Lament: The Path Through Suffering

By M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall

[M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall is Professor of Psychology at Rosemead School of Psychology, Biola University, La Mirada, California.]

[This is the fourth article in the four-part series “Suffering and the Christian Life: The Hard Road to Glory,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 2–5, 2021.]

Shortly after my diagnosis with breast cancer at age forty-five, my neighbor Stephanie came over to see how I was doing. My family had moved into a house across the street from Stephanie’s family when both our oldest sons were babies. Over the years, we’ve shared resources, watched our children growing up together, and enjoyed catching up in our front yards. Stephanie is a devout Greek Orthodox Christian, and after I had caught her up on my cancer news, she asked if she could pray for me. In her prayer she asked God to make my suffering a beautiful offering to him. The imagery stuck with me. It’s not one that I had heard in my evangelical world, suggesting as it did that suffering could somehow be connected to worship. That image of suffering as an offering to God stayed with me throughout my cancer journey and shaped my response to my suffering.

As I’ve done more work in this area, I’ve discovered that the connection between suffering and worship is a deeply biblical one. When Job learned of the worst catastrophe of all, the loss of all his children, we are told that he “fell to the ground in worship, and said: ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised’ ” (Job 1:20).[1] One thing that should be clear from Job’s story is that the connection between suffering and worship is not an easy or a quick one. The story of Job contains many, many chapters of lament, of wrestling with God. Today I will be talking about the road from suffering to worship, a road that is clearly marked in Scripture and that is modelled for us by Jesus—the road of lament.

Lament is making a slow comeback in conservative Christian circles. Just a few years ago, when Todd Billings’s excellent book on the subject fell into my hands, I had never heard of lament.[2] Now more sustained theological work is being done on lament, and a few churches have even started introducing lament into their services. But there is still much work to be done to make lament part of the typical religious experience of Christians.

My own interest in lament, in addition to putting words to something that I engaged in intuitively during my own long, hard year of cancer treatment, was in its potential as a uniquely Christian meaning-making process. Lament facilitates the creation of new meaning by providing a narrative structure, a narrative arc for the meaning-making story to emerge. Quite simply, when we as Christians face suffering, the meaning we are given as Christians to work with is what I spoke of yesterday, having largely to do with identifying with Christ in his sufferings. The process we are given is lament. It is a structure embedded in various parts of Scripture, which is intended to help us engage with our sufferings in ways that will lead to the right kind of outcome, ultimately intimacy with God, which I discussed on Tuesday.

Lament is the bridge between suffering and worship. How does it accomplish this? Seen from a psychological perspective, lament moves through a specific trajectory that is psychologically helpful. So today I’d like us to consider lament as a kind of narrative structure that helps to scaffold our distress in suffering. Lament is found throughout the Old Testament, paradigmatically in the Psalms, and these passages of lament are referenced extensively in the New Testament. Approximately 40 percent of the Psalms can be categorized as laments.[3] In discussing this structure, I’ll be relying on Pemberton’s work on the psalms of lament, which has identified the common elements of this narrative structure: an address to God, complaints, request, and expressions of confidence in God—in short, a process of meaning-making that leads from suffering to worship.[4] I’d like to discuss briefly from a psychological perspective why each of these elements is important in leading from the threat of meaninglessness to the creation of new meaning, from the chaos of shattered worldview assumptions to the order of a rebuilt worldview, from suffering to worship. An important theme to note in this trajectory is that it is essentially a relational trajectory from a place of struggle with God to a place of surrender and trust, out of which flows worship. This involves a shift from a focus on one’s self and struggles to a focus on God.

The Address To God

The psalms of lament typically begin by crying out to God. Psalm 13, which I’ll be using as an example, starts, “How long, Lord?” (v. 1). Lament is, by definition, engagement with God. The whole purpose of lament is to bring our suffering to God. It is not lonely catharsis. It is not mere expression of our feelings, as in secular usage of the term. It is not grumbling to others behind God’s back, which the Israelites were chastised for during their wanderings in the desert. So one crucial element in biblical lament has to do with the fact that we can bring all of our experiences, including our suffering, to God. Brueggemann notes the relational significance of this: in bringing the suffering to God, the believer can take initiative in the relationship with God and be responded to.[5] Consider the alternative. We have all been in relationships where we didn’t really matter, perhaps in relationship to a professor or a boss. The other person called all the shots in the relationship; we simply responded. There was no room in this relationship for our own concerns, needs, or preferences. We had no confidence that attempts to bring those into the relationship would result in them being attended to or responded to by the other person. This kind of relationship lacks any kind of intimacy. Intimacy requires responsiveness. The relationship with God could very easily take this form. After all, God is all-powerful. Our interactions with God could be limited to only responding to his greatness with worship instead of also being responded to. As Brueggemann notes, “The absence of lament makes a religion of coercive obedience the only possibility.”[6] But God is not that kind of God. Our God is one who invites expression of our concerns and needs and responds to them in the way that an attuned mother responds to her child.

As we look back at the psalms of lament through the cross, this relational dimension to the crying out becomes even more intimate. While the Jews had the image of God as a father, this was not a central part of how they thought of God.[7] Jesus’s use of Abba to refer to God—a term of intimacy—was adopted by Paul, who encouraged believers to likewise go before God in the certainty that God was their loving heavenly father.[8] When we cry out to God in lament, we can cry out to him as our Abba Father.

The Complaint

In the second component of lament, the cause of the suffering is brought before God in complaint. The threatened loss of meaning in the face of suffering is also expressed. Psalm 13:1–2 says, “Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?” There is a remarkable array of causes of suffering represented in the psalms of lament. As summarized by Pemberton, they include bodies that are not working well; disease and pain; disappointments in life; depression; people in our lives who by no fault of our own have become our enemies; people who lie about us, take us to court, scheme to cause us trouble or shame us and try to take advantage of us at our weakest moments; lifelong friends who abandon us at our time of greatest need, who turn on us, and who return trouble for all the good that we have done for them.[9]

But the most startling thing about the complaint is that often God himself is the focus of the complaint. Bible teacher and musician Michael Card writes that the two fundamental questions of complaint across the range of difficult life circumstances expressed are “God, where are you?” and “God, if you love me, then why?”[10] It would appear that nothing is off-limits when it comes to expressing our suffering to God. Doubts about God, anger at God, hatred of our enemies—God is open to our expressing honestly whatever is in our hearts. Again, this is remarkable. In our other relationships, our honesty is often bounded by power differentials in the relationship, by concern for the well-being of others, by fear of the reactions of others. God alone is big enough to deal in absolute honesty with what is in our hearts. Some may disagree with me about the need to express doubt, anger, and hatred to God, arguing that this is sinful. Time limits preclude me from going into a discussion regarding whether or not these reactions are in fact sinful. However, let me merely point out here that, if they are sinful, the sin has already occurred in our hearts. Bringing them before God is not the sin; instead it is the beginning of the process of turning away from those distressing feelings.

This expression of suffering is a crucial element of lament. In lament, suffering is not denied or minimized. Suffering is not dealt with by explaining it away or by distracting ourselves from it. It is recognized, and in so doing, the experience of the sufferer is legitimized. I made the argument Tuesday that our contemporary theology of suffering tends to be triumphalistic, skipping the process of working through suffering in order to arrive at the victorious endpoint. But meaning-making in suffering does not work that way. Research suggests that processing the suffering cognitively and emotionally is necessary for growth to occur.[11] The time that we spend sitting in our suffering, grappling with issues of meaning, is crucial. In fact, some studies suggest that the amount of growth is directly related to the amount of intentional engagement with the suffering.[12]

Putting our suffering into words in lament assists in this engagement with suffering, allowing it to be processed. But there is an even more important value to putting our suffering into words.

It allows us to bring it into the interpersonal realm. We are able to express our suffering to someone else, allowing for the sharing of burdens. Even in the relationship to God, who already knows what is in our hearts, voicing our suffering brings with it the intentionality of bringing it to the shared attention of the two people in the relationship. This shared attention, as we saw on our first day together, allows for intimacy.

The Request

While avoiding our suffering is not helpful, neither is it helpful to get stuck in it. In this third element of lament, the request, God is acknowledged as the one who can actually do something about our suffering. In Psalm 13:3, the request is “Look on me and answer, Lord my God. Give light to my eyes.” Wolterstorff distinguishes two kinds of requests for deliverance: deliverance from suffering but also deliverance from the threat of meaninglessness that often accompanies suffering.[13] This distinction highlights the difference between the difficult life event itself and the disorientation it produces. Both are brought to God for deliverance.

The acknowledgment of God’s power implicit in the request also introduces hope into the process of lament. When we ask God to act, we are reminded that God can act to change situations. Hope is central to meaning-making and consequently to flourishing. In fact, hope is a common component of all theories of meaning. Psychological research shows that hope is intrinsic to a sense of meaning in life and that when hope is separated from a sense of meaning, the inverse relationships between meaning and both depression and anxiety decrease.[14] In other words, hope is the engine that helps meaning translate into better psychological outcomes. Meaning-making must evoke hope in order to lead a sufferer into a better place. Research also supports this claim. For example, one study found that hope mediated the relationship between a sense of meaning in life and well-being.[15] In other words, hope is one of the reasons that people with meaning in life flourish. And people who identify with a religion tend to report greater hope.[16]

When psychologists study hope, they study a psychological construct that is rather vague, expressing a sense of optimism about the future. However, hope has a distinct theological focus throughout Scripture. The development of hope as we turn to God with our requests is shaped in the New Testament with a particular eschatological vision. The vision is one of suffering leading to glory. For example, in 2 Corinthians 4:17–18 Paul says, “Our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” “Glory” appears to be a kind of shorthand for salvation and, more specifically, for that part of salvation having to do with the process of transformation that will make us like Christ, resulting in our ultimate transformation into glorious Christ-likeness. As Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 3:18, “And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”

The particular content of hope from a Christian perspective is important because faith does not pit our current suffering against the eschatological glory to come. If it did, then our faith would indeed be a faith that silences the sufferer by simply distracting us from our current circumstances. Instead, our hope legitimizes our experience of suffering in two ways. First, the suffering itself is reconceptualized as a mechanism that can bring us closer to that eschatological vision (“this light momentary affliction is preparing for us,” 4:17, ESV). Second, the difficult events in our life are not diminished by minimizing their consequences in our lives or by denying their existence. Instead, resolution of our pain is achieved by seeing our current afflictions in the light of our eschatological hope (“an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen” 4:17–18, ESV). We are reminded that we live in a transitional age and that our current suffering is transient, but our future hope is eternal. Christ has defeated suffering and death, but we are still living in anticipation of the end of the story. There is still the need for lament in our hope; we “groan as we wait” (cf. Rom 8:22–23).

Our suffering does not disappear, but it is set in a different context—not the context of our current life, hopes, and dreams, but the much larger, glorious (to use the biblical descriptor) reality of our future hope. The context makes all the difference.

The Expression Of Confidence In God

The last component, found in all but one of the psalms of lament, is the expression of confidence in God. The transition to praise and worship is completed. The transition into this part of lament is often marked with the word “but.” It signals a contrast, a movement into a new way of experiencing reality. It signals a line that is crossed, at which the focus shifts from one centered on the psalmist and his own pain to one centered on God. The transition can seem quite abrupt, leading Brueggemann to say, “This movement from plea to praise is one of the most startling in all of Old Testament literature.”[17] For example, Psalm 13 ends, “But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing the Lord’s praise, for he has been good to me” (v. 6).

What causes the transition to worship? This is not clear in the Psalms. The psalms of lament are silent regarding why or how this shift to praise occurs. Has God already acted? Perhaps. My own sense is that something else happens here, a shift that is internal rather than external, that is based on a psychological and spiritual shift, rather than a change in circumstances. Based on my experiences interviewing many people who suffer, I think that the transition occurs because of the surrender to God that the earlier parts of lament facilitate. Even when God has not yet acted, the ritualized movement through the lament can lead the sufferer to this place of worship. As we pray through the Psalms—as we call out to God, pour out our hearts and petitions to him, and allow ourselves to be reminded of who God is—our desires, affections, and perspectives are reshaped. Eugene Peterson says that this is the lesson of the Psalms, “that all true prayer pursued far enough will become praise. . . . It does not always get there quickly. It does not always get there easily. . . . But the end is always praise.”[18]

It is clear that suffering itself does not necessarily lead to worship. We all know people who have faced suffering and have emerged bitter and alienated from God. So what is it about engaging with our suffering in lament before God that can lead to the kind of intimacy with God expressed in praise and worship? I think it boils down to this one thing: surrender. In our everyday lives we may acknowledge who we are in relationship to God. We may even intentionally cultivate attitudes of humility before God. But like Job, we are never entirely stripped of our claim on autonomy, self-determination, and control of our own lives until we hit the wall of our own utter helplessness in the face of what we most desperately want. And if we are wise, that will lead us to acknowledge what has been true all along: we are finite, created for a dependent relationship with a loving, omnipotent, omniscient God. When we are made to face this truth, we can then enter into that relationship in the form of surrender.

But there is more to say here. Our finitude and helplessness in the face of God’s omnipotence and omniscience could lead to a kind of loveless capitulation, the kind of surrender that an invading army demands from a conquered population. That is not what is in mind here. My collaborator Jason McMartin defines surrender as “the loving, active, and inward yielding to and acceptance of the will of God.” We can surrender to God in love because we respond to God’s love. When we surrender our suffering to God, this doesn’t mean that the suffering is our will, but simply that we are yielding our will to God’s will as exemplified by Jesus (“not as I will, but as you will,” Matt 26:39).

Surrender is sometimes confused with passivity or with giving up. But surrender is active; it involves ongoing, active cooperation. It actively responds to circumstances through acceptance and yielding to God’s will, rather than passively abdicating to unchangeable events. If Jesus’s death was the ultimate act of surrender, it is also clear that Jesus was an active participant. He said, “For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father” (John 10:17–18, ESV). McMartin argues that the mode of surrender is not just relevant to coping with suffering but is at the core of how humans were designed to relate to God. This gives a glimpse into why suffering is such a powerful means to intimacy with God: it takes us to where surrender is the only viable option.

What is it that allows the psalmist to surrender as a gesture of love and trust, rather than as an act of passive capitulation? For David, who wrote many of the psalms of lament, there was the experience of God’s love. He referenced his experiences of God’s lovingkindness frequently in the psalms he wrote, such as in the expression of confidence in Psalm 23:6, “Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life.” We have it even easier than David. While David looked forward to the fulfillment of God’s promises in the Messiah, we have already received the gift of Jesus’s coming. And in Jesus we have the man of sorrows, the suffering servant, who entered into our suffering in the incarnation and took it upon himself on the cross. When we surrender, we have the concrete evidence of God’s love for us. Our surrender is not to a tyrant but to a loving God who became flesh and took upon himself our sins and sorrows. And it is surrender to a God who powerfully raised Jesus from the dead. If the two fundamental questions of complaint are “God, where are you?” and “God, if you love me, then why?,” then the Sunday school answer, “Jesus,” really is the right answer. With respect to “where,” Jesus, God with us, is right there in our suffering. Phenomenologically, the more we identify with Christ in his suffering, the more he is there with us. The more we identify with Christ in his resurrection, the more we have hope. With respect to “why,” while we may never have the intellectual answer, from the perspective we take when we identify with Christ, a perspective that comes from the foot of the cross, we can have confidence that, though not seen, God is at work. The cross is ultimately what allows the transition from complaint to worship.

So surrender has two faces: the acknowledgment of one’s own finitude—one’s own powerlessness, helplessness, lack of control, and lack of knowledge—on the one hand and correspondingly one’s awareness of God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and, above all, loving presence on the other. In fact, I think the primary reason that suffering has the potential to lead us to growth, the reason that the Christian tradition throughout the ages has seen suffering as a road to growth, is precisely because it brings us to the end of ourselves. It does the hard work of stripping us of the illusion that we are in control of our life, that we deserve only good things, that the world is just.

My research collaborator, Jamie Aten, tells of his experience of being diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer at the age of thirty-five, in his book, A Walking Disaster.[19] One day, months into his chemotherapy, he dragged himself outside in the winter snow to take out the trash, all the while struggling with God about his cancer in an attempt to understand and control God. After making his way slowly back inside, exhausted by the small household chore, he found himself dropping to his knees beside his bed. His struggling with God gave way to another prayer: “If I’m not okay, please take care of my wife and my daughters.”[20] In that prayer, he acknowledged that he didn’t know what God’s will was and that he couldn’t manipulate God to do his bidding, but in that moment he felt a deep sense that he could trust God, regardless of the outcome. The result was a deep sense of peace and a quiet confidence in God’s goodness and reliability: a spiritual surrender. Jamie emphasized that there was nothing passive about this surrender and that deciding to trust God was a willful act of obedience. Jamie’s experience echoes that of the psalmist, moving from a crying out to God with his suffering to surrender and trust in God.

Suffering And Flourishing

So as we have seen, lament is a powerful way of engaging with God in finding meaning in suffering. It is a process that is grounded in the evidence of God’s love and the presence of God offered in Jesus. I’d like to suggest here that there is a further and surprising way in which the Christian story transforms lament. Our Christian faith suggests that we can not just endure but rejoice in our suffering. Our lament can end in thanksgiving for the suffering itself. Let me be careful to clarify that this is not a masochistic kind of getting pleasure out of the pain of suffering, nor does it imply passivity in trying to alleviate suffering. Instead, the rejoicing is tied closely with God’s redemptive use of the suffering in our lives. For example, Peter says, “Rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ” (1 Peter 4:13). Elsewhere Paul actually talks about suffering as a privilege. In Philippians 1:29, Paul says, “It has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for him.” Peter Hicks says of this verse,

The NIV’s “It has been granted to you . . . to suffer” is hardly adequate; other translations make a better attempt at bringing out the meaning by saying that we have been granted or given “the privilege” of suffering (NEB, Phillips, GNB, NLT), but even that misses the key link with grace. Suffering is more than something granted, more even than a privilege. It is a “grace,” as much an expression of God’s outpoured love and goodness as forgiveness itself. . . . So to savour its full meaning we need to translate Philippians 1:29, “It has been graciously given to you . . . to suffer”, or “in grace the privilege has been granted to you . . . to suffer.” The gift of suffering is no unwelcome imposition; it is as much an expression of God’s love and goodness as any other of his gifts of grace.[21]

Some may argue that this applies only to suffering that is explicitly tied to some kind of persecution. Let me suggest that in the broader context of Paul’s writings, no clear distinction is made between suffering simply as part of the human condition and suffering because of persecution. For example in Romans 8:17 Paul refers to suffering with Christ (“we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him,” ESV). But Douglas Moo points out that later in that same chapter (vv. 23–27), following the same flow of thought, Paul implies that suffering also occurs simply because of being human, involving sufferings of the body and suffering that results from living in the world.[22] Again, not all suffering can be rejoiced in. But when we are suffering in a way that cooperates with Christ’s redeeming work in our lives, accomplished by his suffering—when our suffering helps achieve our glorification and the intimacy with God that our transformation allows—we can rejoice.

Christ’s suffering has the potential to transform our suffering to the degree that we can actually receive it, with rejoicing, as a gift. Why? Only because of its link with Christ. Because of Christ, our suffering can be made holy, filled with meaning and purpose. Suffering is a gift we can receive with gratitude because it moves us toward the goal of knowing Christ, depending on Christ, identification with Christ, and participation in his glory. Paul expresses this passionately in Philippians 3:10, “I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.”

In wrapping up today, I would like to recommend to you the practice of lament. There is value in simply praying through existing psalms of lament, as the ancient Israelites did regularly as part of their worship. The Psalms can powerfully help us to put words to our own experiences. But they do much more than that. Words do not simply reflect experience; they also shape experience. When we engage with biblical lament, the shape of lament causes our experiences to be molded by encountering the reality of God and his character. It allows our experiences to be transformed, and it allows for new meanings to be created.

This profound engagement with suffering is countercultural. In contemporary America, suffering has been reduced to something that must be avoided at all costs, limiting us in engaging with the suffering of others and even with our own suffering. The suffering of others makes us uncomfortable, and consequently we often attempt to help those who suffer by distracting them or pointing out the potential benefits of their situation. The psalms of lament, which were often prayed in community, encourage us instead to stand with others through their suffering. The way out of suffering is through it, not around it, and the psalms of lament offer us a road map down this hard road to glory.[23]

Notes

1. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from the NIV.
2. J. Todd Billings, Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2015).
3. Glenn Pemberton, Hurting with God: Learning to Lament with the Psalms (Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press, 2012), 32.
4. Pemberton, 65. For the sake of brevity, I will not address Pemberton’s fourth component, “motivation.” For more information on the psychological aspect of this component, see M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall, “Suffering in God’s Presence: The Role of Lament in Transformation,” Journal of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care 9.2 (2018): 219–32.
5. Walter Brueggemann, “The Costly Loss of Lament,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 11.36 (1986): 57–71.
6. Brueggemann, 61.
7. Michael J. Gorman, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 12.
8. See Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6.
9. Pemberton, Hurting with God, 31.
10. Michael Card, A Sacred Sorrow: Reaching Out to God in the Lost Language of Lament (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2005), 17.
11. Lawrence G. Calhoun and Richard G. Tedeschi, “The Foundations of Posttraumatic Growth: An Expanded Framework,” in Handbook of Posttraumatic Growth: Research and Practice, ed. Lawrence G. Calhoun and Richard G. Tedeschi (New York: Psychology Press, 2009), 3–23.
12. Jeanne M. Slattery and Crystal L. Park, “Meaning Making and Spiritually Oriented Interventions,” in Spiritually Oriented Interventions for Counseling and Psychotherapy, ed. Jamie D. Aten, Mark R. McMinn, and Everett L. Worthington (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2011), 15–40.
13. Nicholas Wolterstorff, “If God Is Good and Sovereign, Why Lament?,” Calvin Theological Journal 36.1 (2001): 44.
14. David B. Feldman and C. R. Snyder, “Hope and the Meaningful Life: Theoretical and Empirical Associations between Goal-Directed Thinking and Life Meaning,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 24.3 (2005): 401–21.
15. Ilhan Yalçın and Asude Malkoç, “The Relationship between Meaning in Life and Subjective Well-Being: Forgiveness and Hope as Mediators,” Journal of Happiness Studies 16.4 (2014): 915–29.
16. Robert G. Kunzendorf and Franz Buker, “Does Existential Meaning Require Hope, or Is Interest Enough?,” Imagination, Cognition and Personality 27.3 (2008): 233–43.
17. Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary, Augsburg Old Testament Studies (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984), 56.
18. Eugene H. Peterson, Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 122.
19. Jamie Aten, A Walking Disaster: What Surviving Katrina and Cancer Taught Me about Faith and Resilience (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton, 2020), Kindle.
20. Aten, chap. 12.
21. Peter Hicks, The Message of Evil and Suffering: Light into Darkness, The Bible Speaks Today (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 166.
22. Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 511. Also note that a similar tie-in to Jesus’s sufferings and the suffering involved in being human can be found in 2 Corinthians 4:8–14.
23. This four-part lecture series was made possible through the support of grant #61467, Christian Meaning-Making, Suffering and the Flourishing Life, from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation. I am indebted to my grant team members: Crystal Park, Jason McMartin, Kelly Kapic, Eric Silverman, Jamie Aten, and Laura Shannonhouse. I am also grateful for feedback on earlier drafts of the articles from Kelly Kapic, Charlie Trimm, Jason McMartin, and Ken Berding.