Lutherans discuss human suffering

Through the ages, theologians and philosophers have pondered human suffering and its causes.

[Anon]

Paraphrased from "The Case for Faith" by Lee Strobel.

One of the many objections to Christianity is that since evil and suffering exist, a loving God cannot. Imagine a bear in a trap. A hunter, out of sympathy, wants to free him. He tries to win the bears confidence, but he can't, so he has to shoot the bear full of drugs. The bear thinks this is an attack and that the hunter is trying to kill him. The bear doesn't realize this is being done out of compassion. In order to get the bear out of the trap, the hunter has to push him further into the trap to release the tension on the spring. The bear cannot understand because he does not have the capacity of a human being. Likewise, we do not have the capacity to understand things as God does. Sometimes we must go through pain and suffering and we won't understand why, but we need to have faith that it is for only good. Sometimes pain makes us stronger, sometimes it brings us closer together, most often it brings us closer to Him. God has promised that he will never give us more than we can handle, and we can be sure, He will carry us every step of the way if only we acknowledge Him.

[to Anon]

Amen to your post, true, and well said.

[Shaun]

Er... why did it create suffering in the first place? Strobel assumes, judging by this quote, that human suffering exists despite god, but since it is supposedly the omnipotent creator of everything, that makes it responsible for creating suffering itself.

[Sid]

Did the speakers happen to mention Martin Luther's last two papers regarding his hatred of Jews? It gave roots to the Holocaust in Germany and that involved plenty of human suffering. Sometimes seemingly "bad" things happen, sometimes people, including religions, make those "bad things happen.

[Larry Mitchell]

No one at the conference talked about Luthers attitude toward the Jews. That is a subject worth studying. I'm not sure how terrible Luther's comments got in this regard, but it's clear they were plenty bad.
James Kittelson's book "Luther the Reformer" describes Luther as growing increasingly hostile toward the Jews in his writings. "At the very least, Luther felt," according to Kittelson, the Jews' "synagogues and books were to be burned and they were to be forced to leave the cities, give up their commercial activities and work as day laborers on the land." Someone told me Luther said something like "those who spilled the blood of Jews would not be at fault."
Kittelson seems to lament that Luther didn't remain with the view he expressed in 1523 in a writing titled "That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew." In this work, Luther "urged compassion and hoped for their conversion now that the gospel had been restored to its rightful place," Kittelson writes.
However, Kittelson says Luther's ranting against Jews "simply repeated the prejudices of his day."
Kittelson claims that "Luther never became an anti-Semite in the modern, racial sense of the term.... Luther was anti-Jewish in the sense that he opposed anyone who taught against his doctrine.... Like papists, Sacramentarians and Anabaptists, Luther regarded Jews as a poisonous yeast in the Christian loaf."

[Sid]

I always thought Luther got progressively hostile towards the Jews as he got older and those last two papers were evidence of that. He was admitedly bipolar and prone to severe mood swings (sometimes used as an excuse for the writings) but that was a general theme in his life that progressed until he got bold enough to write about it. Unfortunately, because it was his last work it was probably given more credence since he was a bit of a hero in Germany.
The victors write the history books and this is something that I think has been hidden for way to long.