In this week’s New Yorker, James Wood excoriates the arrogant fumblings of popular theodicy, which quickly brands every calamity-averted as “Gods’ protection,” while discreetly invoking “the mystery of providence” when true catastrophe rears forth. Wood outlines an “anti-theodicy” stemming from an outrage that, according to theologian David Bentley Hart, should be profoundly Christian.

Wood, whose agonies over the problem of evil gradually eroded his childhood faith into apostasy, scorns popular treatments of evil, from the weeping university students who praised God for preserving them from tornadoes (apparently doing so by sending the tempest to kill other area residents), to the Archbishop who, in article after the 2004 Asian tsunami, cautioned his Communion against expecting God “constantly to step in if things are getting dangerous.”

Wood lampoons the appeal either to selective intervention, or to mysterious providence–the former, because it seems to have God perenially “on holiday,” idly diverting a car wreck while the masses writhe and weep; and the latter, because it implicates God in “the Holocaust, the killing fields, the five people who die of malaria every minute.” Even if such suffering were justified, even if “the sound of weeping and of crying were heard no more,” Wood would have no part of such redemption.

This view, of course, is profoundly paradoxical, in that such outrage against the silent God is coherent only if there is in fact a God who is silent. Wood, still shivering in the tattered rags of his faith’s former finery, recognizes this contradiction, and, with heart-rending sincerity, calls his belief “permanent rebellion,” a state of “wounded theism, condemned to argue ceaselessly against a God is is not supposed to believe in.” Wood links arms with Ivan Karamazov, whose “Rebellion” speech in The Brothers Karamazov made famous this sort of anti-theodicy, in declaring war on any redemption that would seek to justify the senseless suffering of children.

In a recent interview, Dr. Hart, author of The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?, remarked, “The pathos of [Ivan’s] protest is…exquisitely Christian.” For Ivan, and–Hart contends–for every Christian, “the suffering of children is an infinite scandal, and his conscience could never allow it to sink to the level of some provisional passage through darkness on the way to some radiant future.”

Rather, Hart insists, “The gospel of the ancient church was always one of rebellion against those powers — death chief among them — that enslave and torment creation; nowhere does the New Testament rationalize evil or accord it necessity.”

The truly Christian view, according to Hart, which requires “the eye of charity and a faith in Easter,” is to insist upon the beauty and wonder of creation, to shout obstinately in the face of suffering and death: “Where is your victory? Where is your sting?” If Hart is correct, then perhaps many Christians ought to fortify their theology with heavy doses of Wood’s outrage, that they might learn to speak, not of God’s justifying evil, but of His conquering it.

Anyone with blood running through his veins is thinking about suffering right now. In whatever direction you turn on the compass, it’s there. A whole branch of philosophy called Theodicy has evolved to explain the problem of evil. Here are a couple of thoughts to steady wobbly knees, namely my own:

First, whenever I am just about to bail out of Christianity because of the problem of suffering, it is then that I am confronted with a different problem on the other side — the problem of good, and of beauty. In the beginning, the bugbear was that evil didn’t seem to fit my theology of a good God; now, in the new camp, it is all the goodness and loveliness I see that are a philosophical fly in the ointment.

Next, I concede that there is a lot about justice and righteousness that I don’t understand. I can’t even make up my mind whether it’s okay to take my dog to a park that has a “No dogs” sign that is universally ignored. And even from nation to nation we can’t agree on things like the just way to deal with criminals. Life in prison? Electric chair?

Also, I have noticed that I am not inclined to want God when I am doing quite well without him. If we presume that we are made for relationship and eternal bliss with him, I am advantaged if he uses the megaphone of affliction to get my attention.

C.S.Lewis challenges the oft heard wail about the “unimaginable sum of human misery.” He says “there is no such thing, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there can be in the universe.”

This is not sour grapes; these are sweet enough for me.

It would be nice, I suppose, when strangers ask me where my son graduated from, to say U Penn instead of the penitentiary. But do not overlook the fringe benefits of disaster; you probably have some in your own life:

My two boys, seven years apart in age, never had relationship, which was a constant grief for me. I don’t know if the younger one even knew what his brother’s handwriting looked like; only the back of his hand now and then. What freedom couldn’t do captivity achieved, and they have become penpals over the past two years.

I heard someone ask my son, before his incarceration, what he likes to read. He, in his dismissive manner, “Reading makes my head hurt.” Once in prison he read everything he could get his hands on, and was pleased when transferred to a prison that was reputed to have the best library in the system.

And if he had gone to U Penn, I just wonder if I would have received the letter from him that I got on February 27, 2007, from solitary confinement, that began, “Dear Mom, I thought you’d like to know that I asked Jesus to be my Savior last night.”

“I’m fed up with God!” (2 Kings 6:33, The Messenger )

Bart D. Ehrman got fed up with God and wrote a book about it entitled God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer our Most Important Question — Why We Suffer.

Most of us have flirted with this kind of mutiny — in the face of pictures of starving children and genocides and tsunamis under which planet Earth groans.

Suffering is the wedge that cleaves humanity into two camps — the “curse God and die” (Job 2:9) camp, symbolized by Job’s wife; the “though he slay me, I will hope in him” (Job 13:15) camp, symbolized by Job. There are only two possible “chairs” to sit in, as Francis Schaeffer observed.

Man, beginning with his own mind, tries to draw a circle big enough to circumscribe all reality. He sets out to take in the evidence and judge it, but of course that’s as ludicrous as a child trying to empty the sea with a Dixie cup.

What do you do with the evidence of unspeakable beauty — a perfect lily; a baby’s softness? Which is more reasonable to believe — that God is schizophrenic? Or that there is a mysterious Enemy skulking about who has thrown a wrench in everything? (Matthew 13).

What do you do with the evidence of changed lives: Murderers to ministers of the gospel?

Yesterday I got a letter in the mailbag from a woman who lost her husband five years ago in a freak accident while on a missions trip, serving the Lord. And she has drawn closer to God through it. Go figure.

There is much we don’t see behind the curtain. And where can I go? He has the words of life.

Sir Edmund Hillary died January 11^th of this year.

He was that crazy New Zealander who on May 29^th, 1953, with his Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay, conquered the mighty Mt. Everest, highest spot on earth at 29,035 feet.

It was not yet a well beaten path with broken-in way stations and rumors of a MacDonalds (someone told me that but I don’t believe it.). No high-tech gear, no mountain weather updates, no GPS satellite equipment, no advanced oxygen system, no personal porters to carry their supplies. (Hillary hauled 30 pounds on his back.)

The bee-keeper-become-mountaineer went places no foot of man had been before. He broke in a new path through the treacherous Khumbu Icefall. The trickiest part of the last bit was a 40-foot rock face, where he saw a way to utilize a crack between ice and a rock wall. The place was subsequently named “Hillary’s Step.”

You think it’s hard climbing Everest now? Sure it is. But try being the first.

You think it stinks that you and I have to suffer? Sure it does. But like all the Hillary-imitators today, we have a pioneer. “It was fitting for him,…in bringing many sons to glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings” (Hebrews 2:10).

All we have to do, like migrating geese, is stay in His slipstream.

I’ve been reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison letters. It is striking, how he integrated a painful realism regarding the depravity of mankind, and in particular the Nazi regime that eventually murdered him, with an optimism that God’s providence, writ in miracles as well as nature, would overcome such evils. “I believe,” he wryly wrote, “that even our mistakes and shortcomings are turned to good account, and that it is no harder for God to deal with them than with our supposedly good deeds.”

Here was a man who was safely abroad, but chose to return to Germany under the conviction that pastors who did not endure with their people would be in no position to lead a restoration once Nazism was defeated. A Christian and therefore peaceful, he nonetheless conspired to kill Hitler. He wrestled with the responsibilities of a Christian man in the face of evil. As I consider my responses — and more grievously, my non-responses — to our present day’s evils, I find Bonhoeffer’s worldview illuminating:

“The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is to live. It is only from this question, with its responsibility towards history, that fruitful solutions can come, even if for the time being they are very humiliating.”

In the end he came to know greater humiliation; on a drizzly day weeks before the war’s end, he was led from his cell, ordered to strip naked, and shot. It is edifying, therefore, to see how Bonhoeffer regarded his persecutors. In his letter titled “After Ten Years,” he wrote something that has convicted me, and subsequently grieved me as I think about how I and many of us in the church sometimes regard sinners:

“We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer. The only profitable relationship to others — and especially to our weaker brethren — is one of love, and that means the will to hold fellowship with them. God himself did not despise humanity, but became man for men’s sake”

I thought of this recently as I saw a car with a window sticker that read: NOTHING FAILS LIKE PRAYER

My instinct was to despise the car’s owner, but I thought about what Bonhoeffer wrote from his prison cell. It occurred to me, then, that perhaps the car’s owner is right. When your worldly options are exhausted, so that you cry to God for release from suffering, or for someone you love to be spared, and this pleading is met with apparent silence, maybe there is no greater sense of abandonment. Maybe there is nothing like a prayer that seems to have failed.

The car’s owner probably didn’t intend for it to be read that way. I pondered what suffering must lead a rational adult to spend time fastening six-inch high letters to his window that shout to God: You weren’t there for me. I considered the pain of suffering strangers and aliens, those who are stricken by the world, yet do not know God. Of course they would slap offensive slogans on their cars and bodies, and spit at the image of Christ, and busy themselves with distraction and self-destruction. Wouldn’t you or I, absent that still, small voice?

So instead of hating the car’s owner, I tried to regard him, as Bonhoeffer urged, in the light of his suffering. And then I prayed for him. Then I prayed thanks to God, for the pleadings answered and the pleadings denied, because in my striving with him he has been there. Even when I thought him absent, he was there. This, more than any immediate answer to my wants, is the blessing to which I cling.

I’m not imagining it. It is confirmed that children have more allergies today than before. And now there is a theory: we are too clean for our own good. Newsweek, Nov.5, 2007: “The immune system is designed to battle dangerous foreign invaders like parasites and viruses and infections. But clean water, antibiotics, and vaccines have eliminated some of our most toxic challenges.”

It is hypothesized that we have so laudably eliminated exposure to physiological harm that we are not strong enough to fight off the meekest microbial invaders: “Without hard-core adversaries…the immune system starts battling the innocuous — egg or wheat — instead….Children who grow up on farms, where they are in constant contact with dirt and animals, are less likely to develop allergies.”

I am wondering if it’s not the same on the spiritual plane. Are we forever wishing and praying away the very suffering and “hard-core adversaries” in our lives that the Lord has meant for our spiritual strengthening? Might we not be better off (and on better biblical grounds) praying for endurance in trials rather than always the removal of them?

For allergies, many scientists now recommend “controlled exposure” to harmful stimuli. Isn’t that exactly what God does?