God's Problem Read Free

thought that suffering came from God’s cosmic enemies, who inflicted suffering precisely because people tried to do what was right before God; others thought that suffering came as a test to see if people would remain faithful despite suffering; others said that suffering was a mystery and that it was wrong even to question why God allowed it; still others thought that this world is just an inexplicable mess and that we should “eat, drink, and be merry” while we can. And so on. It seemed to me at the time, and seems so now, that one of the ways to see the rich diversity of the scriptural heritage of Jews and Christians was to see how different authors responded to this fundamental question of suffering.
    For the class I had students do a lot of reading throughout the Bible and also assigned several popular books that discuss suffering in the modern world—for example, Elie Wiesel’s classic Night, 1 which describes his horrifying experiences in Auschwitz as a teenager, Rabbi Harold Kushner’s best-selling When Bad Things Happen to Good People, 2 and the much less read but thoroughly moving story of Job as rewritten by Archibald MacLeish in his play J.B. 3 In the class students wrote a number of papers, and each week we discussed the biblical passages and the extra reading that had been assigned.
    I began the semester by laying out for the students the classical “problem” of suffering and explaining what is meant by the technical term theodicy. Theodicy is a word invented by one of the great intellectuals and polymaths of the seventeenth century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who wrote a lengthy treatise in which he tried to explain how and why there can be suffering in the world if God is all powerful and wants the absolute best for people. 4 The term is made up of two Greek words: theos, which means “God,” and dike¯, which means “justice.” Theodicy, in other words, refers to the problem of how God can be “just” or “righteous” given the fact there is so much suffering in the world that he allegedly created and is sovereign over.
    As philosophers and theologians have discussed theodicy over the years, they have devised a kind of logical problem that needs to be solved to explain the suffering in the world. This problem involves three assertions that all appear to be true, but if true appear to contradict one another. The assertions are these:
     
    God is all powerful.

God is all loving.

There is suffering.
     
    How can all three be true at once? If God is all powerful, then he is able to do whatever he wants (and can therefore remove suffering). If he is all loving, then he obviously wants the best for people (and therefore does not want them to suffer). And yet people suffer. How can that be explained?
    Some thinkers have tried to deny one or the other of the assertions. Some, for example, have argued that God is not really all powerful—this is ultimately the answer given by Rabbi Kushner in When Bad Things Happen to Good People. For Kushner, God wishes he could intervene to bring your suffering to an end, but his hands are tied. And so he is the one who stands beside you to give you thestrength you need to deal with the pain in your life, but he cannot do anything to stop the pain. For other thinkers this is to put a limit on the power of God and is, in effect, a way of saying that God is not really God.
    Others have argued that God is not all loving, at least in any conventional sense. This is more or less the view of those who think God is at fault for the terrible suffering that people endure—a view that seems close to what Elie Wiesel asserts when he expresses his anger at God and declares him guilty for how he has treated his people. Others, again, object and claim that if God is not love, again he is not God.
    There are some people who want to deny the third assertion; they claim that there is not really any suffering in the world. But these people are in the extreme minority and have