Has Christian theology anything to say to those trapped in the downward cycle of despair? asks MARK THOMPSON.

It is one of the perverse contradictions of our time that so much effort has been expended to make life carefree and enjoyable and yet still for very many all that life seems to offer is the grinding sense of being utterly lost, an overpowering conviction that there is no way forward and no way out.

Despair is the loss of all hope. It sees nothing ahead but emptiness and ruin. Everything else is lost. Every path is blocked. Even in our affluent and sophisticated age, too many people know despair from the inside.

Captured on canvas the state of despair can fascinate us. Conveyed in the lyrics of a popular song it may move us, even move us deeply. Yet for those caught in its grip it is a terrifying enemy that eats away at life itself, robbing them of every drop of joy. Despair can paralyse. It can bring you to the point of giving up altogether.

It can also force you to extreme measures. Suicide bombing has been described as "the inevitable result of decades of despair'.

Has Christian theology anything to say to those trapped in the downward spiral of despair? Are there resources in the rich storehouse of Christian doctrine which can lift the oppressive blanket of despair and bring light where there has been only darkness? What has the Christian gospel to say to the young girl on the brink of ruin or those young men who feel driven to extreme measures because there is nothing worth living for?

One man who understood the answers to these questions was the German Reformer, Martin Luther (1483"1546). The way his story is sometimes told, Luther is one of the most courageous and heroic figures of human history. He never doubted his message to the world of his time and held his ground as his ideas threw that world into turmoil. The Diet of Worms is the triumph of one man's determination, single-mindedness and willpower.

However, the truth is that Luther knew all about doubt and struggle and despair. He even coined a term for the black periods he experienced so often: they were his Anfechtungen. Sometimes the darkness would last for days.

Luther knew the darkness of despair while he was still a monk in Erfurt. He could never escape his own failure. He had been taught to fear the righteous judgement of God and nothing seemed to bring him relief from that fear. He tried working harder but the defects in his walk with God only seemed even more conspicuous to him. He frequented the confessional and wore himself out with acts of penance, but he could never find a way out. "My conscience would never give me assurance', he later told his students, "but I was always doubting and said, "You did not perform that correctly.  You were not contrite enough.  You left that out of your confession".'

Later, on the other side of his great rediscovery of the gospel, Luther would be troubled by different questions. "Are you the only wise man?' "What if you are taking all these people to hell with you?' On the way to Worms in 1521 his great concern was not whether he would return alive to Wittenberg but whether he would confess the truth when faced with the power of the enemy (the representatives of the Roman Church and the Holy Roman Emperor). He feared he might crumble and give in. The recent movie Luther captures this part of his experience well, placing him in his cell on the night before his appearance tormented by the question "Where's your faith now? Where's your faith now?'.

Luther was convinced his struggle with despair was not simply a quirk of his personality (though later biographers have not been so sure).

It was, he explained, the work of the devil who sought to rob human beings of the joy God had designed for them. It was an attempt to distract men and women from the wonder of the gospel and the task of serving each other.

Far from being exceptional, it was part of what it means to live as a Christian in a world distorted by sin and guilt, which is groaning as it waits for the day when it will be renewed.

But it was also the furnace in which real theology and real theologians are forged. Luther insisted, "It is not understanding, reading, or speculation, but living, rather than dying and being damned, that make a theologian'.

Throughout his life, Luther challenged triumphalist pictures of the Christian life, drawing our attention back to the pattern set by Jesus himself. Had not Jesus been brought to the brink in the wilderness, when the devil came to test him?

As Jesus himself had testified, faith relies not upon our own improvement or upon our good works, but upon the character of God and his promises. God can be trusted in the midst of the darkness and he has promised that the darkness will end. In the meantime the darkness strangely serves to keep us from so entangling us in the present that we forget about hope.

Luther found that when there is nowhere to flee from God the only hope we can possibly have is to flee to God. Theology, the knowledge of God, in fact provides the only genuinely effective counter to despair.

For knowing God and his purposes does not simply provide a compelling explanation of the agonising struggle with despair in the present. Knowing God opens the door to the future when every tear will be wiped away.

Mark Thompson is Academic Dean at Moore College.