Skip to main content

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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 f...
6 comments
Read more

Only connect

Last year on Ash Wednesday I attended an ashing service at St Paul's Cathedral.  The service focused on confessing our sins and asking God's forgiveness.  During the service a berobed priest made the sign of the cross in ash on my forehead.  I thought this was pretty cool and refused my husband's request that I rub it off for the train journey home.  Then we ran into an old work colleague of mine and I felt rather stupid. Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, is all about sin and repentance - 'sackcloth and ashes' and all that.  But I wonder how many people in the UK today identify with the idea that they are sinners in need of forgiveness?  My final year dissertation at theological college focused on the dilemma of how to call to repentance people who do not think they have anything of which to repent.  I certainly didn't think of myself as a sinner when I first started exploring Christianity.  I knew I wasn't perfect, but hey, who is? I have hea...
4 comments
Read more

Broken at the altar

A new drama series by Jimmy McGovern finished a couple of weeks ago on the BBC. Broken  tells the story of Roman Catholic priest Father Michael Kerrigan, a broken person ministering to other broken people in an unnamed northern city. It's still available on BBC iPlayer and I would encourage you to watch it - only be prepared for a few grim hours. I'll try to avoid spoilers here. Michael has a problem: whenever he celebrates Mass (which I think in the Roman Catholic Church is every day), he has flashbacks. At the moment of consecration - the point at which, Catholics believe, the bread and wine physically become for us the body and blood of Christ - he remembers every shameful thing he's ever done, and every shameful thing that has been done to him. We see his mother screaming at him that he's a dirty, filthy little boy; young women crying because he has treated them badly; mistakes he has made as a priest; people he has let down. His voice falters and he struggles ...
2 comments
Read more