Stephen Fry on God

"Children with bone cancer - what's that about? How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault?"

http://fullist.co.uk/2015/01/interviewer-asks-staunch-atheist-steven-fry-hed-say-met-god/

A friend sent me a link to an interview with Stephen Fry on Irish TV in which he is asked what he would say to God if he met him face to face. His brutally honest answer begins with the words quoted above. Essentially, his view is that if God exists, he must be a monster.

The number one most commonly asked question on The Alpha Course: "Why does God allow suffering?" It's a humdinger and no one has come up with a satisfactory answer in 2000 years of Christian theology. I was very amused by a passage in The Da Vinci Code where one of Dan Brown's characters explains the problem of suffering using the simple analogy of a child on a skateboard whose parent cannot allow him the freedom to play without letting him fall down and hurt himself from time to time. Right. That doesn't really answer Stephen Fry's question about bone cancer in children though, does it?

Clearly I'm not going to offer a final answer to this painful question either, as it would be arrogant beyond belief and insulting to those who are experiencing intense suffering. But I have come across a school of thought which I have found immensely helpful and that I would like briefly to share. Following the horrors of World War Two, some 20th century theologians started reflecting on the suffering of Christ on the cross and saw there a fresh aspect of God's radical identification with human beings. It seemed to them that as the Son of God was born a human, suffered and died on the cross, God himself came to experience pain and even death. In this way, they argued, God placed himself on the side of those who suffer. God understands their situation from within. God provides a story of suffering with which others can identify. God states his protest against the forces of oppression and darkness in our world and invites us to work to bring them down.

Of course, while this is comforting, it doesn't really explain why God lets such terrible things happen. A sick child is hardly the result of someone exercising their free will, but the result of a profoundly damaged creation. But in the face of appalling tragedy, I find it much easier to love and worship a God who has been there himself.

Comments

Making the best of a bad situation

This morning, instead of going to church, I put this note through all the houses on our street. Despite being an extrovert, I have a tendency toward social anxiety. Despite being an evangelist, I really hate door knocking. As I approached each door, I noticed lots of “no junk mail” stickers and felt briefly worried. One sticker said “no unaddressed mail”. Putting notes through the doors of people I’d never met - even though we live within a few dozen metres of each other - felt risky. Even worse - some people were outside their houses. I actually had to talk to them! “Don’t worry, I won’t come too close,” was my opening gambit. As someone who suffered from OCD as a young adult, fear of contaminating others is quite a familiar sensation. We Brits have the reputation of being standoffish and maybe a bit antisocial, and the virus is not helping in this regard. And yet, I live in the commuter belt; many of us on our street go off to London on trains every morning and come home late

Halloween

It's that magical time of year again - that one night when my small neighbours knock on my door asking for sweeties. This year, I'm properly prepared: I have two pumpkins (I wanted five, but decided to be thrifty), a big tub of sweets and a tube of 100 glow sticks. The sweets are my concession to popular demand; the glow sticks are an attempt to represent light in darkness (a symbolism which will doubtless be lost on the kids). I'm seeing the pumpkin as my main opportunity to communicate something of my Christian faith to my neighbours. One year, while I was at theological college, Halloween fell on a Sunday. The new housing estate church I was assigned to met in a church hall on Sunday afternoons and many of the congregation were unaccompanied children. I googled 'Christian pumpkin carvings' and guess what - there are a lot of ideas out there, America being a country which is big on Halloween and big on Christianity too. I decided to carve a simple fish and c

Do not fear

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash When I was 15 years old there was a particularly unpleasant murder which was splashed all over the news. The culprits were identified, given long prison sentences and, many years later, new identities upon their release. I remember watching news footage of the defendants being brought to trial in a prison van, angry crowds screaming abuse as it drove past. My mother's perspective on this was interesting. "We all have darkness inside us," she explained. "It's easier to scream at it in someone else than to face our own." Today is All Hallows' Eve: for the past week, pumpkins, skeletons, witches and ghosts have loomed at us out of shop windows, from supermarket shelves and strung up as decorations outside homes. Tonight it reaches its peak as many of us, adults and children, dress up in the things we most fear. Axe murderers, which come to mind whenever we're alone in the house and hear a creak on the stai

Coffee Theology

Search This Blog