Darryl Friesen’s Reviews > The Problem of Pain > Status Update

Chapter 6

We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved: we are, as Newman said, rebels who must lay down our arms.

Hence the necessity to die daily: however often we think we have broken the rebellious self we shall still find it alive.

The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it.

[Pain] is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

Ch. 5—a somewhat speculative chapter about the nature of the Fall of Man. However, the last sentence of the chapter bears absolutely true: “The thesis of this chapter is simply that man, as a species, spoiled himself, and that good, to us in our present state, must therefore mean primarily remedial or corrective good. What part pain actually plays in such remedy or correction, is now to be considered.”

Another chapter in which I couldn’t even begin to highlight a single quote or stated truth. Wow.

Maybe this: “Many schools of thought encourage us to shift the responsibility for our behaviour from our own shoulders to some inherent necessity in the nature of human life, and thus, indirectly, to the Creator.”

Or: “A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity.”

Chapter 3—a BRILLIANT unpacking of four different analogies of the love that exists between God and humanity: a) as an Artist to his art b) as a human to his pet c) as a father to his son and d) as a man to a woman.

“When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy.”

Chapter 2—“It remains true that all ‘things’ are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things, but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.”

Chapter 1—“In a sense, [Christianity] creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless, side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteous and loving.”