232 HENRY JANSEN “TRAGIC” AND “COMIC” SUFFERING Introduction The problem of suffering is one with which all religions and worldviews have to deal. While this problem has, to a certain extent, moved to center stage in Chris- tian apologetics since the events of the last century, it is, after all, one of the basic existentials of human existence, with a myriad of forms in which it appears on both a personal and global level. On the personal level, individuals strive through their religious and/or worldview affiliations to deal with failure, feelings of inade- quacy, unemployment, illness, accidents and personal loss and grief, to mention but a few. On a global level, we have in just this past year been confronted with the enormous suffering brought about by a tsunami in the Pacific Ocean, the hurri- cane Katrina, a devastating earthquake in the Kashmir area, the continuing vio- lence in Iraq and terrorist attacks. Religions and worldviews have developed elaborate theories on how suffering should be viewed. In one sense, it could be said suffering is basic to religions and worldviews. As Jerald D. Gort once wrote, “the basic question of humanity concerns [a] sense of a destiny of salvation in the midst of an earthly life filled with distress .... [E]very human philosophy and religion is ‘fundamentally and principially preoccupied’ with this question” (Gort 1995: 194). This is so, however much religions may differ from one another with respect to what they see as suffering and how they deal with suffering. In Christian theology one of the “theories” that has recently taken root is the idea of tragedy as a way of looking at suffering, in opposition to the “traditional” Christian notion of a “comedy” with respect to suffering. In the view of many of the proponents of this theory, the comic view of suffering lays too much stress on human sin as the cause of suffering and also holds forth the vision of a world re- deemed from suffering. In contrast, the tragic view of suffering emphasizes the kind of suffering that happens and about which we can do little or nothing—to put it most strongly, the tragic view of suffering brings the inevitability of suffering into the foreground. In this article I would like to examine the question of whether we can simply choose between viewing suffering as tragic and viewing it as comic. Instead, we should recognize that not only can there be “tragic” and “comic” suffering but also that there can be “tragic” and “comic” aspects to the same instance of suffering.