Why Suffering Doesn’t Disqualify Theological Witness—It Often Demands It
I recently had a conversation with an interlocutor about my theological writing. They were genuinely concerned. I write about faith as drowning in a whirlpool, constantly grabbing for the lifeline of Christ. I write in fragments, repetitions, urgent dictations between crises. I admit to despair, to inability to imagine any happy future, to clinging to God even while angry at Him.
Their verdict: this is suffering being theologized. Stabilize first, then reflect. Your pain is real, but it’s distorting your theology. You need to get your life together before you can write about God.
I want to be clear from the start: what follows are survival notes, not systematic theology. They’re provisional, meant to provoke dialogue, not pronounce final truths. I’m writing from inside the whirlpool, not from the safety of the shore. These are field notes from the depths, offered as witness and invitation to conversation—not as doctrine.
But I think my interlocutor fundamentally misunderstands how Christian theology has always worked.
The Tradition of Theology from the Depths
Open the Psalms. Half of them are people crying out from pits, surrounded by enemies, drowning in chaos. David doesn’t write systematic theology from a place of spiritual stability. He writes from caves, from fugitive life, from the raw edge of survival. “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.”
Job doesn’t lose his theological credibility when disaster strips everything away. His friends—comfortable, healthy, offering tidy explanations—are the ones God rebukes. Job, sitting in ashes, scraping his sores, is the one who “spoke rightly” about God.
Paul writes his most profound theology while dealing with a “thorn in the flesh” (whatever that was—chronic illness, persecution, psychological torment). He doesn’t wait until it’s resolved. He writes: “God’s power is perfected in weakness.” That’s not a coping mechanism—that’s revelation that came through the suffering, not despite it.
The desert fathers fled to brutal landscapes specifically because comfort seemed spiritually dangerous. They trusted the stripping away of ease more than they trusted abundance.
Mother Teresa—now Saint Teresa of Calcutta—experienced decades of spiritual darkness, what she called an absence of God’s felt presence. She didn’t stop serving. She said she wasn’t worthy to serve the suffering poor, that they were closer to Christ than she was.
The Cross as the Ultimate Proof
Here’s the thing about Christianity: when God shows up in human flesh, the world crucifies him.
That’s not a bug. That’s the revelation.
The cross isn’t a tragic detour on the way to resurrection. It’s the unveiling of what this world does to perfect love. It’s what reality looks like when you strip away the anesthesia.
If we only theologize from positions of health, stability, and comfort, we miss what the cross teaches. We risk building a faith that only works for the fortunate—and that’s not the gospel. The gospel is for the sick, the mourning, the persecuted, the ones crying out from depths.
What I’m Not Saying
I’m not romanticizing suffering. I’m not claiming pain is holiness or that struggle gives special insight. I’m not suggesting people should refuse help or healing.
The Christian tradition has always blessed healing—medicine, therapy, friendship, rest—as part of God’s provision. Grace comes in many forms.
I’m also not claiming suffering is the only reality or that resurrection is impossible. And this distinction matters: I’m not saying resurrection is false or that God’s promise is a lie. I’m saying I can’t imagine what resurrection looks like from where I stand—and that’s precisely the point.
Hope, by definition, is something I can’t manufacture or anticipate. If I could “gin up” a happy ending in my own strength, it wouldn’t be hope. It would be fantasy or projection.
No eye has seen, no ear has heard what God has prepared. That’s not just poetry—it’s the structure of Christian hope. We trust the promise, not our ability to picture it.
What I Am Saying
The whirlpool is real. The constant grabbing for the lifeline is real. And that’s not a failure of faith—it’s what faith is for many people.
Kallistos Ware describes faith as a spiral staircase, ascending upward. That always struck me as too neat. My experience is more like quicksand, more like drowning. You don’t climb—you cling. You grab the lifeline again and again, not because you’re making progress but because letting go means going under.
That’s not just my psychology. That’s the Psalms. That’s lament. That’s the cry from the cross itself: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
The question isn’t whether suffering distorts theology. The question is whether we’re willing to do theology from inside suffering or only from positions of resolution and comfort.
Why Easter Is Not a Tragedy (Even When I Can’t Imagine It)
I wrote a piece recently asking: why is Easter not a tragedy? If life is suffering, if human existence is this grinding crucifixion, how could any continuation of existence be anything but more tragedy?
I can’t answer that from my own experience. Anything I try to imagine—any “happy ending” I conjure—feels hollow, contrived, drugged with distraction. My experience tells me continuation equals more suffering. Period.
So here’s where faith comes in: not as explanation, but as trust.
Easter is shocking. Resurrection is rupture—something that breaks into reality from outside, not something that emerges naturally from within. Christ doesn’t climb out of the tomb through heroic effort. The Father raises him. It’s God’s act, not ours.
That’s the only way resurrection doesn’t become tragedy—if it’s genuinely new, something we couldn’t manufacture or anticipate. If I could imagine it, it would just be my projections. And my projections, shaped by this broken world, would inevitably be tragic.
So I trust. Not because I feel hopeful. Not because I can picture the happy ending. But because the God who has walked with me through crucifixion after crucifixion tells me He’s making something new. And if He says it’s victory, I believe Him—not because my experience confirms it, but because He’s proven trustworthy in the depths.
The Apophatic Thread
There’s a tradition in Christianity called apophatic theology—the theology of negation. You don’t say what God is; you say what God is not. You approach the divine by naming what it isn’t, clearing away false projections.
I think hope works the same way.
I can’t tell you what resurrection will be like. I can tell you it won’t be what I imagine, because my imagination is shaped by this crucifying world. I can’t make myself feel hopeful by picturing heaven. Any heaven I picture would be hell in disguise—just this world with better PR.
So I clear away the projections. I refuse the “happy ending” talk that feels like denial. I sit with the reality: this world crucifies. Suffering is real. Despair is real.
And then I say: Christ meets me here. In this. Not after I’ve climbed out. Not once I’m stable. Here. In the whirlpool. In the pit.
That’s where the lifeline drops. That’s where faith happens.
Why This Matters (Especially for the Church)
If we say “stabilize first, then theologize,” we create a faith that only works for the stable. We build churches where you have to be okay before you’re allowed to speak about God.
But the biblical witness is full of people who weren’t okay. Prophets in exile. Apostles in prison. Jesus himself, crying out from the cross.
The danger isn’t that people theologize from suffering. The danger is when we only hear from the comfortable—and then wonder why the gospel sounds hollow to those who are drowning.
On Repetition
My writing is messy. It’s repetitive. It’s dictated between crises, unpolished, often raw. I call it “verbal vomit.” It circles the same core insight again and again: Christ meets us in weakness. Pain is the doorway. Surrender is the only posture that works.
I’m aware this repetition does several things at once:
Liturgical repetition — like the Jesus Prayer or the rosary, where the same words gain depth through rhythm and practice. Sometimes repeating the truth is how we learn to live it.
Pedagogical repetition — circling back to reinforce a core concept with new examples and contexts. The same truth applied to unemployment looks different than when applied to grief or institutional church wounds.
Compulsive repetition — honestly, I’m still metabolizing this insight. I haven’t “moved on” because I’m still living it. I’m still in the whirlpool, still grabbing the lifeline.
Maybe it’s all three. But it’s also honest.
I’m not claiming to have it figured out. I’m claiming that those in the depths have something essential to say about God. And that the cross—where God himself cries out in abandonment—proves that suffering doesn’t disqualify witness.
It often demands it.
A Note to Readers
If you’re looking for systematic theology, polished apologetics, or reassuring answers, this probably isn’t for you.
If you’re drowning—if you’re burned out on church, traumatized by religious language, desperate rather than curious—these are survival notes. They’re not doctrine. They’re not final. They’re field notes from someone clinging to the lifeline, hoping it holds. They’re offered as witness and invitation to conversation, not as the last word.
I can’t promise you resurrection will make sense. I can’t even picture it. But I can tell you the One holding the lifeline has been faithful so far. Even when it felt like He was the source of the drowning, He was also the one keeping me afloat.
That’s not much. But it’s real.
And in the whirlpool, real is all we’ve got.
Boyd Camak 