"We live in a world that is remarkably fruitful and beautiful, remarkably chilling and frightening and destructive. It is a very ambiguous sort of picture, and somehow or other, the bad things are the necessary cost of the good things. That is not an argument you can utter without a quiver in your voice. The world is too complex and strange for that.... A Christian understanding of suffering is not that God is simply a compassionate spectator looking down on the strange and bitter world that God holds in being. As a Christian, I believe that God is participating in the suffering of the world, that God is truly a fellow sufferer. The Christian God is the crucified God. That is a very deep and mysterious, though, I believe, true, insight. That is the deepest level at which the problem of suffering has to be met..."
- Sir John Polinghorne, in Socrates in the City
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