9. Glory Through Suffering

For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. —Romans 8:21-22 [p 148] [p 149] The argument so far We are now coming towards the end of this long section on the problem of natural evil. It will be helpful, therefore, to recapitulate the stages of our discussion so far. We began by defining the problem: How can we reconcile the existence of suffering with the existence of an all-loving, all-wise, all-powerful, Creator God? We then investigated what humankind's attitude to pain, suffering and death has been throughout the centuries and still is to this present, quite apart from the question of whether there is a God-­Creator or not. We found that humankind consistently takes the view that a considerable amount of pain and suffering and even death are justified, if the benefits achieved thereby are sufficiently large. We concluded that humankind can scarcely have any objection in principle, if God's purposes for the human race entail suffering, so long as those purposes are so grand and their achie...