Below are four excellent introductory pictoral videos that introduce the problem of theodicy, and how we can begin to think about it theologically.
No doubt we’ve all heard people say, (rather dismissively as though this is their lifetime study project): “I don’t believe in God because of all the evil and suffering in the world!”
Heard it all before mate! If I had a £1 for every time I’d heard this! As though it’s the Ace in the pack! “Oh, yep, you got me! I’m just another delusional Christian living in denial of the evidence!”
As if the absense of evil and suffering would create humble worshippers in their millions! Hardly.
‘The odd I see’ all around me is the evidence of evil everywhere, not least that which originates in me. The-od-i-cy or ‘theodicy’ is the way in which theologians have engaged with all this ‘odd’ as they sought to integrate a comprehensive Christian worldview. To not engage is to not theologise. Disengagement creates a feeble Christianity that ‘won’t go there’, when Christian theology insists: Go there you must; there are no off-limits, no out-of-bounds, no secrets, no dirty laundry, no skeletons in the closet of Christian Theology.
P. T. Forsyth’s theodicy is masterful and you can read a brilliant introductory series to it here or read a comprehensive treatment of it here.
As an aside, though not at all unconnected, in Forsyth’s 1896 book ‘The Charter of the Church’, he writes,
“Culture, aesthetic or even religious, is now the most deadly and subtle enemy of spiritual freedom. It is the growth of culture in the decay of Gospel that the soul’s freedom has increasingly to dread. It is there that our Noncomformity is in most danger of being untrue to itself and its mission. We are suffering. But it is less from grievance now than from success. We share a prosperity which is passing through variety of interest, refinement of taste, aesthetic emotion, tender pity, kindly careless catholicity, and over-sweet reasonableness, to leanness of soul. It is more at home in literature than in Scripture, and in journals more than either. And it tends to substitute charity and its sympathies for grace and its faith.”
(pg. v-vi)
Here, Forsyth likens suffering as it relates to Christian faith with not suffering, as we would typically understand it. It is a strange irony that human prosperity inevitably leads to a “leanness of soul”that proves quite deadly to actual biblical faith. Elsewhere, in Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, he states with his usual eloquent genius, “[Another] vice of the Christian hour is spiritual self-satisfaction, well-to-do-ness, comfort. The voice of the turtle is heard in the land.”
The Bible is ultra-realistic, even brutal in not allowing humanity to escape to our man-made utopian fantasies of a pain-free future. This seems to me to prove the point: Sin is unreality. The Bible will not let us get away with sloppy thinking or cheap living. In this way, God uses suffering to force us to face evil and suffering’s reality in Him.
Anyway, I suspect this one subject alone is the greatest need of our time, and possibly the most misunderstood and not-understood.
- Evangelism without a working paradigm of theodicy will be just ‘ism’ without the evangel;
- Mission that does not articulate theodicy will be superficial;
- Preaching that doesn’t begin to adumbrate theodicy is going to be a pleasant time of jokes and story telling that will be forgotten by the time the lukewarm coffee is served;
- And ministry that does not address theodicy in the lives of all people will likely lead to a sentimental avoidance of all things nasty (i.e. the stuff we don’t talk about in polite society), in thought, word and deed, a theological dissonance of sophomoric proportions!
People will suffer, and unjustly at that, so it is the task of a robust theodicy to speak into this great big gaping abyss. For it was of course, into the great big gaping abyss of human sin and rebellion that the Son of God did hang on a tree until all of humanity had been reconciled to him. Our salvation is the way of suffering. “Picking up your cross” is not the same as picking up your socks!
These four excellent videos will introduce you to this complex discussion. They are the creations of a superb educator, and you can visit his YouTube channel here.
