Human Beings: Works in Progress

My Dear Reader,

There is one age-old anti-Christian (or, more appropriately, anti-God) argument that just won't stop coming up, and it's this: how can God exist when there is pain and suffering in the world? In my class on religious philosophy, we spent a lot of time trying to figure this one out. After all, since God is all-powerful, couldn't He have created a perfect world? And if He does exist and did not create a perfect world, is God really infinitely good? It's definitely something to think about, after all, how many times do we find ourselves trying to make sense of adversity? Buddha saw this, and his way of getting around it was by saying that life was made of pain and suffering, and that the best way to get around it was to stop all desire. Now, I think that there's a lot of value in that argument, but it doesn't really explain why evil exists, and out of all of the philosophers that I have studied last semester, I think that the guy that got it head-on was a man by the name of John Hick.

Instead of thinking of this world as a final destination, Hick saw it as an in-between stage. Instead of seeing people as created beings, Hick viewed mankind as beings still in the process of being created. In this view, pain is an integral part of the creation process, and rather than being evil or something to avoid, becomes "soul-making." It's an interesting thought. If the creation period didn't just last seven days, but is still ongoing,* and if the perfect world that anti-Godists demand is still in the works, that pain that we each suffer might make a little more sense. After all, nature has testified to us on multiple occasions that creation requires a little pain, which is why I'm pretty glad that I don't remember being born. In addition, the life that Christians are taught to expect after death is supposed to be a paradise, or a perfect world. Thus, life changes from being the awful place that Westly claims it is and instead becomes the process of human creation. That just blows my socks off.

Of course, those who are aware of Mormon theology can understand why I'm so drawn to this conclusion. Essentially, Joseph Smith made this same argument many times. It actually leads us to that one doctrine we have that everybody condemns us for: we believe that we are God's children in a very literal sense. We believe that He made us in His image, meaning that we are formed the way He is formed, if only on a superficial level for now. And since we are His children, we believe that we have the ability to grow and become like our Father. The doctrine might have made Romney lose the race, but it offers something that no other argument for suffering can: it tells us that our suffering has a divine propose, and that God understands suffering perfectly. After all, He knows how to use it as a tool to create the most divine creation imaginable.

I know that a lot of Christians have a big problem with this doctrine, but I don't think that the Bible does. After all, one only has to read Romans 8:16-18, which says:

The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together. For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.

The term "heir" implies that we will inherit what God currently has. The term "joint-heirs" specifically defines the future relationship that we will have with Christ as an equal one. That's a lot to think about, and perhaps a subject for a later time. But these verses also speak of suffering as a way of being glorified, as if Paul (and, as Paul says, the Holy Spirit) agrees that suffering is necessary before we can get this inheritance. Most importantly, these verses claim that pain we suffer in this life is nothing compared to the glory we have awaiting us. And if all of this is true, then the question now is not why suffering happens our lives. The question, instead, is how we can each take the suffering that is given us and use it to become the beings that God is in the process of making.

Regards, best wishes, and questions,

-Cecily Jane

*Just to clarify, I'm not negating the Biblical claim that the Earth was created in seven days (or, as the original Hebrew says, seven periods). I'm one hundred percent pro-Bible. I'm just proposing that perhaps the creation process for human beings was separate and a bit longer.