Why do bad things happen to good people? A conversation on suffering with Kate Bowler

In our lively, provocative and inspiring conversation on “The Spiritual Life,” Kate Bowler, author of the puckishly named memoir Everything Happens for a Reasons: And Other Lies I’ve Loved, takes on perhaps the most difficult question for the Christian: Why do bad things happen to good people? (I’m quoting the title of a popular book on the same subject from a few decades ago.) Kate knows what she’s speaking about: She is not only a professor of American religious history at Duke University, but also a cancer survivor.
There are many terms used by theologians and philosophers to describe approaches to this topic: “the problem of evil,” “the mystery of suffering” and, more generally, “theodicy,” which comes from the Greek words for God (theos) and justice (dike). Loosely defined, theodicy, coined by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, seeks to “justify God.”

The problem can also be defined with what is called the “inconsistent triad,” a phrase popularized by another philosopher, J. L. Mackie. He summarized three propositions that cannot logically coexist: God is all-powerful; God is all-loving; and evil exists. If God is all-powerful, then a loving God could and would stop evil. But since there is evil, then it follows that God is either not all-powerful (God cannot stop evil) or God is not all-loving (God can stop evil, but chooses not to).

Even if believers don’t think in precisely those philosophical terms, they intuit this most basic of questions in the spiritual life. Kate Bowler leans, as I do, on a God who accompanies us through our suffering, as she felt God did during her cancer treatments. For myself, the inconsistent triad means that we also are invited to believe in a God that we don’t understand, at least on this side of the grave. It’s a hard pill for many believers to swallow and one of the main reasons for atheism and agnosticism.

Yet for me, this move towards believing in a mysterious God is an essential step for the adult believer because it invites them to a deeply humble attitude—not only in the face of suffering but in the face of life itself.