When, through faith and repentance, the scales fall from our eyes, when our hearts of stone are changed by God to hearts of flesh, not only do we acknowledge what we have always known about God in and through creation, but God’s special revelation — His Word — more fully details His majesty and glory in a way that creation does not. 

A few years ago, Harvard scholar and author, James Wood, wrote a review of Bart Ehrman’s, God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question–Why We Suffer, entitled “Holiday in Hellmouth.” Wood is an eloquent, penetrating, and insightful thinker and his relatively brief review is perhaps the best, most concise, and accessible articulation of what many see as the “problem” with “the problem of evil” and the various responses that have been offered to it. Wood is rightly repulsed by any discussion of the problem of evil that remains within the cold confines of academia. He loathes the “sterile laboratories of the professional theodicists, where white-coated philosophers quite often crush suffering down to the logician’s granules of P and Q.” For him, as for most, the “problem of evil” is located, not in the ivory tower, but in the intense tension that is naturally felt between the incalculable amount of suffering in this world and the existence of God.

Theodicy, or, rather, its failure, was the other major entry on my debit side. I was trapped within the age-old conundrum: the world is full of pain and wickedness; God may be jealous but is also merciful and all-loving (how much more so, if one believes that Christ incarnated him). If he has the power to alleviate this suffering but does not, he is cruel; if he cannot, he is weak. I wasn’t consoled by the standard responses. Suffering is a mystery, I was told, as is God’s absence in the face of suffering. But this was what I was also told when prayers failed to make their mark: the old “incomprehensibility” routine. It seemed to me that the Gospels, central to my family life, made some fairly specific promises and laid on us some fairly specific obligations; yet that specificity could simply go on holiday whenever God himself seemed to have gone on holiday. (“God moves in mysterious ways.”)

A God whose power has been so drastically limited, and who sounds so like us in our abjection, might be loved, but why should he be worshipped? Twenty-five years ago, as I hunched over my piece of paper with its vertical line, I decided that if God existed, which I strongly doubted, then this entity was neither describable nor cherishable but was a vaporous, quite possibly malign force at the horizon of the sayable.

This is still the best available response to the theodicy problem. But even at sixteen I could see an enormous, iridescent flaw in this colorless argument: it is that the Bible is full of divine intervention, full of infringements of free will. God hardens Pharaoh’s heart, and brings plagues, and spares the firstborn of the Israelites (while conveniently murdering the Egyptians’), and, if you accept the New Testament, anoints his son as a sacrificial lamb for the sins of the world. We pray to him precisely because we believe in the power of such intervention. But when we actually need his intervention–say, to put a stop to a few concentration camps–he has . . . gone on holiday again, leaving people to drone on about the paramount importance of unmolested “free will.”