Hospice spiritual care and suffering: towards a theodicy of suffering

Abstract

This century has seen significant changes in the Christian understanding of suffering. Hundreds of years of traditional belief about an unchangeable God who is not liable to pain or suffering have been challenged by theologians who have been required to reflect upon the meaning of God's love for the world in the light of contemporary understanding of what it means to be human. This understanding has partly come about as a result of the experience of mass suffering during two world wars. Totalitarian leaders such as Hitler and Stalin mimicked traditional images of God as One who inflicts suffering for some cause or ideal beyond human understanding. In revulsion against such views God's impassibility has been widely challenged and repudiated. Equally, psychological understandings, gleaned from the work of Freud, Jung and the relatively new theories of psychology and psychoanalysis, have contributed towards a much fuller picture of human personality and development. Thus, for example, within the 'caring professions' practitioners emphasise that personal love and care often have a profound affect on relationships in terms of feelings and emotions; in particular such love may be costly in that it might involve the sharing of experience and the awareness of another's suffering. According to Paul Fiddes this contemporary awareness and experience of other people's suffering means that sympathy may be taken in its literal sense of 'suffering with'.1 Love becomes the sharing of experience, so that the only way a person becomes absolutely aware of someone else's suffering is by participation in that suffering. Furthermore, if God is revealed in Jesus' suffering as an expression of true and costly love, then it is possible to reach the conclusion that a loving God must therefore be a suffering God. Indeed, the biblical evidence suggests that God suffers because of his love for his people. The Old Testament prophets, especially, spoke of a God who grieves, is disappointed and even labours under the burden of Israel's plight. Fiddes quotes the following passage from Jeremiah to illustrate this point;