I picked this book up the week after a funeral. Not for research. Because I needed it. And that probably tells you more about what Keller has written here than any summary I could give.
Suffering does not wait for you to be theologically prepared. It arrives — in a phone call, a diagnosis, a relationship that quietly collapses — and when it does, most of what passes for Christian comfort turns out to be vapor. Platitudes dressed in Bible verses. Keller knows this. And he refuses to offer you more of the same.
What This Book Is
Walking with God through Pain and Suffering is Tim Keller’s most sustained attempt to address the problem of evil and the pastoral reality of human anguish. Published in 2013 and drawing on decades of ministry in New York City — a city that does not let its pastor hide from hard questions — the book divides into two major movements. The first half is philosophical and theological: Keller surveys how secular materialism, Eastern religion, and ancient Stoicism have tried to make sense of suffering, then makes a careful case for why the Christian account is not only coherent but uniquely honest about how dark things actually get. The second half shifts registers entirely, becoming a pastoral handbook — practical, Scripture-soaked, and often searingly personal. Together, the two halves form something rare: a book that earns the right to comfort because it has first done the hard work of thinking.
The Secular Answers Don’t Hold
Keller opens with a kind of intellectual audit of the alternatives. What does Epicurus say? Buddhism? The modern therapeutic culture with its obsession with healing and closure? He is a fair opponent — he gives each tradition its strongest reading — but he is also relentless in following each to its conclusions.
The secular framework, he argues, is uniquely poorly equipped for suffering. If there is no God, if this material world is all there is, then suffering is simply a brute fact with no meaning, no possible redemption, and no hope beyond what you can manufacture for yourself before death ends everything. This is the view Keller calls the “culture of happiness” — and he points out that it does not merely fail to comfort; it actively leaves people more isolated, because in a world where suffering has no meaning, there is a kind of social pressure to get over it, to not let your grief become inconvenient for others.
Against this he sets the Christian view — not as a philosophical explanation that solves the problem, but as a framework that takes the darkness seriously and then points through it. Romans 8:18 stands near the center of this argument: “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” Paul does not minimize suffering. He weighs it — and finds it outweighed. That is not the same thing as dismissing it.
The Cross as Answer — Not Explanation
This is where Keller is at his finest, and where the book transcends what most theodicy literature manages to do. The Christian answer to suffering is not, finally, an argument. It is a person. It is a God who enters the suffering, bears it, is broken by it, and comes out the other side carrying scars.
Keller draws heavily on C.S. Lewis — especially A Grief Observed — to articulate what he calls the “weeping God.” The God of Scripture is not the distant, impassive deity of Greek philosophy. He is the God who wept at Lazarus’s tomb before raising him. He is the God who, in Gethsemane, asked for the cup to be taken away. He is the God who, on the cross, cried out in desolation. Keller writes that God’s answer to Job was not an explanation but a presence — a theophany, a showing-up, that was somehow enough.
This cruciform approach is the backbone of the book’s practical section as well. The suffering Christian is not called to manufacture meaning or force themselves toward positive thinking. They are called to lament — honestly, biblically, in the tradition of the Psalms — while being held by a God who is acquainted with grief. As Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 4:17, this “light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.” Notice the word preparing. Suffering is not merely endured. Under God’s hand, it is formative.
Keller is also careful to distinguish between suffering as punishment and suffering as refining — a distinction that matters enormously pastorally and that too many Christian counselors collapse. For the person in Christ, suffering is never judicial condemnation. It may, however, be something harder to accept: it may be the furnace of sanctification. That is uncomfortable truth, but Keller delivers it with enough pastoral gentleness that it lands as gift rather than rebuke.
Who This Book Is For
This book is for the person who is currently suffering and needs something with more substance than a sympathy card. It is for the pastor who has a hospital visit this afternoon and feels theologically underprepared. It is for the skeptic or deconstructing Christian who has watched the problem of evil erode their faith — Keller addresses that person directly and seriously. It is for the seminary student who has read Plantinga but needs someone to connect that framework to the person sitting in front of them sobbing.
It is not, I should say, primarily for children or new believers. The first half especially moves with intellectual pace and assumes a reader who is willing to track a sustained argument. But Keller writes with such clarity and pastoral instinct that even less seasoned readers willing to slow down will find much to hold onto.
A Few Honest Caveats
No book this ambitious gets everything right, and intellectual honesty requires saying so.
First, the book is long — nearly 400 pages — and its structure means the reader must wait through substantial philosophical groundwork before reaching the pastoral material many will desperately need. If you are handing this to someone in acute grief, you may want to guide them to Part Two first and circle back. The architecture serves the argument, but not always the suffering reader’s immediate need.
Second, readers from non-Reformed traditions may occasionally find Keller’s framework doing work that is not fully argued. His handling of the relationship between divine sovereignty and human suffering is characteristically Reformed, and while he handles it with care, those who come to the text with different commitments on providence may feel the tension without adequate engagement.
Third — and this is small but worth noting — Keller’s extensive use of literary and philosophical sources, which is usually a strength, occasionally risks giving the impression that the answers to suffering are primarily found in careful thinking. The book corrects for this, especially in its final sections, but it is worth naming. Suffering ultimately presses us past thinking into trust, and a reader wired toward intellectualism could use this book to stay in their head when they need to be brought to their knees.
The Verdict
This is one of the most important books a pastor can own, and one of the most honest books a suffering person can read. Keller writes from a tradition that does not flinch from the darkness — a tradition shaped by Job, the Psalms, Lamentations, and the cross — and he brings that tradition to bear with rigor, warmth, and genuine humility.
He is not offering you a way around suffering. He is offering you a God who goes through it with you. That is not a small thing. That is everything.
If I had one book to give someone walking into the hardest year of their life, this would be near the top of the list.
Rating: 5/5
