f2PointEight

Growing Up in a Theology of Hurt

I grew up in a faith that treated suffering not merely as an inevitable part of life, but as something close to sacred. Pain was not only expected. It was encouraged. It was framed as evidence of devotion, proof that one was truly walking the narrow way. In church halls and crusade tents and Sabbath School classes, we learned that the purest form of holiness was not found in joy or peace or flourishing, but in the willingness to endure harm for the sake of God.

For years I imagined this project taking the form of a documentary, a visual meditation on the way Christianity has learned to sanctify pain and the strange kingdom that rose from that devotion. Filmmaking has always been my craft, and I once believed that only a camera could capture the weight of these questions. But lately I find that the written word is the medium that meets me where I am. It demands no budget, no interviewees, no locations or equipment. It asks only for time, and for the courage to give shape to thoughts I once kept buried. Writing has become its own form of inquiry, a way of turning the lens inward instead of outward.

And as I began tracing these thoughts back through the years, I realised how early this theology had imprinted itself on my imagination. Its shape was already there in the images and stories I absorbed as a child, long before I had the language to question them.

One memory stands out with peculiar clarity. Winning a Dove Award for ‘Inspirational’ Recorded Song of the Year in 1994, Ray Boltz’s I Pledge Allegiance to the Lamb, was played on repeat on every Gospel television channel, and radio station. After recounting in detail stories of Christian martyrdom throughout the centuries to his young son, the music video shows a father seemingly being led to his execution for refusing to renounce his faith. The son, no older than 8 or 9, looks on helplessly but resolute, imprisoned in the cell they shared just moments before. His own execution presumably the state’s next ticket item. The message was unmistakable. The highest good was to be faithful unto death, to follow God especially if it destroyed you. There was a solemn pride in imagining oneself in that father’s place, as if martyrdom were not tragedy but triumph.

This Ray Boltz hit was not an isolated moment in the zeitgeist. Throughout my childhood, martyrdom was treated as both warning and aspiration. Sermons invoked stories about the Columbine High School massacre. Pastors, youth leaders, and earnest laypeople repeated claims that certain victims were asked whether they believed in God, and those who said “yes” were shot. The narrative was powerful and widely repeated. It turned frightened teenagers into poster-children for heroic faith. As children we were asked, in altar calls and youth camps, whether we would be willing to do the same, to die rather than deny. And because children want to be brave, and faithful, and good, many of us said yes before we understood what we were agreeing to. Only later did it emerge that these stories were deeply embellished or simply untrue. But the myth had already lodged itself in the Christian imagination. It was too potent to let go.

In my own tradition, Seventh-day Adventism, this fixation was crystallised by an apocalyptic eschatological worldview in which suffering was not merely expected but eagerly anticipated. The “time of trouble” that would precede the Second Coming would, we were told, be a time when Christians would be hunted and killed. The “remnant”, those who kept the Sabbath, would face persecution and near annihilation. Sermons about this coming horror were delivered with a peculiar mixture of dread and quiet relish. We were being prepared for catastrophe, and the preparation was presented as a privilege.

With the 1983 release of National Sunday Law, Jan Marcussen effectively reinvogorated this worldview for many Seventh-day Adventists of my generation. Aside from the deeply anti-Catholic rhetoric, its pages dripped with fear and fascination, painting a world hurtling toward bloodshed and religious coercion. Even as a child, I sensed something twisted in the way adults spoke of these things. Aged 6, I remember sitting in the back of the car after church had ended as a silent and unwilling participant in adult conversations about the impending persecution of believers. These things were spoken of with near excitement, as if suffering were the proof that we truly belonged to God. I was paralysed by the fear of it, and more so by the implication that my fear itself indicated my lack of faith and likely eternal damnation.

It is only decades later that I can see it clearly, I was raised in a community that romanticised pain. And it took me years to understand how deeply this shaped not just my faith, but the faith of my fellow Christians.

The Invention of the Holy Victim

The earliest Christian communities emerged in a world ruled by empire, where public spectacle and violence were everyday realities. In this environment, martyrdom narratives became powerful tools of identity formation.

Scholars like Paula Fredriksen, Candida Moss, and Elizabeth Castelli have shown that the earliest martyr stories were often less about historical accuracy and more about shaping communal imagination. These accounts served a symbolic purpose. They were meant to inspire, unify, and create a sense of heroic identity. Persecution in the early church was real at times, but it was neither constant nor universal. Yet the fervour with which Christians preserved and embellished these stories tells us something essential. The community needed martyrs, even when history offered few.

The martyr became the ideal believer. The one who died well became the one who lived best.

The church’s identity turned on the image of the suffering righteous. And because Christianity was founded on the tortured death of its central figure, the elevation of pain became almost inevitable. The cross was not just an event. It became the archetype.

Many early martyr accounts are unmistakably theatrical. They depict believers who endure torture with almost superhuman serenity. Their persecutors are drawn as cartoonish villains, driven mad by the victim’s calm. Their deaths are polished into scenes of triumph, with heavenly visions, glowing faces, and miraculous endurance. The goal was not to record history. The goal was to create heroes.

As Castelli notes, what mattered was not what happened, but what the story accomplished.

This spiritual theatre became the emotional bloodstream of the early church. Martyrdom was not an unfortunate by-product. It was literary theatre and a source of inspiration. A proof that the faith was worth dying for. A badge of honour.

A religion that begins with the glorification of an unjust death does not easily disentangle itself from the sanctification of suffering. When the highest model of love is a man nailed to a cross, the community begins to imagine that its own suffering is holy by analogy. The cross becomes not a warning about the cruelty of empire, but evidence that God prefers sacrifice to survival.

This problem with making pain holy, this dangerous inversion, lies at the root of Christianity’s long romance with pain.

God as the Author of Ordeals

Central to Christianity’s theology is the idea that suffering has moral value. That pain purifies. That hardship shapes the soul. That difficulty is a kind of divine pedagogy.

There is a deep problem here.

Pain is not inherently ennobling. Trauma does not automatically generate wisdom. And suffering does not, by itself, create moral character. But Christianity insists that it does.

The believer is told to rejoice in suffering. To take up their cross. To die daily. To count trials as joy. Suffering becomes the pathway to holiness, not something to be alleviated but something to be embraced. This is the logic of the cross, that if God needed the violent death of an innocent man in order to save the world, then suffering becomes woven into the very fabric of redemption. It becomes sacred. It becomes central. It becomes necessary.

This creates catastrophic implications. Because if God uses suffering to achieve good, then the believer will come to expect suffering as a sign of God’s work. Christians often turn to the metaphor of gold refined in fire, holding it up as proof that suffering purifies the soul. In countless sermons, we were told that just as gold must be heated, melted, beaten and reshaped before it gleams, so too must human beings endure affliction to become spiritually valuable.

But the analogy quietly betrays a disturbing truth. Gold has no agency. It does not consent to the fire. It does not survive the furnace with memories or scars. It is an object acted upon, not a life being lived. To compare human suffering to the smelting of metal is to reduce people to raw material in the hands of a divine craftsman, a resource to be broken and remade for some higher purpose. And when a person learns to see themselves as something that must be heated and hammered to be of worth, they begin to accept harm as necessary and even holy. The metaphor that was meant to comfort instead reveals the quiet violence at the heart of a theology that treats pain as a tool. Pain becomes proof that God is present. And the absence of suffering becomes spiritually suspicious. If you are comfortable, perhaps you are compromised.

The logic is subtle, but devastating. If Jesus saved the world by bleeding, then bleeding must be good. If Christ’s suffering redeemed humanity, then suffering must redeem the believer. If pain brought salvation, then pain must be holy.

This is the quiet theology that sits in the pews, stands in the pulpit, and permeates our interpretation of the texts. And it shapes everything.

A God who uses suffering as didactic becomes a God who is complicit in harm. The believer begins to expect God to orchestrate trials in order to test them. Difficulty is no longer random. It is divine design. But what kind of God grows you by wounding you? What kind of love fractures your spirit in order to shape it? What kind of parent believes trauma is the path to transformation?

This is the heart of the problem. Christianity cannot let go of suffering because it cannot let go of the cross. And the cross is a story that baptises pain.

A Faith That Wounds

I was raised to believe that suffering for God was something to aspire to. That persecution was both inevitable and desirable because it proved the authenticity of our faith. But what happens to a child who grows up believing they may one day have to die for God?

They learn to view secularised moral progress as a threat and every law which enshrines it as one step closer to their impending oppression. Especially in contexts where Christians are safe and free, many cling passionately to persecution narratives. Why?

Because persecution validates identity. It confirms chosenness. It justifies fear. It grants moral superiority. It creates the intoxicating sense of being part of a cosmic struggle.

This is why so many Christians insist they are persecuted even when they are not. Persecution is the glue that holds their identity together. Without the threat of suffering, the faith feels untested and therefore unproven.

It is in this sense that equal rights for LGBTQ+ people somehow become reframed as attacks on religious liberty. Laws allowing transgender individuals to use public restrooms become threats to the safety of women and children. Access to abortion is framed as a direct assault on God’s sovereignty. These shifts in the cultural landscape are not, in themselves, aimed at diminishing Christian belief or practice. They are simply attempts to expand dignity and autonomy to groups who have long been denied them. Yet within much of the Christian imagination, any expansion of rights that does not centre their worldview feels like oppression.

This distortion is dangerous because it turns vulnerable populations into enemies of God. LGBTQ+ people, who already face disproportionate rates of homelessness, suicide and violence, are cast as existential threats to the moral fabric of society. Trans people, whose daily lives require extraordinary courage, are framed as predators or deluded sinners. Women seeking abortions, sometimes in circumstances of profound emotional, medical or financial distress, are portrayed as murderers or rebels against divine order. A faith that claims to defend the sanctity of life ends up dehumanising the very people whose lives are most precarious. When Christians imagine themselves persecuted by the progress of others, they justify cruelty as righteousness. They sanctify intolerance as fidelity.

This narrative does not just harm those outside the church. It corrodes the moral imagination of those within it. When the expansion of human rights is framed as a direct threat to Christianity, believers learn to fear compassion. They learn to see justice as the enemy of holiness. They learn to interpret the flourishing of others as a loss of their own power. The result is a community that feels perpetually besieged, even when it remains the dominant cultural force. A persecuted church is a church without responsibility. It can refuse introspection, evade accountability and treat any challenge to its authority as evidence of its faithfulness.

And yet, for many Christians, this posture is spiritually appealing because it exalts God through imagined suffering. If the world is out to destroy their beliefs, then their endurance becomes proof of divine favour. Their resistance becomes a form of worship. God grows larger in their minds as the world grows more hostile. The irony, of course, is that the hostility exists largely in their imagination. The “persecution” they claim is simply the inconvenience of no longer being able to impose their morality on others. But to frame equality as oppression allows them to preserve a sense of heroic identity. It allows them to see themselves not as participants in a diverse society, but as warriors for a besieged kingdom.

In this way, the mislabelled persecution of Christians does two things simultaneously. It harms the marginalised, who must bear the weight of suspicion, hostility and exclusion. And it elevates God, though only by shrinking the believer’s world until every challenge feels like an attack. A God who requires the oppression of others in order to feel victorious is a God made small by fear. A God who is glorified only when someone else’s dignity is denied is a God who reflects the wounds of his worshippers rather than healing them. And a community that mistakes equality for persecution reveals not the strength of its faith, but the fragility of the identity it has built around suffering.

This theology is not merely wrong. It is dangerous. A faith that fetishises suffering inevitably harms its most vulnerable members.

The Cosmic Logic of Necessary Suffering

The story of Job is perhaps Christianity’s clearest example of how suffering becomes sanctified, even celebrated. Job loses everything, his wealth, his health, and most devastatingly, his children, not because he has failed God, but because God agrees to a wager that tests the depth of his devotion. His life is dismantled piece by piece while heaven looks on. And when the ordeal ends, the text presents Job’s endurance as triumph. He is “rewarded” with new children, as though the ones he buried were replaceable, as though grief can be exchanged like damaged property for restored blessings.

In Christian culture, we have softened this horror by calling profound loss “a Job experience,” as if the wholesale destruction of a life is a kind of spiritual boot camp. The story becomes a euphemism, a way to frame catastrophe as divinely orchestrated character development. It is one of the earliest and most enduring examples of how faith teaches us to reinterpret devastation as a sign of favour, suffering as evidence of fidelity, and violence as something God not only allows but employs.

At the core of Christianity is the belief that God required violence to reconcile with humanity. That forgiveness was not possible without blood. That peace could not be achieved without death.

This raises unavoidable questions.

If God is omnipotent, why was suffering necessary? If God is love, why was violence chosen? If God is good, why is redemption built on brutality?

Ironically, the Jesus who walked among the oppressed has been overshadowed by the Jesus who died. His teachings, emphasising compassion, justice, and liberation, are eclipsed by the spectacle of his execution. And Christianity became a religion not of his life, but of his death.

The result is a faith that remembers his wounds more than his works. A kingdom that loves the blood more than the man. A theology that fetishises the agony while neglecting the ethics.

During some of the darkest years of my life, when I was struggling to keep my head above the waters of my own mind, I turned to a book by one of my favourite preachers at the time. God in Pain by David Asscherick attempted to offer the reassurance that our suffering is not meaningless or unnoticed. Its central claim is that God does not merely observe our pain, He shares it. He feels it more intensely than any human ever could. Because whereas we experience our own anguish one life at a time, God is said to experience all anguish across all time in a single, unending present. If this is true, then God suffers infinitely. And therefore, we are not alone.

It was meant to be comforting. At the time, I tried to let it be.

Asscherick draws deeply from Ellen White’s theology of the Great Controversy, the cosmic drama in which sin must reveal its full consequences so that every being across the universe can witness, comprehend, and permanently internalise the horrors that inevitably follow from choosing anything contrary to God’s will. According to this framework, the plan of salvation is not simply about saving humans. It is about securing the moral stability of the universe forever.

The logic, built upon the necessity of suffering, is simple, though devastating in implication.

Free will is only sustainable in a perfect world if all creatures intimately understand that disobedience leads inevitably to suffering. Therefore, suffering must be allowed to occur and must be allowed to run its course so that the universe can learn the lesson permanently. What results is a kind of cosmic aversion therapy where sin must be allowed to manifest itself in complete and catastrophic form. Pain must be permitted to reach its climax, and this world must burn so that future worlds will not.

This is how the book reconciles human anguish with divine love. God allows suffering now in order to prevent suffering forever. God permits the nightmare because the universe needs to see what happens when it turns away from Him. In this story, our suffering is not meaningless, but instrumental. It is part of a grand demonstration. The universe is watching. We are the cautionary tale.

As a young adult drowning in depression, I clung to this logic because the alternative, that suffering was pointless, felt unbearable. But the conclusion I eventually reached was not the one the book intended. If this cosmic pedagogy were true, then God did not care about our suffering in the way I desperately needed Him to. He cared about the lesson the universe had to learn from it. He cared about the vindication of His character. He cared about ensuring that free will could one day coexist with eternal peace.

But He did not care, at least not primarily, about the agony I was living through. He cared about the eternal outcome, the far horizon. And I was left with the quiet, painful realisation that mine, and everyone else’s individual suffering was not a tragedy to be alleviated, but a necessary ingredient in a divine demonstration. A stepping stone in a celestial polemic. A data point in the curriculum of the universe.

If the plan of salvation required the world to witness the full consequences of sin, then my anguish was not something God intended to prevent, but something He intended to use. And so, I reached the conclusion that kept me alive at the time but later shattered my faith.
God did not care about our suffering. He cared about our salvation. And He was willing to countenance all human suffering to achieve it.

It was only later that I realised there is very little comfort in a God who loves the universe more than the individual, and who allows pain now for peace later. That is not compassion. It is calculation. It is not intimacy. It is strategy. It is not love. It is logic.

And once I saw this, I could not unsee it.

Reimagining Faith Beyond the Furnace

When a community comes to believe that suffering is a sign of spiritual maturity, pain begins to function as a kind of religious currency. Hardship becomes proof of holiness. Endurance becomes evidence of divine favour. The believer is taught, often unconsciously, to measure their standing with God by the extent of their wounds. The logic becomes self-reinforcing. If you are hurting, it must be because God is refining you. If you are struggling, it must be because God is shaping you. And if you are breaking, it must be because God is preparing to use you.

This framework does not strengthen the believer. It neutralises them.

By treating pain as a tool in the hand of God, the individual learns to accept or even welcome circumstances that diminish their wellbeing. The consequences are not theoretical. They manifest in the lived experiences of believers. Those who endure abuse are often encouraged to remain in harmful relationships because their endurance is said to mirror the sacrifice of Christ. The grieving are assured that their sorrow is somehow sacred and that to move through it too quickly might appear to dishonour the spiritual lesson it contains. The oppressed are told that their hardship is a reminder that the world is not their home and that their suffering is akin to discipleship.

This theological orientation does more than burden the vulnerable. It empowers those who hold authority. If suffering is believed to be God’s means of instruction, then any set of circumstances that produces suffering can claim to be acting in accordance with divine intention. Harm becomes sanctified by its outcome. Abuse becomes justification for growth. Oppression is reframed as spiritual discipline. And those in power become the unofficial stewards of God’s difficult lessons. The fetishisation of suffering does not protect the believer. It protects the system. It shields the abuser. And it reinforces the hierarchy that benefits from keeping believers docile, compliant and emotionally dependent on spiritual narratives that render their pain meaningful.

This is why trauma is so often converted into testimony within Christian spaces. Personal stories of suffering are treated as moral capital. The deeper the wound, the more powerful the narrative. Testimonies become performances of survival in which the individual is encouraged to offer their pain as evidence of God’s faithfulness. These stories are celebrated not because they honour the one who endured the hardship, but because they validate the community’s belief that suffering is spiritually productive. This is not healing. It is a morbid voyeurism. It turns the inner lives of traumatised people into shared religious property. Their wounds become inspirational material rather than human experiences deserving of care.

It is worth asking whether Christianity must necessarily be tied to this theology of pain. What would it look like for a faith to reject the logic that suffering sanctifies? What happens if believers refuse to see hardship as a mark of divine favour and instead view it as a human reality that demands human compassion?

Such a shift would require a reorientation of the Christian imagination away from the cross as a model of virtue and back toward the life of Jesus as a model of transformation. A faith that does not glorify suffering would emphasise healing as a spiritual mandate rather than a spiritual metaphor. It would treat psychological flourishing as a legitimate sign of God’s presence instead of evidence of compromise. It would regard justice as holy, not suspicion of the world. And it would view the alleviation of suffering as a form of worship rather than a threat to spiritual growth.

Communities shaped by this counter-theology would begin to develop different reflexes. Instead of asking what lesson God is teaching through someone’s pain, they would ask what resources, solidarity and care are required to help them heal. Instead of interpreting oppression as a spiritual trial, they would recognise it as a moral failure of society that demands resistance and change. Instead of rewarding those who endure hardship silently, they would honour those who speak out against harm. The community would be transformed from a theatre of endurance into a sanctuary of support.

Even the understanding of God would shift. Instead of a deity who orchestrates suffering to serve a cosmic purpose, God would be seen as one who stands against suffering altogether. Not a sculptor indiscriminately chiselling away at human lives, but a companion who calls humanity toward liberation, restoration and wholeness. Such a God would not require calamity to accomplish good. They would require only the courage of communities willing to embody compassion.

In this framework, testimony would no longer be a public display of wounds, but a story of healing, resistance and renewed agency. Trauma would not be mined for spiritual inspiration. It would be acknowledged, treated and grieved. The believer would no longer be asked to see their suffering as a divine message. They would be asked to see their suffering as a human experience that deserves tenderness.

This kind of faith would not weaken believers. It would strengthen them. It would free them from the expectation that holiness requires harm. It would allow them to build communities where flourishing is the norm, not a sign of spiritual laxity. And it would dismantle the narrative that God is most present in suffering, opening the possibility that God, if God exists at all, might be more present in joy, justice and human thriving than in the endurance of pain.

Such a transformation would not only heal individuals. It would heal the church. And perhaps, in doing so, it would also heal the distorted image of God the church has carried for millennia.

A Faith That Refuses the Cross

I spent several years in a Catholic preparatory school, where the rhythms of faith were built into the architecture of our days. Once a week we would line up, boys in their best khaki shirts and girls in their blue tunics with an embroidered school crest affixed to the breast. A procession of children shuffling across the road to the octagonally-shaped church for mass. I remember being mesmerised by the vaulted ceilings and the carved reliefs, the way the light caught the dust in the air and made the whole space feel like it was breathing. But of all the details etched into that time, one memory has stayed with me long after the catechisms faded.

The priest had a habit of addressing questions that students passed along through their teachers. One day he paused at the front of the sanctuary and explained that people often asked why the crucifix above the altar held only a cross and not a body. “Why no Christ nailed to the beams?” “Why no suffering on display?” He smiled gently, almost apologetically, and said, “Because I think Jesus has hung there long enough. I would rather look upon the way he lived than the way he died.”

At the time I didn’t grasp the gravity of what he was saying. I was too young, too obedient to the stories we were told about holiness and sacrifice. But three decades later, that comment returns to me with surprising force. It was the first time anyone in my religious world had suggested that the life of Jesus might matter more than the violence of his death. That his compassion might be more instructive than his agony. That the cross was not meant to be a stage upon which human suffering is spiritualised, but a reminder of the brutality that love should oppose.

Only now do I understand how subversive his words were, and how quietly wise.

If Christianity is to reclaim any moral credibility, it must begin by facing its long romance with suffering. The faith cannot be healed until it abandons the idea that pain is a spiritual asset or a tool in the hands of God. Suffering is not sanctifying. It is simply suffering. And any theology that insists otherwise ends up protecting pain rather than people.

To speak meaningfully of following Jesus would require returning to the parts of his life that the church so often forgets. His compassion, his commitment to healing, his insistence on liberation for the oppressed. These were not footnotes to his ministry. They were the ministry. Yet a faith fixated on his death has obscured his life, turning a moral teacher into a sacrificial emblem and transforming a call to justice into an invitation to endure harm. A faith that chose to centre his living instead of his dying might learn to prioritise love over sacrifice, justice over endurance, restoration over resignation.

Perhaps the true courage required of us is not the willingness to die for our beliefs, but the willingness to abandon beliefs that demand our death.

Perhaps holiness is not found in the cross, but in the refusal to climb onto one. And if God exists, then perhaps God is not discovered in the bruising of the human spirit but in its strengthening, in the small and steady rebellions that insist life is worth protecting. The sacred may reside not in wounds, but in the hope of wholeness.

Yet this vision of a gentler, life-honouring faith stands in stark contrast to what many of us inherited. Instead of guiding us toward lives where wholeness is vigourously pursued, it points us back to a blood-soaked cross. It teaches people how to die with conviction but not how to live with clarity. It prepares them to endure suffering but not to question it. It trains them to imagine themselves as martyrs, but rarely as humans deserving of flourishing. The invitation buried beneath centuries of theological ornamentation might be far simpler than we ever imagined.

It may be the call to choose life.

To choose healing.

To choose one another.

To imagine a world where pain is not revered as holy, but recognised as a human experience we are obliged to ease.

To envision a community where dignity is not purchased through hardship, and where suffering is not the price of admission to any kingdom worth entering.

If there is anything sacred in this universe, perhaps it is not the shedding of blood, but the refusal to shed it. Perhaps holiness is found not in accepting harm for the sake of God, but in rejecting any theology that turns human beings into sacrifices. And if faith is to have a future beyond the wounds it has inherited, it will be because believers learned to stop glorifying the cross long enough to remember the God who, according to their own story, came to heal rather than to harm.