The Soul-Making Defense — Suffering Produces Character

Why It Matters

The free will defense addressed moral evil but left natural evil largely unexplained. The soul-making defense tries to go further. It argues that suffering — including suffering that is not the result of human choice — serves a purpose: the development of character, wisdom, compassion, and the kind of moral depth that comfort cannot produce. This is not a minor claim. C.S. Lewis, one of the most serious Christian thinkers of the twentieth century, gave much of his intellectual life to understanding how suffering could be compatible with a good God, and the soul-making argument is central to what he found.

There is truth in this argument. Think about the people you know — or the people you have read about — whose character you find most profound. Many of them have been through something hard. Grief, illness, loss, failure, the experience of real injustice. The difficulty did not make them better automatically — hardship can also make people bitter or broken. But in many cases, hardship produces something that ease cannot: a kind of weight and depth, a capacity for genuine compassion, a resilience that is not simply confidence but something more tested and real.

C.S. Lewis wrote, in The Problem of Pain, that 'God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.' He meant that suffering has a particular capacity to break through our comfortable self-deceptions and force us to ask real questions. Many people who have gone through serious suffering report something like this: the experience broke something open in them that needed to be broken.

And yet. The argument has a real limit, and this lesson will name it honestly. The limit is: some suffering does not produce anything. Some suffering comes to people who have no opportunity to grow from it — who are too young, too overwhelmed, or who simply do not survive it. And even where growth is possible, it seems cruel to say that the point of a child's cancer was to make someone a better person. The soul-making defense, pushed too far, becomes an argument for the acceptability of suffering that is hard to look at honestly. This lesson will look at it honestly.

A Story

What Came After

Clara was fourteen when her mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The diagnosis came in October, and by January the family had reorganized around the new reality: her mother's unpredictable energy, her father's hidden anxiety, the appointments and medications, the way dinner conversation had quietly changed.

Clara was not the same after that year. She became better at reading people — at noticing when someone was struggling before they said anything. She became more patient than she had been, especially with people who were slow or uncertain. She became, in ways she couldn't fully articulate, more serious. She had less patience for things that seemed frivolous, and more capacity for things that were genuinely hard.

She didn't think any of this was good. She would have given all of it back, instantly, if it meant her mother's health returned. The character she had developed felt like something she had been forced to purchase at a price she had not agreed to pay. When her Sunday school teacher said, 'God must have wanted you to grow through this,' she felt a cold anger she had trouble naming.

She talked about it with her friend's grandmother, who had grown up in difficult circumstances and who did not flinch at hard things. The grandmother listened to all of it. Then she said: 'The growth is real. And it's yours. And it doesn't mean the suffering was good. Both of those things are true at the same time.' Clara sat with that for a long time. It was not a resolution. But it was honest in a way the Sunday school answer hadn't been.

The grandmother added one more thing: 'The question isn't whether suffering can produce something. It can. The question is whether that's enough of a reason for it. And I'm not sure it is. I'm not sure anyone has a good answer to that.' That was the most useful thing anyone had said to Clara in a year. Not because it resolved anything, but because it refused to resolve it too quickly.

Vocabulary

Soul-making theodicy

The philosophical and theological argument, associated with the thinker John Hick, that the world was designed not as a place of comfort but as a place of character development — and that suffering is part of what enables genuine moral and spiritual growth. Also called 'Irenaean theodicy' after the early church father Irenaeus.

John Hick

British philosopher of religion (1922–2012) who developed the most rigorous modern version of the soul-making theodicy. Hick argued that human beings are not created fully formed but are works-in-progress, and that the challenges of life — including suffering — are the means by which moral and spiritual development becomes possible.

C.S. Lewis

British writer and Christian apologist (1898–1963) who wrote The Problem of Pain, one of the most thoughtful engagements with suffering from a Christian perspective. Lewis took the problem seriously without offering easy comfort. After the death of his wife, he also wrote A Grief Observed — a raw and honest account of what it felt like to face what he had argued about.

Formative suffering

Suffering that produces genuine growth — deeper compassion, greater resilience, moral weight that comfort could not have produced. The soul-making defense claims that the possibility of formative suffering justifies God's permission of suffering in general.

The limit of the defense

The soul-making defense runs out when applied to suffering that produces no growth — suffering that is excessive, comes too early, or ends a life before any development is possible. This limit is real and the defense must honestly acknowledge it.

Guided Teaching

John Hick's soul-making theodicy begins with a claim about what human beings are: not finished creatures placed in a garden, but unfinished creatures being formed through experience. Hick drew on the early church father Irenaeus, who distinguished between being made 'in God's image' (which humans are at creation) and being made 'in God's likeness' (which is a goal to be achieved, not a starting point). The process of achieving that likeness — of becoming genuinely good, genuinely loving, genuinely wise — requires the kind of world we actually live in: a world with real difficulty, real consequence, real moral challenges.

The argument has a specific advantage over the free will defense: it can address natural evil as well as moral evil. If the world is designed as a place of soul-making — of character formation — then natural challenges serve a purpose too. Illness, loss, physical hardship — these are not merely accidental features of a fallen world. They are, on this view, part of the curriculum. The kind of patience, compassion, and resilience that Clara developed could not have come from a comfortable life.

C.S. Lewis pressed this further. He argued that a God who wanted to give us the comfortable feeling of security at all costs would be a very different God from one who wanted to produce genuine character. He wrote: 'We want not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven — a senile benevolence who, as they say, liked to see young people enjoying themselves.' The God who appears in the Bible, Lewis argued, is the former: a God who is committed to our genuine formation even when that formation is costly.

This is genuinely persuasive for some cases of suffering. The character that comes through adversity is real. The compassion of people who have suffered is often qualitatively different from the sympathy of those who haven't. And there is something true in the observation that a world with no difficulty, no cost, no resistance would produce a kind of ease that is not the same as goodness — that genuine virtue requires genuine testing.

But now the limit. Ivan Karamazov — the character in Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov who makes the most powerful literary statement of the problem of evil — says this: even if there is a harmony at the end of history that redeems all suffering, he refuses it. He refuses to accept a ticket to the future harmony that was purchased with the suffering of a single child. The question Ivan is pressing is: does the good that suffering enables actually justify the suffering? And specifically: does it justify the suffering of those who do not survive it, or who suffer it too young to grow from it?

This is the honest limit of the soul-making defense. It works for suffering that is genuinely formative. It strains when applied to suffering that is excessive — that breaks rather than builds. And it fails entirely for suffering that ends before any formation is possible. Clara's grandmother was right: the growth is real, and it doesn't mean the suffering was good. Both of those things are true at once. The soul-making defense is real and limited. Holding both honestly is what this module is asking for.

One more thing Lewis added, which is worth keeping: A Grief Observed, which he wrote after his wife Joy died, is full of exactly the kind of honest struggle the soul-making defense describes. Lewis doesn't abandon his arguments. But he is honest that living through grief is different from arguing about it — that the arguments feel different from inside than they do from outside. He is angry. He is confused. And he keeps going. That kept-going-ness, in the face of genuine pain that he had argued about theoretically, is its own form of testimony.

For Discussion

1. 1.What is the soul-making defense, and what advantage does it have over the free will defense?
2. 2.What is Hick's distinction between being made 'in God's image' and being made 'in God's likeness'? What does it imply about why the world is the way it is?
3. 3.What did C.S. Lewis mean when he said God 'shouts in our pains'? Do you think that's true?
4. 4.What did Ivan Karamazov mean when he said he refused the ticket to the future harmony? Is his objection fair?
5. 5.Clara's grandmother said: 'The growth is real, and it doesn't mean the suffering was good.' How do you hold those two things together?
6. 6.For which kinds of suffering does the soul-making defense feel persuasive? For which does it not?
7. 7.Lewis wrote A Grief Observed after the death of his wife — and it is much more raw and honest than The Problem of Pain. What does the difference between those two books tell us about the difference between arguing about suffering and living through it?
8. 8.What is the specific case that Ivan Karamazov makes that the soul-making defense cannot answer? Do you think that case is decisive?

Practice

Testing the Defense

1. 1.Write down one instance of suffering that you think the soul-making defense genuinely addresses — a case where difficulty produced real character, depth, or wisdom that comfort could not have produced.
2. 2.Now write down one instance where it doesn't — a case where the suffering seems to produce nothing, or where the person who suffers does not survive long enough to grow from it.
3. 3.Write Ivan Karamazov's objection in your own words. Then write the best possible response to it. Then honestly assess: does the response fully answer the objection?
4. 4.Write one paragraph in response to this question: can a defense of God's permission of suffering be both philosophically serious and emotionally honest at the same time? What would that look like?

Memory Questions

1. 1.What is the soul-making theodicy, and what thinker is most associated with it?
2. 2.What is the difference between being made in God's image and being made in God's likeness, in Hick's argument?
3. 3.What advantage does the soul-making defense have over the free will defense?
4. 4.What did C.S. Lewis mean when he said God 'shouts in our pains'?
5. 5.What is Ivan Karamazov's objection to theodicy in general, and does the soul-making defense answer it?
6. 6.What is the specific limit of the soul-making defense — the kind of case it cannot address?