If God is good and God is powerful, then why does it hurt so much to be human? That question has shipwrecked more faith than any manuscript criticism or archeological controversy — and C.S. Lewis meets it head-on with a clarity that still feels like cold water on a hot wound.
What This Book Is About
The Problem of Pain (1940) is Lewis’s philosophical and theological attempt to answer the oldest objection to theism: if God is omnipotent and perfectly good, why does his creation groan? Lewis was still a relatively new convert when he wrote it — his atheism had collapsed only a decade earlier — and that background gives the book an unusual texture. He is not dismissing the problem from a safe distance; he has stood inside the objection and knows its weight.
The book moves systematically. Lewis begins by reconstructing the atheistic argument with genuine force before dismantling it. He then addresses the omnipotence of God (and its real limits), the goodness of God (which he carefully distinguishes from mere kindness), the nature of human wickedness, the fall, animal pain, and finally hell. The last chapters are among the most underread and most rewarding. At roughly 160 pages, the book is compact but never thin — every paragraph is load-bearing. This is not a grief memoir or a pastoral comfort letter. It is an argument. Lewis himself acknowledged that its companion volume, A Grief Observed, written after his wife’s death, is the emotional underside of what this book handles intellectually.
What Lewis Gets Right
Three insights in particular have stayed with me across many readings.
First, his distinction between kindness and goodness. Lewis argues that we misread God when we expect him to function like a doting grandparent whose chief aim is that everyone have a pleasant time. A God of mere kindness, Lewis writes, would be a God of no real consequence — one who would let us rot in comfortable mediocrity rather than subject us to the painful work of becoming. This maps directly onto what Paul calls “the eternal weight of glory” in 2 Corinthians 4:17. The suffering of this present age is not random turbulence; it is operative. God is not indifferent to our pain, but he is not primarily optimizing for our comfort either.
Second, his treatment of human dignity and the necessity of a hard world. Lewis contends that a world without resistance — where no action had real consequences and no suffering was possible — would be a world in which virtue itself became meaningless. You cannot be brave in a world with no danger. You cannot be patient where nothing is difficult. The hardness of creation is, paradoxically, what makes genuine human agency and genuine human character possible. This is not stoicism dressed in Christian clothes; it is a serious account of why a good Creator might make a world that costs something to inhabit.
Third, his honesty about the inadequacy of every answer. Lewis never pretends the argument dissolves the pain. He acknowledges near the end that when the actual suffering arrives, all the logic in the world offers limited consolation. That intellectual humility is rare in apologetics literature, and it is one of the reasons this book wears its age so well.
Where Lewis Pushed My Thinking
I came to this book as a Reformed pastor with a settled confidence in the sovereignty of God — the kind that can, if we are not careful, become a way of talking about suffering without actually feeling it. Lewis pushed back on that tendency in me in two specific places.
The chapter on animal pain genuinely unsettled me. Lewis works hard to account for predation and animal suffering before the fall — topics that most systematic theologies handle in a paragraph or skip entirely. His speculative solution (involving the fall of Satan having cosmic effects on the natural order) may not be exegetically airtight, but the pastoral honesty of the attempt matters. He refuses to let animal pain be a footnote. As someone who reads Job 1–2 regularly and is struck by God’s willingness to hand Job over to genuine devastation, I found Lewis’s seriousness here convicting. Job’s suffering was not ornamental, and neither is the groan of creation in Romans 8:18.
His account of tribulation as divine surgery rather than divine punishment also pressed me. Lewis draws a sharp line between retributive suffering and what he calls “the pains of growth” — the discomfort of being remade into something better than you currently are. I hold a robust doctrine of divine wrath and I am not inclined to flatten that into therapeutic language. But Lewis is not doing that. He is pressing on the fact that even suffering which is not punitive may be purposive — that God is always doing something in what he allows. That has sharpened how I preach through affliction texts.
Finally, the chapter on hell, brief as it is, gave me new language for why eternal condemnation is not divine cruelty but divine respect for human choice. I had believed this; Lewis helped me articulate it.
Who Should Read This
This book belongs on the shelf of anyone who takes theodicy seriously — which, if you have a pulse and a Bible, should be everyone.
I would specifically recommend it to new or inquiring Christians who are wrestling with whether faith is intellectually defensible in the face of suffering. Lewis does not give you an escape hatch from the problem, but he gives you a framework sturdy enough to stand on when the ground shakes. I would also recommend it to pastors and elders who counsel people in grief — not to hand to someone in acute loss, but to have read themselves before those conversations happen. You will preach and counsel better for having worked through Lewis’s argument. The person in the pew on Sunday who is asking why God allowed the diagnosis, the death, the divorce — they deserve a shepherd who has done the hard thinking. This book is part of that preparation.
Caveats
Two honest notes. First, Lewis is not a systematic theologian and he does not pretend to be, but some of his moves — particularly around the fall and its effects on the natural order — are more speculative than he perhaps signals. Read him as a brilliant Christian thinker doing his best with a hard problem, not as a confessional authority. Second, the emotional register of this book is almost entirely cool and rational. That is partly its strength and partly its limitation. If you or someone you love is in the middle of active grief, start with A Grief Observed first. Come back to this one when you are ready to think again. Neither weakness is a reason to avoid the book — they are simply reasons to read it with your eyes open.
Verdict
⭐⭐⭐⭐ / 5
4 out of 5 stars. The Problem of Pain is one of the clearest and most courageous engagements with theodicy in the English language. It is dense, it is demanding, and it will not hold your hand through the hard parts — but it will give you a foundation to stand on when the hard parts come. Lewis writes as a man who has felt the weight of the objection and chosen, with full intellectual honesty, to remain a Christian anyway. That is exactly the kind of witness this moment in the church needs. Read it slowly. Argue with it. Come back to it. It rewards every return.
