Tag: Feature

From a Christian perspective, life is sacred, and the fracturing and dislocation of body and soul are extremely painful, but even in the midst of experiencing these dark and overwhelming feelings, there is a genuine, accessible and robust hope for redemption.

The suffering of mental-health disorders presents a very particular challenge to anyone considering the question of suffering alongside questions of faith since, if we are afflicted personally with a mental-health condition, our very perceptions, thoughts and feelings are affected directly.

Wondering why a loving God might allow suffering, or, for that matter, where he is while we suffer, are not questions that any of us can dissect with sterilised instruments in a clean laboratory removed from outside influence or bias or personal pain.

For many people right now, concluding for atheism seems like the obvious thing to do; the kind of suffering which has come with Coronavirus seems incompatible with the existence of a loving God. Yet our conviction that we have been face-to-face with real good and real evil and the unpalatability of there being no meaning at all suggests we cannot remove God from the picture. To remove God from the picture is to remove the possibility of an answer.

The first thing to say is that I don’t have all the answers. I’ll be honest with you, this is the hardest question that any of us face. To offer simplistic answers is worse than hopeless. We react very differently to coronavirus, temperamentally and psychologically and, this is one of the reasons I believe Christianity to be true, it deals with this differential diagnosis.

One of the biggest questions arising from COVID-19 came from the prevalence of people suggesting the current pandemic is a judgement from God or that it is the result of ‘cosmic karma’. Read what Professor Lennox had to say in response.