Part VI: Theodicy — Divine Emotion and the Problem of Evil

Chapter 28

Does God Suffer with Us?

The Fellow-Sufferer Theodicy

Introduction: The Oldest Question and the New Dimension

There is a question that has haunted human beings for as long as they have looked up at the sky and wondered about God. It is the oldest, deepest, and most painful intellectual challenge to the Christian faith. And it can be stated in a single sentence: If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good — why does evil exist?¹

Theologians and philosophers call this the "problem of evil," and its power lies in its simplicity. If God has the power to stop suffering, the knowledge to know it is happening, and the goodness to want it to stop — then why doesn't He stop it? Why does a child die of cancer? Why do earthquakes destroy entire cities? Why do innocent people suffer at the hands of tyrants? Why does the Holocaust happen in a world governed by a loving God?

For centuries, Christian thinkers have offered answers — what we call "theodicies," from the Greek words theos (θεός, "God") and dikē (δίκη, "justice"). A theodicy is an attempt to justify the ways of God in the face of evil. And many of these answers have genuine intellectual power. We will survey several of them in this chapter. But what I want to argue is that the debate about God's emotional life — the debate we have been tracing throughout this book — adds a profound new dimension to the problem of evil that most traditional theodicies have missed entirely.

The new dimension is this: Does God suffer when His creatures suffer? And if so, does that change how we should think about evil?

This chapter's central argument is straightforward: If God genuinely suffers with His creatures, this transforms the problem of evil from "Why does God allow suffering?" to "God is present in our suffering, bearing it with us." This does not "solve" the problem of evil in a strictly philosophical sense. The logical puzzle remains. But it transforms the question in a way that is both theologically richer and pastorally more powerful than any answer that classical impassibility can offer. The question shifts from "Why?" to "Where is God?" — and the biblical answer is: He is right here, in the pain, weeping alongside us.²

The Traditional Theodicy Problem

Before we can appreciate the fellow-sufferer theodicy, we need to understand the traditional problem clearly. The philosopher Epicurus is often credited with the classic formulation, though its roots go even deeper into ancient thought. The argument runs like this:

If God is willing to prevent evil but unable — He is not all-powerful. If He is able but not willing — He is not good. If He is both willing and able — then why does evil exist? And if He is neither willing nor able — why call Him God?³

Christian theologians have worked with this challenge for two thousand years, and they have produced some genuinely impressive responses. Let me briefly summarize the most important ones, because the fellow-sufferer theodicy only makes sense against this backdrop.

The free will theodicy, associated with Augustine and many others, argues that God created human beings with genuine freedom, and that genuine freedom necessarily includes the possibility of choosing evil. God could have created robots who never sinned — but they would not have been capable of love, relationship, or moral virtue. The price of freedom is the possibility of its misuse, and that misuse is the source of much of the world's evil.⁴

Another major approach is the soul-making theodicy, often linked to Irenaeus and developed in the modern era by John Hick, which argues that suffering serves a purpose: it builds character. A world without any suffering would be a world in which virtues like courage, compassion, patience, and perseverance could never develop. Suffering is the furnace in which moral maturity is forged.⁵

A third approach, the greater-good theodicy, argues that God permits particular evils because they serve a greater good that could not be achieved otherwise. We may not always see what that greater good is — our perspective is limited — but God, who sees all of history from beginning to end, knows that the suffering of this present time is producing something that outweighs it (cf. Romans 8:18).⁶

These theodicies have genuine strengths. I do not wish to dismiss them. The free will theodicy rightly preserves human moral responsibility. The soul-making theodicy captures a real truth about how suffering can build character. And the greater-good theodicy trusts in the wisdom of a God who sees what we cannot see. All of these contain important biblical insights.

But here is the problem. All of these traditional theodicies share a common assumption — and it is precisely at this point that the divine emotion debate becomes relevant. The common assumption is that God Himself is not affected by the suffering He permits. In the classical framework, God observes the unfolding of His plan — including all its suffering — from a position of perfect, undisturbed bliss. He is the architect of a plan that includes evil, and He watches it unfold with serene contentment, knowing that the final outcome will justify every painful step along the way.⁷

The Classical Impassibilist Approach to Theodicy

The impassibilist approach to theodicy can be stated quite simply. God permits evil for wise and sovereign purposes. He is not Himself affected by the evil He permits. His plan is perfect. Evil is, in some sense, part of that plan — or at least something that God, in His wisdom, has chosen to allow. And God observes the plan unfolding from a state of undisturbed blessedness. His happiness is not diminished one fraction of a degree by the suffering of His creatures.⁸

Now, let me say clearly: I believe this view has real intellectual strengths. It preserves divine sovereignty in the strongest possible terms. It insists that God is not a victim of evil — He is the Lord who will triumph over evil. It maintains that the final outcome of history is guaranteed by a God who cannot be shaken, disturbed, or thrown off course by anything that happens in the world. These are important truths, and I do not want to lose them.

But the impassibilist approach has a devastating pastoral weakness. And it is a weakness that I believe undermines its credibility as a complete response to evil.

Consider this scenario. A mother has just lost her child to cancer. She is sitting in a hospital room, shattered with grief, barely able to breathe through her tears. And a pastor comes in and says to her: "God has a plan, and He is perfectly happy right now. Your daughter's death does not disturb His bliss. He is in a state of complete contentment, and nothing in your experience has registered as pain in His experience. But His plan is good, and you should trust it."

Is that comfort? In a technical sense, perhaps. It tells the mother that God is in control. But in a human, relational, pastoral sense, it is not merely inadequate — it borders on cruelty. Because what the grieving mother needs is not just a God who has a plan. She needs a God who cares. She needs to know that her daughter's death has broken God's heart too. She needs to know that the Creator of the universe is not sitting in serene contentment while she drowns in grief, but is weeping with her — that her loss is His loss, that her pain has registered in His experience.⁹

This is the pastoral weakness of the impassibilist theodicy. It answers the intellectual question ("Why does God allow this?") but fails to answer the existential question ("Does God care that this is happening to me?"). And for most people in the midst of actual suffering, the existential question is far more urgent than the intellectual one.

As Richard Bauckham has observed, the basic problem of traditional theism with its purely active, impassible God is precisely this question of theodicy: how can an all-powerful and invulnerable God be justified in the face of the sheer enormity of human suffering?¹⁰ The traditional answers may satisfy the philosopher in the study, but they can feel hollow to the parent in the hospital.

The Rise of the Fellow-Sufferer Theodicy

It was precisely this pastoral gap that gave rise to what scholars have called the "fellow-sufferer theodicy" — the view that God does not merely observe suffering from a distance but enters into it, sharing the pain of His creatures. The fellow-sufferer theodicy arose most powerfully in the twentieth century, shaped in large part by the catastrophic suffering of two world wars, the Holocaust, and the existential crisis these events provoked in Western Christianity.¹¹

The logic of the fellow-sufferer theodicy is not complicated. It runs something like this:

1. The world is full of terrible suffering — suffering so enormous, so senseless, and so cruel that no purely intellectual explanation can fully account for it. Auschwitz. The killing fields of Cambodia. Child sex trafficking. The slow death of a five-year-old from leukemia. No philosophical argument can make these horrors "make sense."

2. But if God genuinely suffers with His creatures — if their pain registers in His experience, if their grief breaks His heart — then something profound changes. The question shifts from "Why does God allow this?" to "Where is God in this?" And the answer is: God is here. He is in the hospital room. He is in the refugee camp. He is in the grief of every parent who buries a child. He is not watching from above in serene detachment. He is weeping alongside.¹²

3. This does not "solve" the problem of evil in a philosophical sense. The logical puzzle remains: why does an all-powerful God allow this suffering in the first place? The fellow-sufferer theodicy is honest about this. It does not pretend to explain why God permits evil. But it transforms the pastoral dimension of the problem in a way that the impassibilist approach cannot. It answers the existential question: God is with you. God hurts for you. God carries this with you.

As Rob Lister has helpfully observed, the modern passibilist commitment to divine suffering as a response to evil can be summarized in three propositions: first, human suffering of such magnitude necessitates divine suffering; second, even though the thesis of divine suffering does not constitute a formal theodicy, it is the only acceptable response to the problem of evil; and third, once it has been concluded from the theodicy question that God is a fellow-sufferer, then it may readily be inferred that God is passible.¹³

What this reveals — and Lister is right to point this out — is that the passibilist logic on this point typically runs not from passibility to theodicy, but from theodicy to passibility. In other words, the experience of overwhelming suffering drives thinkers to conclude that God must suffer with us, and from this they derive the conclusion that God is passible. As Thomas Weinandy has summarized the passibilist reasoning: "God is passible because God must suffer."¹⁴

Now, there is something important to note here, and I want to be fair to both sides. Lister rightly observes that this reveals a presupposition at work in passibilist thought — a presupposition about the experience of human suffering from which passibilists then argue to their conclusion about divine passibility. This observation does not mean passibilism is wrong. But it does show that passibilists, who often charge impassibilists with beginning from extrabiblical philosophical presuppositions, are themselves beginning from a presupposition — in this case, a presupposition about what kind of God the reality of suffering demands.¹⁵ I think this is a fair critique, and I will return to it below. But I also think it does not undermine the core insight of the fellow-sufferer theodicy. The question is whether the presupposition is true — and I believe it is, because the Bible itself teaches it.

Moltmann and the Crucified God: The Cross as Theodicy

No thinker in the modern era has pressed the fellow-sufferer theodicy with more passion and power than Jürgen Moltmann. His landmark work The Crucified God (1974) remains one of the most influential theological books of the twentieth century, and its central argument bears directly on our discussion.¹⁶

Moltmann's core claim is that the cross of Christ is not merely something that happened to the human nature of Jesus. It is an event within the life of the Trinity itself. At the cross, the Son suffers abandonment by the Father. The Father suffers the loss of the Son. And the Spirit proceeds from this shared suffering, binding the world's pain into the heart of God. The cross, for Moltmann, is nothing less than the revelation of who God truly is — a God whose very being is constituted by suffering love.¹⁷

His writing on this subject carries searing intensity. An impassible God, he argues, is "poorer than any man." A God who is incapable of suffering is a being who cannot be genuinely involved with the world. Suffering and injustice do not affect him. He cannot weep, for he has no tears. And a being who cannot suffer cannot truly love. Such a God, Moltmann concludes, is essentially the God of Aristotle — an unmoved mover, cold and distant, not the God revealed in the crucified Christ.¹⁸

This leads Moltmann to his famous conclusion about theodicy. He argues that the only answer to "protest atheism" — the atheism born of rage against a God who allows such suffering — is the recognition that God Himself is in the suffering. As Richard Bauckham summarizes Moltmann's position: the cross does not solve the problem of suffering, but it meets suffering with the voluntary fellow-suffering of divine love. Solidarity in suffering does not abolish the pain, but it overcomes what Moltmann calls "the suffering in suffering" — the loneliness, the abandonment, the utter isolation that makes suffering truly unbearable.¹⁹

There is immense power in this vision. Moltmann takes the cross with radical seriousness as a revelation of God's character. And his pastoral instinct is profound: for the person who is drowning in grief, the most healing thing they can hear is not "God has a plan" but "God is with you in this." Moltmann understands that.

But Moltmann's vision also has serious problems — problems I must address honestly, because our mediating position (as developed throughout this book) agrees with Moltmann's core insight while rejecting several of his specific conclusions.

First, Moltmann tends to make suffering constitutive of God's eternal nature. He writes that the self-sacrifice of love is "God's eternal nature" and that there is "no definition of the divine nature which could avoid including this." This means that for Moltmann, suffering is not something God freely chooses in response to creaturely need — it is something built into the very structure of divine reality. A God who does not suffer would not really be God. As we discussed in Chapter 9, this goes too far. It makes suffering a necessity for God rather than a free choice born of love, and it compromises the gratuitous, gracious character of God's involvement with His creatures.²⁰

Second, as J. D. Kim has observed, Moltmann's theology of the cross focuses on God's solidarity with the suffering of the world at the expense of the cross's redemptive purpose. In Moltmann's framework, the cross is primarily about God identifying with sufferers — but the Bible presents the cross primarily as God's victory over sin and its effects. Peter Vande Brake captures this concern well: for Moltmann, God's suffering with humanity seems to be more central than the forgiveness of the world's sins in the suffering, death, and resurrection of the Son. The cross is not merely a sign of divine solidarity — it is the achievement of redemption.²¹

Third, Moltmann's panentheistic tendencies lead him to deny God's genuine self-sufficiency. For Moltmann, God needs the world in order to become fully Himself. God cannot not create. The incarnation is not primarily God's response to human sin but the fulfillment of God's eternal longing to become human. This compromises divine aseity — the truth that God is fully complete in Himself, and that creation is a free act of love rather than a necessity of the divine nature.²²

Fourth, as Lister rightly argues, many contemporary passibilists — Moltmann included — see the cross merely as a sign of God's suffering solidarity, without the accompanying assurance that this necessarily portends any final victory. In that sense, the passibilist can actually downplay the power and significance of the cross. The classical view sees the cross in relation to the achievement of victory over sin. The most extreme passibilist view sees it merely as an expression of divine empathy. Both aspects are essential, and losing the redemptive dimension of the cross is a serious theological error.²³

Wolterstorff: The Grieving Father and the Grieving God

If Moltmann provides the theological architecture for the fellow-sufferer theodicy, Nicholas Wolterstorff provides its human face. Wolterstorff was one of the most distinguished Christian philosophers of the twentieth century — a professor at Yale, a leading voice in Reformed epistemology, a rigorous analytical thinker. But in 1987, he published a book that was not a work of philosophy. It was a cry of pain.

Lament for a Son was written after the death of Wolterstorff's twenty-five-year-old son Eric in a mountain climbing accident in Austria. It is one of the most searingly honest expressions of grief in modern Christian literature. And at its heart lies a theological conviction that speaks directly to our discussion.²⁴

Wolterstorff found no comfort in philosophical theodicies. The free will defense, the soul-making argument, the greater-good hypothesis — none of them touched his grief. What gave him comfort was something far simpler and far more profound: the conviction that God, too, is a grieving parent. That when Eric fell to his death on that Austrian mountainside, God did not observe the event from a state of undisturbed bliss. God wept. God's heart broke.

He expressed this conviction in words that have become some of the most quoted in modern theology. God, he wrote, is not only the God of the sufferers but the God who suffers. And then he added a remarkable meditation on the Old Testament teaching that no one can see God's face and live. Wolterstorff had always assumed this meant that no one could see God's splendor and survive. But a friend suggested another possibility: perhaps it means that no one could see God's sorrow and live. The grief of God is so vast, so deep, so overwhelming, that to behold it fully would destroy us.²⁵

This is not systematic theology. It is the raw cry of a father who has lost his son. But it is precisely in its rawness that its theological power lies. Because Wolterstorff is doing something that the classical impassibilist framework cannot do: he is finding comfort in a God who shares his grief. An impassible God — a God whose bliss is undisturbed by the death of a twenty-five-year-old boy — would have been no comfort to Wolterstorff. What Wolterstorff needed was a God who wept with him. And he found that God in the pages of Scripture.

Wolterstorff's testimony is one of the most powerful contemporary expressions of the fellow-sufferer theodicy. It is not a philosophical argument. It is something deeper — a witness to the kind of comfort that only a suffering God can provide. And it raises a question that every defender of classical impassibility must face: What comfort would an impassible God have offered to this grieving father? Would the assurance that God is perfectly happy right now — that Eric's death has not disturbed the divine bliss even slightly — have been good news to Nicholas Wolterstorff?²⁶

The Biblical Case for a God Who Suffers with Us

The fellow-sufferer theodicy does not rest solely on the intuitions of grieving parents or the theologies of twentieth-century German professors. It rests on the testimony of Scripture itself. Throughout this book, we have surveyed hundreds of passages that describe God's emotional engagement with His creatures. Now we need to ask: What do these passages say specifically about God's response to human suffering?

And what we find is overwhelming. The Bible consistently portrays God as One who is deeply affected by the suffering of His creatures — who sees, hears, knows, and responds to their pain with genuine emotional engagement.

The Old Testament Witness

Consider the foundational event of the Exodus. In Exodus 3:7–8, God speaks to Moses from the burning bush:

"Then the LORD said, 'I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians.'" (ESV)

Notice the verbs: God sees, God hears, God knows, and God comes down. This is not the language of a detached observer who watches suffering from a distance without being affected. This is the language of One who is moved to action by the pain of His people. As we noted in Chapter 13, the word "know" here (yada', ידע) carries connotations of intimate, experiential acquaintance — not merely intellectual awareness but deep personal involvement.²⁷

The prophets intensify this portrait. As we explored in Chapter 15, the book of Hosea presents one of the most emotionally wrenching portrayals of God in all of Scripture. In Hosea 11:8, God cries out over His rebellious people:

"How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? ... My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender." (ESV)

This is not the language of a God who is calmly implementing a plan. This is the language of a parent who is agonizing over a beloved child. God's heart recoils. His compassion burns. The Hebrew word nikhmarim (נִכְמְרוּ, "grow warm") describes an intense churning of emotion — the kind of visceral, gut-wrenching feeling that overwhelms a parent watching their child self-destruct.²⁸

Similarly, in Jeremiah 8:18–9:1, the prophet gives voice to what many scholars believe is the grief of God Himself:

"My joy is gone; grief is upon me; my heart is sick within me. ... Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? ... Oh that my head were waters, and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!" (ESV)

And in Judges 10:16, after Israel's repeated rebellion and consequent suffering, the text says something remarkable: "And he [the LORD] became impatient over the misery of Israel" (ESV). Other translations render this as "his soul was grieved for the misery of Israel" (NKJV). The text portrays God as one who could no longer bear to watch His people suffer — not because He was helpless, but because their pain moved Him so deeply that He was compelled to act.²⁹

The Psalms add another layer. As scholars like Terence Fretheim and Walter Brueggemann have emphasized, the lament psalms — which constitute nearly a third of the entire Psalter — presuppose a God who listens to human pain and is genuinely affected by it. Lament is not a monologue. It is a conversation with a God who hears, cares, and responds. If God were truly impassible — utterly unaffected by creaturely suffering — then lament would be pointless. You do not pour out your grief to a being who is constitutionally incapable of being moved by it. The very existence of the biblical lament tradition testifies to the conviction that God suffers with His people.³⁰

The New Testament Witness

The New Testament deepens this portrait dramatically. As we discussed in detail in Chapter 20, the Gospels portray Jesus — the incarnate Son of God, the One who is "the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature" (Hebrews 1:3) — as a man of profound emotional engagement with human suffering.

Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus (John 11:33–35). He was moved with compassion for the crowds who were "harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd" (Matthew 9:36). He anguished in Gethsemane, sweating drops of blood (Luke 22:44). He cried out from the cross in the agony of God-forsakenness: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46).

Now, as we discussed in Chapter 26, the question of whether these emotions belong to the divine nature of Christ or only to His human nature is one of the most contested questions in theology. The classical impassibilist position, as articulated by Weinandy and others, insists that Jesus suffered only in His human nature — His divine nature remained impassible throughout. But as I argued there, this position creates a troubling split in the person of Christ. If Jesus is "the exact imprint" of God's nature (Hebrews 1:3), and if "whoever has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9), then the emotions of Jesus cannot be irrelevant to our understanding of God. They reveal something true about the heart of God — not just the experience of one human being.³¹

Paul adds an important dimension. In Romans 8:22–23, 26, he writes:

"For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. ... Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words." (ESV)

As Andrew Sloane observes in his contribution to Divine Suffering, the groaning of the Spirit in Romans 8:26 extends the participation of God in the world's suffering. Creation groans. We groan. And the Spirit Himself groans alongside us. God is not a distant observer of a groaning world — He is a participant in its pain, groaning together with it through the ministry of the Holy Spirit.³²

The Cross as the Ultimate Answer to Theodicy

We arrive now at what I believe is the most powerful dimension of the fellow-sufferer theodicy — the cross of Jesus Christ. For at the cross, God did not merely sympathize with human suffering. He endured it. He entered into the very worst that evil can do — torture, abandonment, injustice, death — and bore it in His own being.

This is not just a theological proposition. It is the central claim of the Christian gospel. And it transforms the problem of evil in a way that no purely philosophical theodicy ever could.

When people ask, "Where was God during the Holocaust?" — the Christian answer is: on the cross. When a child asks, "Does God know what it's like to be hurt?" — the Christian answer is: yes, He does. When a suffering person cries out, "Does God understand my pain?" — the Christian answer is: He was tortured and killed. He knows what it is like to be abandoned by the people He loved. He knows what it is like to cry out to God and hear nothing but silence. He knows.³³

The cross is God's answer to the problem of evil — not as a philosophical argument but as a personal act of solidarity and redemption. It does not explain why God allows suffering. It does something better: it demonstrates that God does not stand outside our suffering, watching from a safe distance. He enters into it. He takes it upon Himself. He bears it in His own body and soul.

And here is the crucial point: the cross does not merely reveal God's willingness to act on our behalf. It reveals God's willingness to suffer on our behalf. An impassible God could have saved the world through a divine decree, an irresistible act of sovereign power. Instead, God chose the cross — a means of salvation that required suffering, pain, grief, abandonment, and death. Why? Because, as I have argued throughout this book, God is not merely an all-powerful sovereign who can do whatever He wants. He is a loving Father who enters into the experience of His children — including their suffering.³⁴

The author of Hebrews captures this beautifully:

"For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need." (Hebrews 4:15–16, ESV)

The word "sympathize" here is sympatheō (συμπαθέω), which literally means "to suffer with." Jesus is able to suffer with us because He has experienced what we experience. He is not a distant, detached high priest who observes human suffering from a position of divine invulnerability. He is One who has been there. He has felt the nails. He has known the loneliness. He has tasted the cup of suffering to its very dregs.

This is the heart of the fellow-sufferer theodicy. And it is explicitly Christological — it is grounded in the person and work of Jesus Christ, not in abstract philosophical speculation about what kind of God the universe requires.

The Father's Suffering at the Cross

But we need to push beyond Christology to ask a more difficult question: Did the Father suffer at the cross? And what about the Holy Spirit?

The classical impassibilist answer is clear: no. The Father observed the Son's suffering from a state of undisturbed bliss. His plan was being fulfilled. His purposes were being accomplished. He was perfectly content. The Son suffered in His human nature, and the Father was not affected by it emotionally.

But is this the picture the Bible paints? I do not think so.

Think about what happened at Calvary from the Father's perspective. The Father watched His beloved Son — the Son in whom He was "well pleased" (Matthew 3:17), the Son He had loved from eternity — be stripped, beaten, mocked, nailed to wood, and killed. Can any father watch his son die without grief? Can the Father who is love (1 John 4:8) observe the torture and murder of His beloved Son without experiencing anguish?

Moltmann was right about this much: the Father's experience at the cross must not be reduced to serene contentment. The Son suffers dying. The Father suffers the death of the Son. As Moltmann puts it, the grief of the Father is just as important as the death of the Son. The Fatherlessness of the Son is matched by the Sonlessness of the Father.³⁵

Now, I want to be very clear about what I am not saying. I am not affirming patripassianism — the heresy that teaches the Father was crucified. The Father did not suffer in the same way as the Son. The Son experienced physical death and spiritual abandonment. The Father did not. But the Father experienced genuine grief, genuine anguish, genuine emotional suffering at the cross — not identical to the Son's suffering, but real nonetheless. A father who watches his son die and feels nothing is not a loving father. And God is the perfect loving Father.³⁶

Interestingly, even Thomas Weinandy — one of the most sophisticated modern defenders of impassibility — concedes that "grief and sorrow are predicated of the Father" at the cross, though he insists these are "metaphorical" rather than involving actual emotional changes of state. Weinandy writes that while such emotions are predicated of the Father metaphorically, "what is expressed within these metaphors is nonetheless absolutely true." This is a remarkable admission — one that, in my view, concedes more than Weinandy realizes. If the metaphors express something "absolutely true" about the Father's experience, then in what sense is the Father's grief merely metaphorical?³⁷

The cross, then, reveals something about the heart of the entire Trinity. The Son suffers and dies. The Father grieves. The Spirit sustains Christ through His ordeal (Hebrews 9:14 speaks of Christ offering Himself "through the eternal Spirit") and then, in the aftermath of the resurrection, proceeds to apply the benefits of Christ's suffering to believers — groaning with them in their ongoing suffering (Romans 8:26). The cross is not merely the suffering of one person in His human nature. It is a Trinitarian event that reveals the depth of God's emotional engagement with a suffering world.³⁸

The Passibilist Theodicy and Its Pastoral Power

At this point, we need to step back and appreciate the full pastoral force of the fellow-sufferer theodicy. Because its power lies not primarily in its philosophical sophistication (it is not, strictly speaking, a philosophical theodicy at all) but in its ability to speak to people in the depths of their suffering.

Paul Fiddes captures the pastoral dimension with remarkable clarity. The most basic level of comfort, he notes, is simply the knowledge that God suffers too and understands one's situation from the inside. The psychological effect of being aware of a suffering God who grasps your predicament may operate at a level below formal theological argument — but it can soar far higher than any formal theodicy ever could. No theological argument can justify the mountain of misery represented by the great atrocities of history. But the knowledge that God is present in the midst of that misery — suffering alongside the victims, weeping with the bereaved, raging against the injustice — can provide a kind of comfort that no philosophical argument can match.³⁹

Andrew Sloane, writing in Divine Suffering, offers a particularly moving illustration of this pastoral power. He recounts conversations with survivors of childhood sexual abuse who found the doctrine of divine passibility profoundly healing. The recognition that God was not impassively watching their traumatizing experience — that God also paid a price for not so arranging the world that such horrors could not occur — enabled them to connect with God in ways they could not previously imagine. The questions of theodicy persisted — how could God allow a child to endure such evil? — but the knowledge of God's co-suffering opened a door to relationship with God that the impassibilist framework had kept shut.⁴⁰

Sloane goes further. He shares his own experience of family loss — the deaths of his parents, who had not expressed clear faith in Christ, and his sister, who had taken her own life after apparently rejecting the faith. In the midst of that grief, Sloane reports experiencing the odd sense that, should his loved ones face judgment, God would suffer their loss more deeply than he could. If God truly loves us far more than we love each other, and if God truly grieves the events of the world, then even the reality of judgment must be accompanied by divine grief. Knowing that we share our grief with the God who judges may be, as Sloane puts it, "oddly comforting."⁴¹

This is a remarkable and pastorally sensitive insight — one that connects directly to the broader theological themes explored in the author's companion book, Beyond the Grave, which argues for a postmortem opportunity for salvation. If God genuinely grieves the loss of those He loves, then God's grief itself becomes a reason to hope that His love pursues people even beyond death. A God who grieves the lost is not a God who easily gives up on them.

The Suffering God and the Persecuted Church

The fellow-sufferer theodicy takes on special significance when we consider the global context of Christian suffering. As the authors in Divine Suffering emphasize, persecution — real persecution involving loss of property, fractured family relationships, social exclusion, violence, torture, and death — is the daily reality of millions of God's faithful people throughout the world today.⁴²

For Christians facing persecution in China, Nigeria, Iran, North Korea, and many other countries, the question of whether God suffers with them is not an academic exercise. It is a lifeline. An impassible God who observes their torture from a state of perfect contentment offers cold comfort. But a suffering God — a God who is present as both the sovereign Lord and the fellow sufferer — offers something entirely different: solidarity, companionship, and the assurance that their pain is not invisible to the One who holds the universe in His hands.

As Sloane writes in Divine Suffering, if we allow for suffering love to be one of the divine perfections manifest in God the Son, then fellowship with the suffering Christ is not a mere imagined likeness between the human Jesus and those whose suffering resembles His. In this fellowship of suffering, the suffering God of the gospel manifests the real presence of God to God's people. And — importantly — God is present not as a mere patient, powerless fellow-sufferer but as the sovereign Lord who is also a fellow sufferer.⁴³

This is a crucial qualifier. The fellow-sufferer theodicy does not present God as a helpless victim who suffers alongside us but can do nothing about it. That would be the God of process theology — a deity who is genuinely affected by creaturely suffering but lacks the power to overcome it. As we argued in Chapter 5, process theology goes far beyond what Scripture teaches. The biblical God is not a helpless co-sufferer. He is a sovereign co-sufferer — One who freely chooses to enter into creaturely pain while retaining the power and the plan to bring that pain to an ultimate end. The puzzling history of the growth of persecuted churches, as Sloane notes, testifies to this paradox: the suffering of God's people, joined to the suffering of God Himself, becomes a vehicle of divine power.⁴⁴

Lament: The Practice That Requires a Suffering God

One of the most important implications of the fellow-sufferer theodicy is its connection to the biblical practice of lament. As Andrew Sloane observes, classical theism — particularly in its impassibilist form — struggles to know what to do with lament. Calvin's commentary on the Psalms is a case in point. For Calvin, most lament is little more than evidence of the inadequate faith of even such Old Testament giants as David. If Calvin's picture of God and God's relationship to the world is correct, he has little alternative but to say this — because if God is utterly unaffected by human suffering, then lament is essentially a failure of trust.⁴⁵

But a suffering God makes better sense of lament as a faithful Christian practice. A fully relational, suffering God can be readily addressed in lament, because lament presupposes that God in fact responds to prayer and acts because of our prayers. Furthermore, lament plays an important role in relating to this God, because a suffering God can be readily found in the practice of lament. Lament addresses a key problem that both underlies and is generated by suffering: the apparent absence and silence of God. If God genuinely suffers with us, then even His silence is not absence — it is the shared silence of one who is present in the darkness, even when we cannot see Him.⁴⁶

Moreover, Sloane makes a crucial observation: a suffering God allows evil and suffering to be real suffering and actual evil — not puzzling experiences of complex goods in clever disguise. Classical theism, in its most extreme forms, has sometimes produced deeply inadequate moral and apologetic responses to suffering — responses that attempt to tell suffering people that what they are experiencing is actually, somehow, a hidden good. A suffering God does not need to explain away evil. He can acknowledge that some suffering is genuinely pointless, that some evils are truly horrendous — experiences that destroy souls rather than build them. And He can be present in those horrors without needing to retroactively justify every last one of them.⁴⁷

Fair Assessment: What the Fellow-Sufferer Theodicy Gets Right

Let me now step back and offer my own assessment of the fellow-sufferer theodicy — what it gets right, where it needs qualification, and how it fits within the mediating framework I have been developing throughout this book.

I believe the fellow-sufferer theodicy gets several things profoundly right.

First, it is right that God genuinely suffers with His creatures. This is not a modern invention but a biblical reality, supported by hundreds of passages across both Testaments. God sees, hears, knows, and is moved by the suffering of His people. He does not observe their pain from a state of undisturbed bliss. He enters into it, shares it, and bears it.

Second, it is right that this truth transforms the problem of evil. The question is not just "Why does God allow suffering?" but "Where is God in the suffering?" And the biblical answer — reinforced and climactically demonstrated at the cross — is that God is present in the suffering, bearing it alongside His creatures. This does not solve the intellectual puzzle, but it answers the existential cry, which is what most suffering people need most urgently.

Third, it is right that the cross is the ultimate demonstration of God's solidarity with the suffering. At Calvary, God did not merely allow suffering — He endured it. He entered into the worst that evil can do and bore it in His own body and soul. This is the heart of the gospel, and any theodicy that fails to place the cross at the center is incomplete.

Fourth, it is right that a suffering God offers something pastorally and existentially that an impassible God cannot. As Wolterstorff's testimony illustrates, the comfort of knowing that God shares your grief — that your pain has broken God's heart — is qualitatively different from the comfort of knowing that God has a plan and is perfectly happy. Both may be true in some sense. But the former reaches people where they are in a way that the latter simply cannot.

Fifth, it is right that the fellow-sufferer theodicy validates the practice of lament. If God is genuinely affected by our suffering, then pouring out our pain to Him is not a failure of faith — it is an act of relationship with a God who cares enough to listen, to feel, and to respond.

Necessary Qualifications: Where the Fellow-Sufferer Theodicy Needs Guarding

But the fellow-sufferer theodicy also needs several important qualifications — qualifications that distinguish the mediating position I am advocating from the more extreme versions found in Moltmann and some other passibilists.

First, the fellow-sufferer theodicy must not replace traditional theodicies — it must supplement them. The fact that God suffers with us does not answer the question of why He allows suffering in the first place. The free will defense, the soul-making argument, and the greater-good hypothesis all contain genuine biblical insights. The fellow-sufferer theodicy does not make these arguments unnecessary. Rather, it adds a dimension that they lack — the pastoral dimension of God's presence in suffering. A complete theodicy needs both the intellectual answers (why does God allow this?) and the existential answer (where is God in this?).⁴⁸

Second, God's suffering must be understood as a free, sovereign choice — not a metaphysical necessity. This is where our position differs sharply from Moltmann. Moltmann makes suffering constitutive of God's eternal nature, which means God must suffer. But the Bible presents God's suffering as an act of grace — a free choice born of love, not a structural requirement of the divine nature. God did not need to create a world in which He would suffer. He chose to create such a world because He freely and sovereignly chose to love. His suffering is voluntary, gracious, and purposeful — not necessary, inevitable, or constitutive.⁴⁹

Third, God's suffering never overwhelms, destabilizes, or incapacitates Him. This is the crucial qualifier that distinguishes the mediating position from extreme passibilism. When God suffers with us, His suffering is real — but it is also sovereign. God's grief never paralyzes Him. His anguish never prevents Him from acting. His pain never clouds His judgment or undermines His purposes. God suffers as God — not as a finite creature overwhelmed by forces beyond His control. As I have argued throughout this book, God's emotions are genuine but sovereign, real but never out of control.⁵⁰

Fourth, the cross must not be reduced to mere solidarity. Lister is right that some passibilists downplay the redemptive dimension of the cross by focusing exclusively on its solidarity dimension. The cross is not merely God saying "I feel your pain." The cross is God doing something about the cause of suffering — defeating sin, conquering death, reconciling the world to Himself. As David Cook has insightfully observed, there is a real danger that emphasizing the weakness and suffering of God leads us to belittle the reality of sin, to overlook the holiness of God, and to lose the power of God to actually overcome evil and transform sinners. The gospel does not merely offer divine empathy. It offers genuine hope of change — because sin has been dealt with at the cross.⁵¹

Fifth, we must guard against the assumption that divine fellow-suffering is the only acceptable response to the problem of evil. As Lister notes, some passibilists have elevated their theodicy to the status of the only morally acceptable option, dismissing all other approaches as cold, heartless, or insufficiently sensitive to suffering. This is an overstatement. There are genuinely helpful insights in the free will, soul-making, and greater-good theodicies. The fellow-sufferer theodicy adds to them; it does not replace them.⁵²

Why the Fellow-Sufferer Theodicy Requires Passibility

At this point, I want to make an argument that may seem obvious but is crucially important: the fellow-sufferer theodicy requires divine passibility. You cannot have a God who genuinely suffers with His creatures if God is strictly impassible.

Think about what strict impassibility claims. God cannot be emotionally affected by anything outside Himself. His inner experience is one of perfect, undisturbed bliss. Nothing in the world — no amount of suffering, no depth of evil, no cry of anguish — can register as pain in the divine experience. God observes suffering the way a security camera observes a robbery: it records what happens, but it does not feel anything about it.

If this is true, then God cannot suffer with us. He can act to relieve suffering — the impassibilist can affirm this. He can know about suffering — the impassibilist affirms omniscience. He can even will to end suffering — the impassibilist affirms divine benevolence. But He cannot feel our suffering. He cannot grieve with us. He cannot be heartbroken by our pain. He cannot weep alongside the bereaved. He is, in the deepest and most personal sense, absent from the experience of suffering — even if He is present in every other sense.⁵³

And this, I believe, is a devastating limitation. Because what suffering people need most is not just a God who acts, knows, and wills. They need a God who cares — who is genuinely moved by their pain, who shares their grief, who suffers with them. They need what the author of Hebrews describes: a high priest who can "sympathize" (sympatheō, to suffer with) because He has experienced what they experience.

The impassibilist can say: "God acts to relieve your suffering." But the impassibilist cannot say: "God suffers with you." And for millions of people in the midst of crushing grief — from the bereaved parent in a hospital room, to the persecuted believer in a prison cell, to the abuse survivor trying to find their way back to trust — the latter statement is far more comforting than the former.

This is why the fellow-sufferer theodicy requires passibility. Not because passibility solves all theological problems (it raises its own set of challenges, as we have seen). Not because the fellow-sufferer theodicy is the only valid approach to the problem of evil (it is not). But because the deepest dimension of God's response to evil — His personal, emotional, experiential solidarity with His suffering creatures — is impossible without genuine divine passibility.

The Good News of the Suffering God

Andrew Sloane concludes his essay in Divine Suffering with a remarkable argument by demonstration. Rather than starting with a detailed defense of divine passibility as a philosophical thesis, he asks: If divine passibility is true — if the sufferings of Jesus are the suffering-of-God-in-Christ — then how does that shape our understanding and proclamation of the gospel?⁵⁴

His answer is that the gospel makes better sense when it tells the story of what a God of suffering love has done to save a broken and suffering world. And if that is the case — if the gospel is more powerful, more pastorally effective, more existentially satisfying, and more faithful to Scripture when it includes the suffering of God — then these virtues of the passibilist reading become, in turn, good arguments for divine passibility. The gospel makes better sense when it tells the story of a suffering God.

I find this argument compelling. Throughout this book, I have been arguing that the biblical portrait of God is one of deep, genuine, emotional engagement with His creatures. The fellow-sufferer theodicy is one more area where this portrait proves its power. A God who suffers with us offers something that an impassible God simply cannot: real presence in the darkness, real solidarity in the pain, real companionship in the grief.

This does not mean that God is a helpless victim — as we have stressed repeatedly, the mediating position rejects that idea emphatically. God's suffering is sovereign. He is the Lord who is also the fellow sufferer. His grief does not incapacitate Him; it motivates Him. His anguish does not paralyze His purposes; it fuels them. He suffers and He acts. He weeps and He redeems. He enters into the darkness and He brings the light.

Sloane captures this beautifully: the gospel does not explain away the problem of evil and suffering — it solves it. It tells us of a God who defeats evil through suffering power, who brings an end to suffering and the frustration of creation's longing for wholeness (shalom). And it provides unique resources for responding to suffering — personally, theologically, and pastorally — precisely because it tells the story of a God who has been there.⁵⁵

A Proper Ordering: The Suffering God and the Victorious God

Before we conclude, I want to address one more important issue. Some critics of the fellow-sufferer theodicy — including Lister, whose assessment I have tried to represent fairly — worry that the passibilist emphasis on divine suffering comes at the expense of divine victory. If God is primarily a co-sufferer, does this not undermine the confidence that God will ultimately triumph over evil?⁵⁶

This is a legitimate concern. And it is one that I believe the mediating position can answer without difficulty.

The key is to hold both truths together: God suffers with us and God will triumph over evil. The cross demonstrates both realities simultaneously. At the cross, God entered into the deepest suffering — but three days later, the resurrection demonstrated God's power over death itself. Suffering and victory are not opposed in the biblical narrative. They are bound together. God conquers through suffering, not in spite of it. As Paul writes, "Death is swallowed up in victory" (1 Corinthians 15:54). The victory does not erase the suffering — but it transforms it, gives it meaning, and brings it to a glorious end.

Similarly, the eschatological vision of Revelation 21:3–4 holds both truths together: "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away." This is the promise of a God who has wept with His people throughout all of history and who will personally, tenderly, lovingly wipe away every tear. The wiping away of tears presupposes that there were tears to wipe — real tears, shed by a God who suffered alongside His people. But it also presupposes that the tears will end — that the suffering God is also the victorious God who will bring all suffering to its final conclusion.⁵⁷

The proper ordering, then, is this: God freely and sovereignly chooses to suffer with His creatures out of love. This suffering is real and genuine. But it is not the final word. The final word is resurrection, restoration, and the wiping away of every tear. God's suffering serves His redemptive purposes — it is not an end in itself but a means to the greater end of salvation, restoration, and eternal joy. As the author of Hebrews writes of Jesus, it was "for the joy set before him" that He "endured the cross" (Hebrews 12:2). The joy is coming. But the suffering was real — and it matters that it was real, because it means God truly understands what His creatures have endured.

Connecting the Threads: Passibility, Theodicy, and the Heart of God

We can now see how the fellow-sufferer theodicy connects to the broader argument of this book. Throughout our study, we have been building a case that God genuinely feels — that His love is real love, His grief is real grief, His anger is real anger, His joy is real joy. The fellow-sufferer theodicy is the natural extension of this case into the most pressing practical question of the Christian life: What does God feel about evil and suffering?

If the biblical portrait of God's emotional life is accurate — if God truly loves, truly grieves, truly burns with righteous anger — then we should expect God to be deeply affected by the suffering of His creatures. And that is exactly what we find, both in the biblical text and in the theological tradition at its best. God does not observe evil from a position of detached bliss. He sees it, hates it, grieves over it, and enters into it to overcome it.

This connects directly to the arguments we have made in earlier chapters. In Chapter 22, we explored Mullins's unity problem and argued that genuine love requires being affected by the beloved's condition. If God truly loves His creatures, He must be genuinely affected by their suffering — otherwise, His "love" is not love at all but mere benevolence. In Chapter 23, we explored the wrath argument and showed that God's anger at sin is a genuine emotional response — not a detached judicial assessment. And in Chapter 26, we explored the suffering of God at the cross and argued that the Son's suffering reveals something true about the heart of God, not just the experience of one human nature.

The fellow-sufferer theodicy brings all of these threads together. A God who genuinely loves will genuinely grieve when His beloved suffer. A God who genuinely hates sin will genuinely burn with anger at the evils that destroy His children. A God who genuinely entered into human suffering at the cross is a God who genuinely suffers with His creatures still. This is the heart of God as the Bible reveals it — not the God of Aristotle, unmoved and undisturbed, but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who sees the affliction of His people, hears their cry, knows their sufferings, and comes down to deliver them.⁵⁸

Conclusion: Where Is God in the Suffering?

We began this chapter with the oldest question in theology: If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, why does evil exist? We have surveyed the traditional answers — the free will defense, the soul-making argument, the greater-good theodicy — and found them genuinely valuable but pastorally incomplete. They answer the question "Why?" but they do not answer the question "Where?"

Where is God when a child is dying? Where is God when the bombs are falling? Where is God when a woman is abused? Where is God when the diagnosis is terminal? Where is God when the grief is so heavy you cannot breathe?

The fellow-sufferer theodicy answers: God is here. He is not watching from heaven with serene contentment. He is present — weeping, groaning, carrying the weight of the world's suffering in His own heart. He is the God who saw the affliction of His people in Egypt and came down. He is the God who agonized over Israel through the mouth of Hosea. He is the God who wept at the tomb of Lazarus. He is the God who suffered and died on a Roman cross. He is the God whose Spirit groans alongside a groaning creation.

This is not a philosophical solution to the problem of evil. It is something better. It is a personal presence in the midst of evil. It is the assurance that we are not alone — that the God who made us is moved by our pain, enters into our suffering, and will one day bring all suffering to its final end.

The fellow-sufferer theodicy requires passibility. An impassible God cannot suffer with us. He can act for us, know about us, and will good for us — but He cannot weep with us. And for the mother in the hospital room, for the persecuted believer in the prison cell, for the grieving father on the mountainside — weeping with them is exactly what they need their God to do.

In the next chapter, we will explore the other side of this coin: the devastating problems that strict impassibility creates for the problem of evil. If God is truly unaffected by creaturely suffering, does He become a God too distant to help? Can the impassible God offer any meaningful comfort to the suffering? These are the questions Chapter 29 will address. But for now, let us rest in the assurance that our God is not far off. He is right here, in the darkness, bearing it with us. And one day — one glorious day — He will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and there will be no more mourning, no more crying, no more pain. The God who has wept with us will rejoice with us forever.⁵⁹

Bibliography

Adams, Marilyn McCord. "Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God." In Oxford Readings in Philosophy, edited by Marilyn McCord Adams and Robert M. Adams, 209–21. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Barker, Kit, and G. Geoffrey Harper, eds. Finding Lost Words: The Church's Right to Lament. Australian College of Theology Monograph Series. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2017.

Bauckham, Richard. "Jürgen Moltmann." In The Modern Theologians, edited by David F. Ford, 2nd ed., 209–27. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997.

Brueggemann, Walter. "The Costly Loss of Lament." Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 36 (1986): 57–71.

Fiddes, Paul S. The Creative Suffering of God. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988.

Frame, John. The Doctrine of God. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2002.

Fretheim, Terence. Exodus. Interpretation. Louisville: John Knox, 1991.

Fretheim, Terence. The Suffering of God: An Old Testament Perspective. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984.

Hasker, William. The Triumph of God over Evil: Theodicy for a World of Suffering. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008.

Heschel, Abraham. The Prophets. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.

Hick, John. Evil and the God of Love. Rev. ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Kim, J. D. Constructing a Mediating Theology: Affirming the Impassibility and the Passibility of the Triune God. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2022.

Lamb, David T. The Emotions of God: Making Sense of a God Who Hates, Weeps, and Loves. Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2022.

Lister, Rob. God Is Impassible and Impassioned: Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013.

Moltmann, Jürgen. The Crucified God. Translated by R. A. Wilson and John Bowden. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Reprint, Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.

Moltmann, Jürgen. The Trinity and the Kingdom. Translated by Margaret Kohl. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981. Reprint, Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.

Mullins, R. T. God and Emotion. Elements in the Philosophy of Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Plantinga, Alvin. God, Freedom, and Evil. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977.

Schmutzer, Andrew J., ed. Divine Suffering: Theology, History, and Church Mission. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2023.

Sirvent, Roberto. Embracing Vulnerability: Human and Divine. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2014.

Vande Brake, Peter H. "Divine Passibility." PhD diss., Calvin Theological Seminary, 2001.

Weinandy, Thomas. Does God Suffer? Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000.

Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Lament for a Son. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987.