The following is an excerpt from a book about suffering written by Timothy Downing, Missionary in Ecuador. The book is titled: The Storm Will ComeBuilding Foundations for Inevitable Suffering
The Post-Enlightenment Delusion of Progress
To understand how deeply our civilization has embraced the myth of perpetual summer, we must trace the intellectual genealogy of our current predicament back to its origins in the post-Enlightenment project. The great thinkers of that era—Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet, and their intellectual heirs—bequeathed to us a vision of human progress that was both magnificent in its scope and tragically flawed in its premises. They envisioned a future in which reason, applied systematically to the problems of human existence, would gradually eliminate the sources of suffering that had plagued humanity throughout its history.
This was not merely scientific optimism, though science played a crucial role in the vision. It was a comprehensive reimagining of the human condition itself. Disease would yield to medical advancement. Poverty would surrender to economic development. Ignorance would retreat before universal education. War would become obsolete through enlightened diplomacy and international law. Even death, the final enemy, might eventually bow to human ingenuity.
The vision was intoxicating, and its partial fulfillment over the subsequent centuries has only strengthened its hold on the modern imagination. We have indeed conquered diseases that once devastated populations, lifted millions from grinding poverty, and created systems of knowledge that would have seemed miraculous to earlier generations. The very fact that I can write these words in one hemisphere and you can read them in another, connected by technologies that compress space and time, testifies to the genuine achievements of human reason and industry.
Yet somewhere in this magnificent project, a crucial element was lost: the ancient wisdom that recognized suffering as an ineradicable feature of the human condition, not because of human failure but because of the very nature of existence in a fallen world. The Enlightenment project, for all its genuine achievements, was built upon a fundamental anthropological error—the belief that human beings are perfectible through external means, that the sources of our deepest anguish lie outside ourselves and can therefore be eliminated through the proper application of technique.
This error has profound theological implications. By locating the sources of suffering primarily in external circumstances—disease, poverty, ignorance, social inequality—rather than in the fundamental structure of existence in a fallen world, the Enlightenment project implicitly denied the biblical understanding of sin and its consequences. It assumed that human beings are essentially good and that evil represents a temporary aberration rather than a permanent feature of our condition this side of the eschaton.
The result has been a civilization increasingly ill-equipped to deal with the kinds of suffering that cannot be solved through technical means: the loss of loved ones, the disappointment of cherished hopes, the gradual recognition of our own mortality, the crushing weight of guilt over actions that cannot be undone, the existential loneliness that persists even in the midst of apparent success and connection. These forms of suffering, which previous generations understood as integral to the human experience and therefore as occasions for spiritual growth, have become in our age either pathological conditions requiring treatment or systemic failures demanding reform.
The Prosperity Gospel and Therapeutic Culture
This Enlightenment foundation has produced two particularly damaging contemporary manifestations: the prosperity gospel within Christianity and therapeutic culture within the broader society. Both represent attempts to maintain the myth of perpetual summer by spiritual or psychological means when material means prove insufficient.
The prosperity gospel, in its various forms, promises believers that sufficient faith, properly applied, will result in material blessing and freedom from significant suffering. This theology, while appealing to our natural desire for comfort and security, represents a profound distortion of biblical Christianity. It transforms the Gospel from the announcement of God’s redemptive work through suffering into a manual for avoiding suffering altogether. The cross becomes not the pattern for Christian living but an unfortunate necessity that we, through our superior faith and understanding, can transcend.
This heresy is particularly insidious because it contains enough truth to seem plausible. Scripture does indeed promise that those who trust in the Lord will be blessed, that prayer can move mountains, and that faith can accomplish remarkable things. But the prosperity gospel takes these promises out of their biblical context, ignoring the equally clear scriptural teaching that believers will face tribulation, that following Christ requires taking up our own crosses, and that some of God’s most faithful servants have endured extraordinary suffering precisely because of their faithfulness.
The result is a theology that creates not stronger Christians but more vulnerable ones—believers who interpret any significant suffering as evidence of inadequate faith or hidden sin, who lack the spiritual resources necessary to endure trials that cannot be prayed away, and who find themselves spiritually homeless when the inevitable storms arrive. When prosperity theology meets genuine affliction, it does not provide comfort but condemnation, not strength but shame.
Therapeutic culture, while lacking the explicitly religious framework of prosperity theology, operates on similar assumptions about the eliminability of suffering. It promises that proper psychological technique, whether through therapy, medication, or various forms of self-improvement, can resolve the fundamental sources of human unhappiness. Like the prosperity gospel, therapeutic culture contains enough truth to seem credible—professional counseling has indeed helped millions of people, and advances in psychiatric medicine have alleviated real suffering for those dealing with severe mental illness.
But therapeutic culture, in its more extreme manifestations, goes beyond offering legitimate help for genuine pathology. It promises a kind of psychological salvation, suggesting that the right combination of insights, techniques, and treatments can eliminate not just mental illness but the ordinary sorrows that attend human existence. It medicalizes grief, pathologizes anxiety, and treats as symptoms conditions that previous generations understood as the natural responses of healthy souls to difficult circumstances.
The therapeutic mindset has profoundly shaped contemporary Christianity, often in ways that believers themselves do not fully recognize. Churches have increasingly adopted therapeutic language and methods, promising not transformation through suffering but healing from suffering. Christian bookstores overflow with titles promising “breakthrough,” “victory,” and “freedom” from various forms of emotional or spiritual difficulty. The biblical language of discipline, endurance, and sanctification through trial has been largely replaced by the therapeutic language of recovery, empowerment, and self-actualization.
The Historical Witness: Suffering as Formation
The contrast with previous generations of Christians could hardly be more stark. When we examine the writings of believers from earlier centuries—the church fathers, medieval mystics, Reformation theologians, Puritan divines, or even evangelical leaders from as recently as a century ago—we encounter a fundamentally different understanding of suffering’s role in Christian formation.
Consider the perspective of John Chrysostom, the fourth-century preacher whose eloquence earned him the title “Golden-Mouthed.” Writing to those facing persecution and hardship, he did not promise them relief from suffering but instruction in how to suffer well: “When you are weighed down by tribulations, do not seek to be delivered from them, but seek rather to endure them well. For the difference between a coward and a hero is not that one doesn’t suffer and the other does, but that one suffers badly and the other nobly.”
Or consider the counsel of Thomas à Kempis in The Imitation of Christ: “It is good for us sometimes to have troubles and adversities; for they often make a man lay to heart that he is only a sojourner, and may not put his trust in any worldly thing. It is good that we sometimes endure contradictions, and that we are hardly and unfavorably judged, when we do and intend well. For these things help us to be humble, and shield us from vainglory. For then we seek more earnestly the inward witness of God, when outwardly we are contemned by men, and when there is no credit given to us.”
The Puritan tradition, perhaps more than any other stream of Christian thought, developed a sophisticated theology of sanctification through suffering. Richard Baxter wrote, “It is not the having of these graces, but the using of them, that is our evidence of sincerity; and it is not the using of them in prosperity and ease, but in adversity and trial, that gives us the surest evidence.” John Flavel counseled believers to “remember that all the stones that come about your head are under the controlling hand of your Father, and that everything works together for good to those who love God.”
These earlier generations did not embrace suffering for its own sake—they were not masochists or adherents of a morbid spirituality that gloried in pain. Rather, they understood what our generation has largely forgotten: that spiritual maturity is impossible without the trials that reveal the inadequacy of our natural resources and drive us to deeper dependence upon divine grace. They saw suffering not as an interruption to spiritual growth but as one of its primary means.
This understanding was reflected not only in their theological writings but in their practical approach to life’s difficulties. They prepared for trials rather than trying to avoid them, developed disciplines for enduring hardship rather than techniques for eliminating it, and created communities capable of sustaining one another through prolonged difficulty rather than offering quick solutions to complex problems.
The Moravian missionaries of the eighteenth century provide a particularly compelling example. These believers, inspired by Count Zinzendorf’s vision of Christian sacrifice, voluntarily embraced lives of extraordinary hardship in order to carry the Gospel to unreached peoples. They sold themselves into slavery to reach slaves in the Caribbean, endured Arctic conditions to minister to the Inuit, and accepted mortality rates that would be considered unconscionable today. They did so not because they enjoyed suffering but because they understood that some goods can only be achieved through the acceptance of significant cost.
John Wesley, writing about the Moravian influence on early Methodism, noted their distinctive approach to affliction: “They looked upon worldly happiness as inconsistent with a Christian life. They thought that a man could not be holy unless he were continually suffering, either from God or man.” While Wesley ultimately rejected this extreme position, he recognized the spiritual strength that came from their willingness to embrace hardship for the sake of the Gospel.
The contrast with contemporary Christianity is instructive. Where earlier generations prepared believers for inevitable trials, we promise techniques for avoiding them. Where they developed disciplines for enduring hardship, we offer strategies for eliminating it. Where they built communities capable of sustaining one another through prolonged difficulty, we create support groups focused on recovery and healing. Where they saw suffering as revelatory—revealing both human weakness and divine strength—we see it primarily as pathological, something to be diagnosed, treated, and cured.
This shift represents more than a change in emphasis; it reflects a fundamental alteration in our understanding of what it means to be human in a fallen world. We have exchanged the biblical vision of life as a pilgrimage marked by trials and sustained by grace for a therapeutic vision of life as a problem to be solved through the proper application of technique. The result is not stronger believers but more vulnerable ones—Christians who possess sophisticated techniques for pursuing happiness but lack the spiritual resources necessary for enduring unhappiness when it inevitably arrives.
The historical witness calls us back to a more robust understanding of the Christian life, one that neither seeks suffering nor fears it but recognizes it as one of the primary means by which God shapes His people for eternal glory. This does not mean embracing a morbid spirituality that delights in difficulty, but it does mean recovering the wisdom of those who understood that the goal of Christian living is not the elimination of suffering but its transformation—the alchemy by which divine grace converts the base metal of human affliction into the gold of spiritual maturity.
Such recovery will require more than intellectual assent to different theological propositions. It will require the patient cultivation of spiritual disciplines that previous generations took for granted, the rebuilding of communities capable of sustaining believers through genuine hardship, and perhaps most fundamentally, the courage to abandon the myth of perpetual summer and prepare ourselves and our children for the storms that are certainly coming.
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