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.

“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.

A frequently mentioned stumbling block to the Christian faith is the problem of evil — why during Old Testament times God commanded the destruction of whole cities, including women and children; why, if God is so great, He can’t seem to stop atrocities; why our prayers may sometimes seem to go unanswered; etc.

I was edified by the following observation in Esther Meek’s book Longing to Know: “But if evil challenges my belief in the existence of God, my sense of outrage at things not the way they are supposed to be challenges a belief in his nonexistence. A universe without a standard of good would be one in which you and I would feel no such outrage at evil. If belief in God has a problem with evil, nonbelief in God has a greater problem with evil.”

People who disbelieve in Christianity on account of the reasons cited in paragraph one have their own theories integrating the disparate “data” we confront in this baffling world — whether their theory is Hinduism, Scientism, or Agnosticism (the wager that it’s most sensible to be noncommittal). And every explanation of the world — atheism or Christianity — has “gaps,” bits of data not easily integrated into the pattern. It’s all a matter of which gaps you can live with.