Summary of Timothy Keller's Walking with God through Pain and Suffering

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

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#1 Suffering can destroy so many things that give life meaning that it may feel impossible to even go on. But nothing is more important than learning how to maintain a life of purpose in the face of adversity.

#2 Suffering can destroy so many things that give life meaning that it may feel impossible to even go on. But nothing is more important than learning how to maintain a life of purpose in the face of adversity.

#3 Suffering can be a powerful means of achieving your purpose in life. In other cultures, suffering can be an important part of the grand narrative of life. In modern Western culture, suffering is unavoidable, and so people must smuggle in resources from other worldviews to help them make sense of it.

#4 Suffering can be a powerful means of achieving your purpose in life. In other cultures, suffering can be an important part of the grand narrative of life. In modern Western culture, suffering is unavoidable, and so people must smuggle in resources from other worldviews to help them make sense of it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Oct 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9798350039429

IRB Media

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Insights on Timothy Keller's Walking with God through Pain and Suffering

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The most important thing to remember when dealing with suffering is to maintain a life of purpose. Every culture has provided its members with instructions on how to deal with suffering correctly, and the Western culture is one of the weakest and worst at doing so.

#2

Every culture must provide a discourse that explains the causes of pain, as well as the proper responses to it. Without such a discourse, victims can develop a deep, undying anger and poisonous hate that is called ressentiment.

#3

The secular view of life is that this material world is all there is. The meaning of life is to have the freedom to choose the life that makes you most happy. However, in that view of things, suffering can have no meaningful part. It is a complete interruption of your life story.

#4

There are four ways traditional cultures have helped their people respond to suffering and evil. The first is the moralistic view, which believes that pain and suffering stem from the failure to live rightly. The second is the self-transcendent view, which believes that life circumstances are set by the stars or by supernatural forces.

#5

There are four different approaches to dealing with suffering: the self-transcendent, the moralistic, the fatalistic, and the dualistic. Each one tells its members that suffering is a necessary part of the warp and woof of human existence, and that it can help them rise up and move toward their main purpose in life.

#6

The Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, believe that life is filled with suffering. Their solutions to their members involve mainly internal work. They call for confession and purification, spiritual growth, and faithfulness to the truth.

#7

While other cultures see the world as consisting of both matter and spirit, Western thought understands it as consisting of material forces only, all of which operate devoid of anything that could be called purpose.

#8

The secular view of reality is that this is a materialistic universe, and that which gives your life purpose must be some material good or this-world condition. But suffering inevitably blocks achievement of these kinds of life goods.

#9

In our Western society, the meaning of life is individual freedom and happiness. So if the only thing to do with suffering is to avoid it at all costs, or if it is unavoidable, manage and minimize the emotions of pain and discomfort as much as possible.

#10

The secular model believes that sufferers should be treated by experts, who should alleviate their pain by removing as many stressors as possible. However, this has led to great confusion in our society, because different guilds of experts differ on what they think sufferers should do.

#11

The older view of suffering was that the pain is a symptom of a conflict between a person’s internal and external world. It meant the sufferer’s behavior and