The Problem of Pain (1940) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

show spoilers

Characters/People edit see section history

show spoilers

• Adam: First human created by God.
• Jeremiah: An Old Testament Prophet
• Abraham: From the Old Testament. He obeyed God and left his homeland to travel with his family to a place God directed him.
• Mould: Add a description of this character.

Quotes edit see section history

• “The world is a dance in which good, descending from God, is disturbed by evil arising from the creatures, and the resulting conflict is resolved by God's own assumption of the suffering nature which evil produces.”

• “...the problem which He had set Himself when He created the world, the problem of expressing His goodness through the total drama of a world containing free agents, in spite of, and by means of, their rebellion against Him.”

• “...the possibility of pain is inherent in the very existence of a world where souls can meet. When souls become wicked they will certainly use this possibility to hurt one another; and this, perhaps, accounts for four-fifths of the sufferings of men.”

• “It is so arranged that all the forms of it can live only by preying upon one another. In the lower forms this process entails only death, but in the higher there appears a new quality called consciousness which enables it to be attended with pain. The creatures cause pain by being born, and live by inflicting pain, and in pain they mostly die.”

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life it’self.

  Highlighted by 203 Kindle customers

• In a sense, it 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.

  Highlighted by 200 Kindle customers

• God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

  Highlighted by 192 Kindle customers

• ‘If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.’ This is the problem of pain, in it’s simplest form.

  Highlighted by 176 Kindle customers

• 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.

  Highlighted by 171 Kindle customers

• What we would here and now call our ‘happiness’ is not the end God chiefly has in view: but when we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy.

  Highlighted by 167 Kindle customers

• If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.

  Highlighted by 163 Kindle customers

• Christianity is not the conclusion of a philosophical debate on the origins of the universe: it is a catastrophic historical event following on the long spiritual preparation of humanity which I have described.

  Highlighted by 159 Kindle customers

• If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.

  Highlighted by 156 Kindle customers

• The third stage in religious development arises when men identify them—when the Numinous Power to which they feel awe is made the guardian of the morality to which they feel obligation.

  Highlighted by 153 Kindle customers

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Heaven: Where Christians believe Believers go after death.

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. C. S. Lewis (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 231.8

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Add a note to help parents select a book for a child.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Religion & Spirituality › Religious Studies › Ethics
• Books › Religion & Spirituality › Christianity › Theology
• Books › Religion & Spirituality › Christianity › Christian Living

More Books Like This edit see section history