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If God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, then God would prevent evil if God wanted to. And if God is perfectly good, then, of course, God would want to prevent evil if God could. Thus, if God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and ever-present, and is also perfectly good, then God could prevent evil if God wanted to. And God would want to prevent evil if God

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could. And so this is the dilemma that our speaker laid out for us this morning. And what do we say as preachers, as those who follow the gospel of Jesus Christ? What do we say about God and God's reconciling work in the world to those who suffer from disease?

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Hurricanes, fire, famine, flood, tidal wave, earthquake, and drought. What do we say about God and God's reconciling work in the world to those who suffer human structures of domination, subordination, and constraints that reinforce racial, gender, and class orientations and hierarchies? What do we say? about God and God's reconciling work in the world.

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To those who suffer from hunger, no homes, no schools, no medicine for their children, no clean water to drink, no work, no viable credit, our speaker this morning left us in great anticipation and assured us that there is balm in Gilead, that the message of the gospel can help us speak to the ever-present issues of suffering. Please join me in welcoming Reverend Dr. Tom Long, the Brady Professor of Preaching at Candler School of Theology, Emory University.

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Kind of sounded a lot harder the way she described it. I almost ran out the other door. When it comes to thinking through this theodicy problem for the purpose of preaching, the theologian David Bentley Hart, in his wonderful book on God and Suffering, poses, I think, a provocative ethical question for preachers. He cites a New York Times article from Sri Lanka that was published several months after the Indian Ocean tsunami.

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And in an attempt to kind of take the vast panorama of that tragedy and reduce it to a somewhat understandable human scale, the reporter had interviewed a Sri Lankan man, a man of tremendous physical strength and moral determination. who, despite his strength and grit, had been unable to save his four children and his wife from the surging waters. The reporter at one point in the interview asked the man to name his children. And he did, starting with the oldest.

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And when he got down to the youngest, a four-year-old boy, this man of great strength, collapsed in sobbing and grief. Only a moral cretin, said Hart, would have approached the father at that moment with some abstract theological explanation of what had happened in the tsunami. Sir, your children's deaths are a part of God's eternal but mysterious councils.

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or Your children's deaths tragic as they may have seemed to you in the larger sense serve God's complex design for creation Most of us at Hart would have had the good sense to be ashamed to speak such words to a broken father many goes on to turn it into a rule which Marilyn McCord Adams I think agrees with if we think it's shamefully foolish and cruel to say such things in the moment when another's sorrow is most real and painful then we ought never say them it's not a bad rule for preaching on suffering I think if you can't say what you want to say about God and evil and suffering to a suffer in the depths of loss and grief then it's probably not the gospel to say anytime. I'm reminded of the wonderful preacher and teacher of preachers of a previous generation, Paul Scherer, who in the late 1960s, when he was in the last stages of the cancer that was going to take his life, was still teaching preaching at Princeton Seminary, even though there were many weekdays and difficult days for him.

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Sometimes when a student would finish preaching a sermon, and it had been one of those Hallmark greeting card, your best life now, power of positive thinking sermons, instead of the usual homiletical critique of structure and exegesis and language, Cheryl would say to the student, Look in my face. Look in my face. I am a dying man. Look in my face.

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Are you sure that's the sermon you would want to preach to a dying man? One possible amendment to Hart's ethical rule, you may remember that great sermon that William Sloan Coffin preached, Alex's Death, about the death of his own son. And in the sermon, he said that he had received a healing flood of letters, hundreds of cards and telegrams and calls and letters. He said some of the best, and easily some of the worst,

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came from my fellow reverends a few of whom proved that they knew their Bibles better than they knew the human condition Coffin says look I know all of the right biblical passages blessed are those who mourn and my faith is no house of cards those passages are true I know it but the point is while the words of the Bible are true grief renders them unreal the reality of grief is the absence of God my God my God why have you forsaken me What I'm saying here is I think there is, in good pastoral insight, some wisdom about timing. That pastors know that true things are not always true in a particular moment. And so I want to stick with Hart's moral test.

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Nothing that we say about this ought to be something that we cannot say to people who are in the midst of suffering, though we may pick the particular timing in which we do it. Now, what I want to do this afternoon is to look at several of the classical ways that faithful people have tried to think their way at least part way through this problem. I want to think it through with them, and then I want to try to sift the wheat from the chaff. I want to take from each of these approaches what I think a preacher can take, and I want to criticize what I think I must criticize.

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Now, I know I have the microphone, But I invite you to do the same sifting in your own way, not necessarily to agree with me, but to think it through as you would sift the wheat from the chaff. And the place I want to begin is with one of the most popular, accessible, and persuasive treatments of this issue. And I'm talking about Rabbi Harold Kushner's When Bad Things Happen to Good People.

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I think that book needs to be taken seriously. if for no other reason than like Leslie Weatherhead's The Will of God did for a previous generation Kushner actually has provided for millions of people a way intellectually to walk through this issue and the first paragraph of that book gives me at least a clue as to why that book was so popular and it also gives me guidance about how I ought to preach on this issue he says This is not an abstract book about God and theology. It does not try to use big words or clever ways of rephrasing questions in an effort to convince us that our problems are not really problems.

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We only think they are. This is a very personal book. Written by someone who believes in God and in the goodness of the world, someone who spent most of his life trying to help other people believe and was compelled by a personal tragedy to rethink everything he'd been taught. about God and God's ways.

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Well, as you probably know, Kushner's book was prompted indeed by a very personal tragedy, the death of his 14-year-old son, Aaron, from progeria, a rare disease that is premature aging. He was diagnosed when he was three years old, and the pediatrician told the Kushner's, Your son will have pain every day of his life. He will never grow more than three feet tall. He will never have any hair on his body or in his head.

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And he will look like an old person in childhood and will die in his early teens. And all of those things turned out to be true. Among Kushner's several reactions, the most prominent and first was moral outrage. He said, I know I'm not perfect, but my wife and I are basically ethical people.

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And what is more, more than most other people, we are religious people. Even if there is some moral flaw in me that I do not know about, my son Aaron is an innocent child, a happy, outgoing three-year-old. Why should he have to suffer every day of his life? Why should he be stared at and pointed at?

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Why should he be condemned to see other children grow into adolescence knowing that he'll never know adulthood, never know marriage, never know fatherhood? This was not the way God's world was supposed to work. Now, one of the valuable things about Kushner's book to me as a preacher is that he has a very sensitive B.S. detector.

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He goes one by one through all the bromides and nostrums and pious sentimentalities that people of faith tell each other in order to help them get past this sort of issue. And it is a difficult thing to read because I think I have preached nearly all of them. For example, He quotes Harriet Schiff in The Bereaved Parent.

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She lost her son on the operating table trying to repair a congenital heart defect. And her pastor came up to her and said, Harriet, I know this is a difficult time, but you will make it through it. You know, God never puts any burden on us more than we are able to bear. But Harriet unraveled the tortured logic of that statement.

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And she said, inevitably, then, it only can mean if I had been a weaker person, my son would still be alive. Kushner also goes after one image that I have found very powerful in my own life and ministry and punctures it. It's the eschatological image, and he borrows it from Thornton Wilder's book, The Eighth Day. Wilder said that life is really designed by God as a great and beautiful tapestry.

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It's magnificent in its size, intricate in its design, beautiful and glorious. The problem is... We do not experience life on that side of the tapestry. We experience life on the other side of the tapestry, and all we can see are the frayed knots and the broken threads and the rough backside of God's great design.

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But one day, we will stand on the other side and see the glory for what it was. So, Some lives are lived out in long and peaceful ways, and others, like Aaron Kushner's, are cut short. It's not a moral thing.

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It's just what is needed for the design. Kushner, as a father, quite rightly, responds with outrage at that. And finally says, at its best, it is a hypothetical solution to a real problem. Having dismissed all of the standard bromides, then, to suffering, Kushner, like Joe, boldly ventures out on his own.

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Like Bart Ehrman and others, he defines the problem as we have talked about it. There is a God. God is loving and just. God is all-powerful.

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There is innocent suffering and the hypothetical chess match, something has got to give. Which will it be? Kushner goes to the book of Job to find an answer, as many have. And he goes to a text in Job that he calls the central passage in Job.

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It's part of the whirlwind speech, and it's where God says to Job, Have you an arm like me? Can you thunder with a voice like mine? Can you tread down the wicked where they stand? Can you bury them in the dust together?

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Well, then I will acknowledge that your own right hand can give you victory. Now, most exegetes of that passage hear that as the God of Job saying to Job, Who are you to impose upon me your puny little definitions of justice? Do you think you are equal to me? Well, then, come on, let's see you save yourself.

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Kushner, however, hears it in a different way. What he hears is God not thundering at Job, but confessing his weakness to Job. God is saying, hey, look, I'm doing the best I can. Controlling evil in this world is not an easy job, and not even for me, Job.

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And if you think it's so easy, then why don't you come on up here and give me a hand, try it out. Now, I don't want to misread Kushner, but I get the impression that this is not really an exegetical insight. That Kushner has not gone as an open tablet to Job and suddenly discovered this answer. I think he's played the chess game, and he has decided, Can I give up God?

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No. Can I give up a loving God? No. Can I give up that my son has suffered?

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No. All right, that leaves me but one option. I will give up that God is powerful. And then he finds it in this text as a kind of proof text.

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He says, I no longer hold God responsible for illnesses, accidents, and natural disasters because I realize I gain so little and lose so much when I blame God for these things. I can worship a God who hates suffering but cannot eliminate it. more easily than I can worship a God who chooses to make children suffer and die for whatever exalted reason. Okay, Kushner, then where does evil come from?

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If God's power is reduced, just where is this monstrous evil from? Well, some of it's from bad luck, he said, some of it from bad people. But most of it is just from the randomness of nature and from capital F. fate.

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Now look, this is popular theology, and we should understand it as such, but I mean no condescension by that. I think I'm called to get in the pulpit and do a form of popular theology. And Kushner talks their language, and Kushner makes sense to a lot of people. So what sense do we make of what Kushner says?

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Well, theologian Douglas John Hall goes after Kushner on two grounds. The first-- and Dr. Hall would never buy this, by the way, what I'm about to say. He would deny what I'm about to say.

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But I think the first reason that Hall goes after Kushner is because Hall is a Protestant. And he goes after him on Protestant grounds. Namely, Kushner, you have no idea what you're talking about when you use the categories good and bad. When bad things happen to good people, you don't have an adequate definition of good and bad.

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And maybe some of those bad things are really not so bad. And I can tell you one thing for sure, you're not all that good. Now, this is Paul through Augustine, through Luther, through Calvin, through Barth, to Hall. Human beings have no moral standing before God, and in fact, says Hall, preaching Kushner's theology in North America is a dangerous thing to do because Christians in North America already think smugly.

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They're so doggone good. And as a matter of fact, what Kushner's theology can only sound like in North American ears is The stock market crashed. My 401k is down.

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My Bermuda grass is not growing. Oh, why do bad things happen to good people like me? Hall says, when Kushner's book is read by average good middle-class North Americans without ever causing them to question their fundamental assumptions about themselves and their society, damage has been done. Actually, I'm going with Kushner on this one.

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Against Hall. I know what Paul said, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. I know that I am not morally good and neither is Harold Kushner. But I don't think that's the point here.

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I think Kushner would admit that himself. I think what Kushner is saying using the straightforward rabbinic style of good and bad almost like Matthew good and bad I think what he's saying by using that rabbinic style is Something about the death of my son reveals a moral imbalance in the universe That I don't care if I am morally tainted in some way There's nothing going on that can account for the suffering of my son in fact I hear Rabbi Kushner saying, in essence, what my own rabbi says, Jesus, when he said, If you who are evil nonetheless know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more then can you trust the goodness of God to provide you everything that you need? Furthermore, what I like about Kushner is his absolute refusal to make God in any way the author of this kind of evil and suffering.

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He has a faith in a loving and just God, and he is not going to cross his fingers and find some way around to embrace his son's death as somehow loving and just. That puts him in a logical bind, and the only way he can see out is to turn the volume down on God's omnipotence. Now, where Kushner gets in trouble is in the collateral damage, I think he does, to the doctrine of God. Monstrous evil has to come from somewhere, and if God is not powerful enough either to create it or cure it, then where does it come from?

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And for Kushner, it comes from capital F, fate. Fate sends the problems. Fate caused my son's death. God cannot tame it.

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Fate is in control. Unwittingly, what Kushner has done as many others have, is to set up a dualism, a good God, bad God dualism. And as Hall points out in his second criticism, this dualism is essentially

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gnosticism the Gnostics started off with the problem of evil there is evil in the world and God is good so this world must not have been created by the good God it had to be created by some lesser God a demi urge now Kushner does not speak of a demi urge he speaks of fate and fate functions as a demi urge in the last speech in the book of job God says to Job, you see Leviathan, the most fearsome creature in all of chaos. You see Leviathan, woo, does it make you tremble? I play with Leviathan like a sparrow.

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I put Leviathan on a leash. And as Stephen Mitchell, one of the translators of Job, says, what this means is, Job, what's all this foolish chatter about battles between a hero god and some cosmic opponent? Don't you get it?

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There's no one else in here, just me. All right, I'm taking some things from Kushner. I'm opposing some things in Kushner. He focuses on the pole of the power of God, and he solves the problem by turning down the omnipotence.

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American process theologians land on the same territory. But instead of simply reducing the power of God, what American process theologians do is they redefine the understanding of power. They reframe the naming of power. One of the best, most articulate spokespersons for process theology, John Cobb of Claremont, says,

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Where a lot of Christian theology has gone wrong is in conceiving of God's power as if God were a potter and the creation were the clay. The clay has no response to make. The clay is helpless. The God who is the potter manipulates and molds the clay.

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But that, says Cobb, when you think about it, is not really power. It's the kind of power that a tyrant has, or a prison guard, or a frightened parent who grounds a teenager. It's an admission in the last analysis that you don't have any power. What if God's power were not like that?

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What if God's power, said Cobber, more like a lover, or more like a persuader? That what God does is not to manipulate creation, but God is in the middle of creation, like a wise and effective parent, trying to persuade creation to move toward its maximum good. So there God is in the middle of things. You can do better.

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You can do better. Teasing and luring the creation on to better and more productive things. Well, okay, but where did evil come from? Well, it's just there.

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In fact, it is a cardinal doctrine of the process theologians that God did not create the world ex nihilo. That's the old Potter model. And they love to re-translate Genesis 1 instead of, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The Hebrew will take another version and it is,

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When God began to create the heavens and the earth, they were formless and void. So process theologians start in the middle. There God is, having inherited a formless and void creation, working in the middle of that process to lure the creation on to better good. Now this grows out of the philosophy of whitehead, as you know, in which

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God is not really an ontological being. God's energy in a creative process, and God works with what is available, moving things toward the maximum possibilities that are there. Cobb imagines how animals got created. There was God calling out to the primordial mud where potential animals would come from, and God says to the mud,

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Leave the mud. Stand up. Give birth to your betters. And the animals resist.

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We don't want to. We can't. Yes, you can, said God. Even if you can't, I can.

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Stand up. Stand up. And finally, after eons, not only animals, but human beings stand up. Now, Cobb thinks that this approach to God, this reframing of the power of God,

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pretty well solves the problem of evil or at least addresses it sure there's a Lisbon out there the world has tsunamis and earthquakes but they're morally neutral they wouldn't be evil if there weren't life involved so what are you going to blame God for creating life God was working with the available possibilities would you rather have a world that's dead or would you rather have a world that teems with life even with the risk of tsunamis and earthquakes and who knows maybe God knew that there was one window of opportunity to summon life forth rather than waiting for a time when the creation was more mature God summoned life when life could be summoned What to make of that? Well, as a preacher, I think there is something right in the process theologian's redefinition of the power of God, moving away from coercive and manipulative models.

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Feminist theologians have taught us the same thing. But beyond that virtue, I think process theology actually stumbles on the issue of theodicy. The result, in the view of one of its harshest critics, is that instead of getting an empathetic view of God, persuading and loving creation into fruition, what we get is basically a pathetic view of God. Karl Rahner put it well when he wrote about process theology and about Moltmann's crucified God.

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I am not comforted by a God who is simply in here in the muck and mire of life with me, doing the best God can. I need some eschatology. I need a God who is going to win a victory over evil. Joe Roth, another critic, said, At Auschwitz, the best God could do was to permit 10,000 Jews a day to go up in smoke.

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The process had been going on for years. But remember, God was doing all God could to persuade a different outcome into existence. A God of such weakness, no matter how much God tries to persuade, is rather pathetic. This God's too small, inspires little awe, a little sense of holiness.

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This God neither deserves nor will attract much attention. theologian Robert Neville at Boston University who is himself a kind of process theologian nonetheless nails it he said the problem with Whitehead's view of God is that God becomes a helicopter parent a smother mother always hovering around pleading and cajoling now I can't make decisions for you you have to choose for yourself but you know what's best all I can do I've done the best I can to make you happy it's up to you to choose the best way Neville says, The God of the Bible is awesome, free to be terrible even. Whitehead's God is just nice.

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Well, if Kushner and the process theologians want to address this issue by reducing or redefining the powerful God, there are other Christians who've thought it through in different ways. Other Christians have moved to another pole. And they have rethought in a profound way the notion of innocent suffering. The oldest and most persuasive of these is, of course, Augustine, who finds the origins of the evil that we face not in the will of God, but in an act of free will committed in defiance by God's creation.

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Now, according to Augustine, when God created the world God created paradise wasn't too hot wasn't too cold there was food but we didn't get fat we had things to do but we didn't get tired and we didn't grow old there was sex but no lust nobody got sick nobody had an accident everybody obeyed the Ten Commandments without having to have them Because out of our free will, we intuitively chose to be in relationship with each other and with God. Paradise.

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But then, for reasons mysterious, bound up in the inscrutable nature of freedom, God's creatures turned away in rebellion turned in on themselves turned away from the highest good this is not just human rebellion angels did it too all creation turned against God and creation fell God created the world ex nihilo good and we return the favor by creating evil ex nihilo bad now it's important to note in Augustine that evil is Nothing. It's no thing.

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It has no ontological status. It is simply the deprivation of the good God gave us. It's a lack. It's like a black hole in the universe.

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And like a black hole or a vacuum, it's nothing, but it has suction and power. And death camps and earthquakes, suffering and cancer, it's all the consequence of a creation thrown into chaos by the misuse. of our own free will. The impossible chess match can move forward because innocent suffering has now been redefined.

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You know, the free will defense is the one that the average Joe in the congregation articulates. If you ask people about the problem of evil, they will come back at you with some version of the free will defense. Bart Ehrman said when he was writing his book, he would tell people what he was writing, and they would say either they wouldn't talk about it, or they would give him some version of the free will defense, or send him an e-mail.

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And he would say, oh, really? Well, what about Hurricane Katrina? Do you think Hurricane Katrina was the result of somebody's free will? Well, Bart Ehrman hadn't read Augustine.

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Yes, Augustine would say Hurricane Katrina is the result of the creaturely rebellion of God. Now, there's some things to take away from this as a preacher. First of all, Augustine does not succumb to dualism. There's no demiurge, no fate here creating evil, no good God, bad God ideas.

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He doesn't grant any status to evil. It's not something in and of itself that then has to be accounted for if God is the author of all that is. Second, it's salvific and eschatological. God is now at work redeeming this creation.

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The problem, however, with the free will business is that the more you think about it, The less sense it makes. Questions abound. If this was paradise, where did this impulse to rebel come from?

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Oh, it's a mystery. I'm not opposed to playing the mystery card in theology, but it sounds like an evasion here. If there was a rebellion, there was some dis-ease somewhere in creation. Where did it come from?

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And then there's a moral problem as well. Even if the key cause of suffering is the misuse of our creaturely will, surely God knew the risks. In fact, Augustine says not only did he know the risks, he knew the consequences. He knew what was going to happen.

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Well then, Why did he create it that way? Couldn't he have created us free and smart? Free and morally wise?

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Surely we would not have chosen something that would have led to the Black Death, to Lisbon, to wars, to melanoma, and Katrina. Now, by the way, those who have followed the tangled logic of this all the way to the end, it finally takes you to predestination, as we Presbyterians know. I'm always delighted, by the way, of the story of Dr. Felix Gear, who taught systematic theology many years ago at Columbia Theological Seminary.

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One hot April afternoon, he was lecturing on Reformed theology to his class. The windows were open, but it was a hot Georgia day, and there was a C student from Alabama on the back pew who was falling asleep. It ticked Dr. Gear off, and so he decided to get even with him, and so he called on him.

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Mr. So-and-so, would you explain the Doctrine of Predestination? Well, the student was brought to by the sharpness of Dr. Gear's voice, but he had just waked up, and he had no idea what Dr.

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Gear had actually asked him. The other students were looking at him. He knew he was being asked something, so he tried to slip the noose. Dr.

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Geer, I used to know that, but I forgot. Geer put his chalk down, looked up at heaven and said, Oh God, only one man in the history of the world has understood predestination, and now he's forgot. Ultimately, though, the free will issue fails our original moral test. Are you going to walk up to the strong man who lost four children and a wife and say, the reason this happened is because Adam and Eve and angels rebelled against God, and it was in the semen of Adam, and it was transmitted all the way to your children?

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John Hick, who has thoroughly explored Augustine, has said there is another way. He calls it the Irenaean option, and he bases it on the early Christian theologian, Irenaeus. But Irenaeus never actually talked about the theodicy problem.

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What Hick has done is to go into Irenaeus's writings and cherry-pick statements and put them together as a theodicy issue. It really has more to do with Hick than it does with Irenaeus. But regardless of provenance, it's an interesting approach and worth exploring. If Augustine said that paradise was not too warm, not too cold, sex but no lust, we work but we don't get tired, we have marriage but no battle of wills, perfect harmony and balance, irony

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according to Hicks said maybe that's our understanding of Paradise not God's what if God's understanding of the ideal creation is not some endless Caribbean vacation but what if God's understanding of Paradise is an environment of soul making what if the goal of creation is to make souls. The glory of God. Is humanity fully alive?

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What if that's God's goal? Then said Hick, God would have to make a creation that had two elements in it. First, Humanity would have to be created epistemically distant from God.

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What he means by that is not already having your soul fully formed and in union with God. You'd be at distance from God. You'd be immature so that you could grow toward God in Christ. The second thing is that God would have to be hidden in this creation because if God were fully revealed to us, it would bowl us over with the glory of God and destroy our capacity to choose and grow.

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So in a world where we're distant from God, godless in a way, and God is hidden from us, what kind of paradise is that? Maybe this is the environment for soul making. When my daughter was a little girl and she was in the doll playing phase, we gave her a lot of dolls and usually we would give her china dolls that had on the painted smiley faces. But at one point, I forget whether it was a birthday or Christmas, she said to us that she wanted a doll that cried and wet its pants.

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As a father, this puzzled me. You want a doll that cries and wets its pants? Why do you want trouble? The reason she wanted trouble, of course, is she wanted a real baby.

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She wanted a baby that needed her. she wanted a baby that would choose her out of need well said Hick what if God is the same way wouldn't God create an environment in which we needed to grow toward God and to choose God out of our need and evil and suffering would be in that environment as necessary ingredients of soul making this is kind of Leibniz with moving parts. This is the best of all possible worlds, and we're growing.

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And it's got an eschatology. Hick quotes approvingly, Julian of Norwich, Sin must needs be, but all shall be well, all shall be well, all manners of things shall be well. Now, I think as a preacher, this IRNAN response to theodicy gets us somewhere. It is true to our experience.

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Our experience is our souls get made as we walk through the troubled veil of life. That is true to our experience. Through many dangers, toils, and snares, we have already come. 'Twas grace that brought us safe thus far, and grace will lead us home.

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Or in lift every voice and sing. Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod, felt in the days when hope unborn had died. Out from the gloomy past till now we stand at last where the white gleam of our bright star is cast. It's true to our experience.

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But there are problems here. The first place I think that soul-making theodicy runs aground is on what Marilyn McCord-Adams calls catastrophic evil. Six million Jews dead in the Holocaust. A father who rapes his five-year-old daughter every day of her life.

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Whose soul is getting made in that? Hick's aware of this problem, he faces it, and finally says, It's a mystery. Well, not in my book.

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It fails the ethical test that we have set out at the beginning. But it's not just catastrophic evil that I think gives us problems in the irony and solution to things. It may be the evil that's planted in there that makes our souls, the necessary evil that God plants and authors in order that our lives might be enriched by it. And the best argument against this was made by Dostoevsky.

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in the brothers Kerematzov. In that famous conversation between Ivan and Elocha, when Ivan is saying to her, let me tell you about the suffering of children. And he describes several terrific, terrible cases of horrific children suffering. And he says, look, I know.

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that there is the promise of final Harmony all will be well all will be well there will come a day when the mother of the tortured child will embrace and forgive the torturer or when even the child will embrace and forgive but if the price of admission to God's kingdom is the suffering of a child, then I respectfully turn in my ticket. Now, David Bentley Hart has said, most people read that as kind of Dostoevsky's edgy, blasphemous moment. But Hart said, this is the most deeply Christian

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witness that he could possibly make. Because he will not imagine a God who will author evil even for good. That it is not like a parent saying, I'm going to lance this boil, it's going to hurt, but it's for your good. It's like a parent saying, I'm going to put this hot iron on your face.

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One day you will understand. There is no someday that can make sense of an act of suffering like that. Now, theologian Kenneth Surin would enter the scene at this point and say to me, Tom, I told you so.

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You've got all these people in trouble. You've talked yourself into a box here. You have explored many of the major responses to the theodicy problem, and while you found some good things, all of them have finally failed some major test, the test of intelligibility or ethical soundness or theological coherence. Surin would say, That was inevitable, Tom, and you should have known it.

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As soon as you set the problem up, there is a God, God is just and loving, there is innocent, suffering, and God is all-powerful, you have created a logical, mathematical, philosophical problem to which the only response that can be made is a philosophical, logical response, and Christians do not have a philosophical, logical God. We have a God we know only in Jesus Christ, and we have a story called the Gospel. And therefore, we do not have a solution to the theodicy problem. We have only a practical approach to it, namely, we tell the Gospel one more time so that we can put one foot in front of the other and live one more day in a world of suffering.

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I could have told you that, said Kenneth Surin. Why did you take these people down this path? In fact, Surin would say, Tom, you're just like Job's friends. You are trying to explain what is utterly irrational.

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We don't need to ask questions like, why is there evil? Why did God create it? The only questions we are entitled to ask are, what is God doing in the midst of evil, and how can we join in it? Well, Dr.

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Cern, I appreciate your warning, but I'm going to run your stop sign. As a preacher, I'm facing a different set of issues than you are. I'm facing a congregation that asks the question in precisely the way I have proposed it. It's one thing to say, well, that's the culture speaking.

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And you have to resist the culture. It's one thing to quote Barth. The Bible does not always answer your questions. It sometimes calls your questions into question.

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I know that. But I think we have seen in the thoughtful and faithful responses to the theodicy issue some clues about what to say and what not to say and what I want to do now is to get right out on that chessboard and I want to shine the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ and see as far down each path as I can see so that I will know the gospel to proclaim because Sunday's coming Sunday's coming tomorrow morning in fear and trembling.

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I'm going to try to say it.