Mystery and Theodicy

James Wood's book review in The New Yorker of June 9, 2008, Holiday in Hellmouth, tackles an almost forbidden subject these days in religious circles: the problem of why a good, all-powerful God up there in heaven permits such suffering and devastation down here on earth. Bart D. Ehrman's new book, God’s Problem, is the occasion for Wood's review/essay. (Full disclosure: I have not read either of Ehrman's books to date.)

Ehrman, a scholar/skeptic of religion, famously wrote the 2005 bestseller Misquoting Jesus debunking the reliability of the very text of the Bible, especially the New Testament, as an inerrant guide to faith. The new book makes Ehrman's own atheism explicit:

“I no longer go to church, no longer believe, no longer consider myself a Christian,” he announces on the third page. “The subject of this book is the reason why.” In a nutshell: “I could no longer explain how there can be a good and all-powerful God actively involved with this world, given the state of things. . . . The problem of suffering became for me the problem of faith.”

To be sure, says Wood, this is not an outright denial of God's reality. It is, rather, anti-theodicy: "wounded theism, condemned to argue ceaselessly against a God it is supposed not to believe in." Theodicy is argumentation in support of continued faith in God, as we experience a world shot through by woe. Anti-theodicy is the position that such pro-God arguments won't wash.

Wood, Ehrman's reviewer, explains that he himself lost the conservative faith his family imbued in him, when, as a late teen, he confronted two issues. The first was the fact that prayer quite apparently does not avail to relieve or forestall suffering, and the second was the problem of suffering itself. Why does a mighty God not put an end to evil and woe, right here, right now?

Wood says the problem of suffering and evil would not have impressed Westerners as a reason "to reject the idea of God [, until] about 1700, at the very earliest." Before that, it merely occasioned (albeit sometimes tortured and Job-like) inquiry into "how to understand God and how to relate to him, given the state of the world.”

My reaction to that tidbit is to wonder what changed to allow the premise "An all-powerful, all-good God exists" to be conceivably negated, whereas it had originally been more of an unassailable axiom than the hypothetical premise of an argument. Did we start to whittle away at Christendom's longstanding axiom set — everything known to be true beyond argument or evidence — in the West? Or did we simply become more insistent that no proposition be deemed acceptable if the argument toward it creates logical quandaries?

One name for any assertion about bedrock reality that ineluctably ties further attempts at reason in knots is "mystery." Theodicy in its purest form is something we in recent centuries have invented to try (Ehrman and Wood would claim without success) to

crush [the mystery of] suffering down to the logician’s granules of P and Q . (“Let P be the proposition that God is benevolent, and let Q be the existence of ... useless suffering.”)

Ehrman and Wood object to the "scholastic" obviousness of reducing a mystery to a formula of logic in this way. The "entrapped invocation of a God who is not believed in but is nonetheless despised [which] gives [Ehrman's] book a rough power" avoids that sort of dry reductionism. However, neither Ehrman no Wood seems able to swing his mental pendulum fully back in the other direction and admit to the ultra-basic "rough power" over our souls of mystery-qua-mystery.

In other words, taking the mystery out of human apperceptions of God does indeed leave us with seeming contradictions between theology and manifest reality that seem to impugn theology more than reality.

On the other hand, taking the mystery out of God leaves us with a mere conceptual abstraction, not the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob ... and Jesus. Showing that that abstraction of a divinity makes no sense and therefore could not reasonably be said to exist is in no way binding on Yahweh, the Lord of Hosts, who for Moses' own protection appears to Moses as a Burning Bush.