, that ends a life before any soul is made, or that breaks a person rather than building one. The greater-good picture asks us to trust a plan we cannot inspect, which is cold comfort at three in the morning. Kreeft is not knocking these arguments down to score points. He is measuring the gap between what they prove and what a suffering person needs.

Here Kreeft makes his central turn, and it is not an argument but a claim about a person. Every human wisdom tradition, he observes, tried to get us out of suffering — the Stoics by detachment, the Buddhists by extinguishing desire, the philosophers by explanation. Only one story does the opposite. In Christianity, God does not stand outside the pain issuing reasons. He climbs in. The doctrine of the Incarnation says that God became a man and suffered — was betrayed, tortured, and killed. Whatever else this is, Kreeft argues, it is not the move of a distant judge.

This changes the terms entirely. The question had always been asked upward: why do you, safe and untouched, permit our agony? Christianity's answer refuses the premise that God is safe and untouched. On the cross, the accusation that God does not know what it costs simply collapses. He knows from the inside. Kreeft is careful: this does not explain suffering, does not tell us the reason for any particular tumor or loss. It does something else. It removes the loneliness from it. Suffering with company is a categorically different thing from suffering alone.

Step back from the particular doctrines and a pattern in Kreeft's whole method comes into view. He has been arguing, chapter by chapter, that suffering belongs to a different category than the problems we are used to solving. A problem is something in front of us that we can hold at arm's length and work on. Suffering is not in front of us; it is around us and inside us. The philosopher Gabriel Marcel drew this exact distinction between a problem and a mystery, and Kreeft uses it as the hinge of the book. We do not solve a mystery. We enter it, and are changed by what we find there.

This is why, he suggests, every answer that stayed on the level of explanation was bound to feel thin. Explanation is the language of problems. Presence is the language of mysteries. When we love someone in grief, we do not hand them an argument; we sit with them, and the sitting is the help. Kreeft's claim is that God's answer to suffering follows the same logic scaled up — not a message about pain but a person entering it. The medium is the meaning.

The question that arrived uninvited at the bedside is still there at the end of the book, and Kreeft has not made it disappear. He never promised to. What he has done is move it out of the courtroom, where it was always losing, and into a room where a different kind of response becomes possible. The problem of pain, examined as pure logic, stays unsolved for believer and atheist alike. The pain itself, he argues, meets its answer not in a proof but in a presence — in the claim that whatever God is, he is not standing at a distance.