THEODICY - The branch of thoelogy that defends how a good and all-powerful God could create a world with suffering and evil in it.
This one is a monster issue, and it's going to take careful reading and explanation to address it. As you know, I don't believe in 'sound bite arguments' where someone throws down a huge issue and expects a one-sentence answer as they smugly walk out of the room. This isn't a sitcom; this is real life, so let's all be mature and deal with this in a truly studious manner.
Why does God allow suffering in the world? Why did He allow Haiti to undergo such a widespread tragedy? And what about the Holocaust for that matter? Genocide? Pandemics?
Let's take it bit by bit, piece by piece.
I quote N.T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham for the Church of England and author of Evil and the Justice of God. Wright was in a "blog debate" with an agnostic professor on beliefnet.com. You can find a good article about this on
His answers included addressing the fact that the agnostic went into great detail about each tragedy.
“You spend a good deal of time in the book, and even in your brief posting, detailing some of these horrors, as though to remind readers of what (surely?) all intelligent people know already,” Wright responded.
“You’re not implying, are you, that people (like me, for instance) who still hold to Christian faith are somehow failing to notice these horrors, or to reflect soberly and deeply on them?”
Wright goes into the purpose of call of Abraham as given in the Scriptures. Wright explains that the call was when “God launches the long-range plan to rescue the world from its misery,” not just an individual invitation for Abraham to have a special connection to God.
“In other words, I read the story of Israel as a whole (not merely in its individual parts, which by themselves, taken out of that context, might be reduced to ‘Israel sinned; God punished them,’ etc.,) as the story of theodicy-in-practice: ‘this is the narrative through whose outworking the creator God will eventually put all things to rights,’” , also
pointing out that during Jesus’ walk on Earth it seems as if God was not in control then, either. The Jews had their own idea of how God would work with the Messiah: victory for Israel against her enemies and world power.
Allowing his son Jesus to be crucified did not fit what the Jews wanted.
“Near the heart of Jesus’ proclamation lies a striking redefinition of power itself, which looks as though it’s pointing in the direction of God’s ‘running of the world’ (if that’s the right phrase) in what you might call a deliberately, almost studiedly, self-abnegating way, running the world through an obedient, and ultimately suffering, human being, with that obedience, and especially that suffering, somehow instrumental in the whole process,” Wright contends.
“What ‘we would want God to do’ – to have God measure up to our standards of ‘how a proper, good and powerful God would be running the world!’ – seems to be the very thing that Jesus was calling into question.”
