Dad sent me a link to an interesting survey asking how Christians deal with the question of theodicy.
In its simplest form Theodicy asks the question, “If there is a being, God, who is all powerful, everywhere present, all knowing, all good and loving, why is there so much evil, suffering and pain in the world.” The answers range from, “the existence of evil is proof that such a being does not exist,” to “there is no such thing as real evil.” The discussion fills the halls of academia, the corridors of seminaries and is occasionally addressed from the pulpit, particularly in response to tragedy.
Long-time readers of this site (yeah — all ten of you) will know that while I’m not very active in the church, and certainly have my own fair share of doubts and questions, my core beliefs stem from being brought up in the Episcopal church. While I’d not heard the term theodicy before this (or at least didn’t remember hearing it), the question has come up on occasion over the years, often during conversations when people have expressed surprise that a black-wearing, industrial-music-listening, goth-culture-loving, (ex-)drug-using, GLBT-supporting, open-minded person such as myself would still count their base beliefs as Christian.
Admittedly, the question of theodicy is one of the most difficult out there, and often one of the most difficult to counter when someone tosses it out as one reason that they can’t/don’t/won’t believe in God. As for myself, I’m a firm believer in free will (and, thus, no big fan of predestination theories), and have never believed that God (or the Devil, for that matter) intentionally causes tragedies to happen to people as any form of test. There’s a level of sadism to that belief that has never jibed with my notions of what God — should s/he exist (which as I mentioned above, I do sometimes struggle with) — would be like.
Rather, I believe that there’s a lot of things that happen in this world, both good and bad, natural and man-made, and how we deal with them is what’s important. From natural disasters to people doing horrid things, they don’t happen because “God willed it”, but (as trite as it sounds) simply because these things happen at times. And, in a certain sense, the bad things need to happen for us to appreciate the good, just as much as the good needs to happen for us to cope with and get through the bad. No light without dark, yadda yadda…I’m not explaining it well, and I’m afraid I’m veering frighteningly close to new-age mystic claptrap, but I think you get my overall point.
I’m often reminded of three stories I’ve come across over the years.
The first is one my dad tells about a priest and family friend in Alaska, Fr. Mark Boesser, who would be drawn into conversations with someone either expressing doubts in their faith, or lambasting him about his. At some point he would ask them what sort of God they didn’t believe in, and they would go off, describing a God that constantly wreaks havoc on the world, causes earthquakes that kill off thousands of people, kills babies in their cribs, tears families apart in accidents, gives people debilitating illnesses, and so on. After they wound down, Fr. Boesser would almost always in complete honesty be able to look at them and say, “I don’t blame you — I couldn’t believe in that sort of God either.”
The second is from a book I read a long time ago — unfortunately, I can’t remember which. Someone who has just lost someone close to them (a child, I believe) goes to a priest and demands to know why God would allow such a thing to happen. The priest says something along the lines of, “It is my belief that when your child died, the first tears to fall were God’s.”
The third — well, for the third, you’ll just have to bear with my sense of humor. In James Morrow’s book Only Begotten Daughter, Julie Katz (the daughter of God) is being taken on a tour of hell by Satan. They start debating the question of theodicy, and eventually Satan turns to Julie and says, “Well, just think about it this way. All power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
