I’ve been wary of sharing a response to Stephen Fry’s now famous comments in response to a question asking what he would say to God if he were to meet him at the pearly gates. My reason is partly because I don’t think it was that big a deal. He was asked a hypothetical question about a God he doesn’t believe in and answered accordingly. He was a guy who doesn’t believe in God sharing his frustration with the conflict between the idea of an all-powerful God who is said to be all-loving, and a supposedly created world riddled with suffering. It’s the age old question of the problem of pain. People throw around the frustration of that conflict regularly, as we should. It’s been happening for thousands of years among people much smarter than someone like me.

I’ve read many responses to Fry and been somewhat dissatisfied even though some of them are well thought out and would stand up in a debate. There has been the understandable response that wonders how anyone can struggle with something being bad or evil if there isn’t a God, a moral source of defining good and evil that stands outside of the natural order and against which we can measure everything. The response from a non-theist would be that compassion is woven into the human species as part of natural selection because it is advantageous for our survival and group survival would even lead some to sacrifice themselves for the good of the rest. This same thinking would argue that the concept of evil has been created as a response to that which threatens our survival. With this thinking, compassion and evil are made sense of even in a world of blind chance and non-theistic natural selection. The discussion back and forth on the source of morality, compassion and our sense of something being evil is interesting, but it doesn’t capture me. For me, there’s something else that I find more gripping… even if nobody else does.

Someone asked me how I would respond to Stephen Fry if I had been sitting with him. So here’s my answer to that question.

I hope my first instinct would be to empathise rather than react. There are a couple of moments where his interviewer looks shocked, maybe he’s taken aback by the force of Fry’s answer, but I don’t think we should find any such answer shocking. I think we Christians often shock too easily because we forget that in everything that offends us there is, to a degree, a mirror of ourselves. That’s true of the thinking of others and the actions of others. There is injustice that should cause us anger, but if we’re involved in the world, should anything really shock us, especially the philosophical answer of someone sharing a thought on suffering that clearly comes from a place of compassion? In such situations a little less shock and the reactions that come from it, and a little more empathy, goes a long way.

I also hope I wouldn’t react in defensiveness. If my example is the one who went to the cross for all, should I be quick to defend or listen? I wonder if we too often treat the Church and our faith as a fortress that needs defending and we interpret far too many things as arrows being flung at that fortress and therefore we feel a need to defend and attack when we see something that we believe is coming against us? This feels inadequate to me, especially when dealing with others who are in the same boat as I am but are simply coming at the same problems from a different angle, some of which may be a strong reaction to the things that I hold to be true.

All of us should have wrestled with the same struggle Fry has if we have compassion for those caught in suffering around us or if we have wondered and recoiled at some of the horror that seems to be woven into the kingdom of nature. I recently found out about an insect that drugs its prey then lays its eggs on the drugged prey so that the hatched lavae can feed on the live and conscious body of the victim host, inside and out (moving from parts not vital to the survival of the victim through to its vital organs last), before they grow into adults and carry on the same cycle.

Fry’s struggle is not new. It’s even there in the wrestling of scriptural writers. If I were to offer a response in words with no expectation or agenda to sway him to my belief and thinking, I would hope that it might be something along the lines of:

“I hear you, and on most of it I’m actually with you. Because of things that have happened in my own life and what I’ve witnessed around the world I really struggle, to my deepest core, with the same stuff. In that struggle, I’ve found bits of the Bible that really resonate with my pain and confusion in regards to suffering. Those words have given a home for my sense of that conflict.

When entering into pain and suffering (whether it be thinking about it, experiencing it, or sharing it with others) I’ve found kindred voices in Job, some of the Psalms, Lamentations, and importantly, Jesus’ time in the Garden of Gethsemane and his time on the cross. Heck, I’ve even sat in agreement with the existential writer of Ecclesiastes when he laments about the seeming meaninglessness of everything. The set-up to the story of Job leads me to believe that I can’t know the transcendent reasons for inexplicable suffering beyond the mechanics of how it occurs… it just doesn’t make sense even in the face of the story of the Fall, and nor does blind natural selection offer any comfort, so sometimes I just have to put my hand over my mouth and respond with nothing more than silence and a few tears.

I have no easy answers for those questions, but I have a faith that doesn’t sideline them with cheap quips, nor does it say not to ask the questions – it gives voice to them. I also wonder if we’ve spent too much time on the language of an all-powerful, all-knowing God, which must have elements of truth if we are to have any hope that it could be better, but not enough time on the suffering God who self-weakens and ultimately is seen to save the world through his own vulnerability and sacrifice – the God who becomes the child with bone cancer, and becomes every other suffering person.

I don’t expect you to believe that, and heck, I don’t even think it will necessarily make sense, but I wonder if, in the person of Jesus, the God who becomes one of us and enters into the struggle with us – the lamb, not the lion – there’s another side to the story that we need to give more attention to.”

At least, that’s how I would respond if I had a chance to say “I’ll get back to you in an email or blog post.” I don’t think I’d have the wit to come up with such an answer that quickly. Fry is much smarter than I am and could probably demolish me in any debate.

I can’t get away from what I see as the New Testament being riddled with the idea of the God who chooses weakness to save His creation. From the beginning, in the Genesis story, we see the God who is self-limiting (I don’t know all the philosophical reasoning and arguments around that, so don’t ask). Our big failing is our desire for power and control. This is what Fry is offending when he shares his thoughts – he’s offending, in us Christians, our sense of power and control and so our natural response is defense and to try and take control back, but if we truly follow the crucified God then should our response not be one of embracing the weakness and the struggle – to empathise and enter the pain in those thoughts with him?

The strange thing is, and this is the picture painted in the resurrection and Revelation, that it is in the embrace of weakness that all that is offensive in the world is undercut and overcome. It’s in the choosing not to strike back that violence has its wind removed. It’s in the choosing of love that hate finds it no longer has fuel. It’s in choosing to embrace that the desire to hit is smothered. Why, because living from weakness is, paradoxically, real strength.

For the record, this is an ideal that I continually fail to embrace… but I live with the constant whisper of the challenge towards it and when I am able to embrace it, I catch glimmers of a better world, less conformed to me and more in line with the God who so loved the world…

Stephen Fry, you’ll probably never read this, but thanks for sparking the discussion that is now happening since your interview has gone viral.