First Things: On the Square >> Theodicy and the Narrow Escape Syndrome

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus posts a wonderful essay on "theodicy" and the "God problem." Any essay that brings in the agonies of Ivan Karamazov is well worth reading!

"I try to spell out the implications of that in my book Death on a Friday Afternoon. But that book is not chiefly about theodicy. On that subject, there is another recent book that I would warmly recommend to James Wood and, if he could stifle his flippancy long enough to read it with care, to Bart Ehrman. It is David Bentley Hart’s The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?

The Doors of the Sea was published in 2005 in the aftermath of the great Asian tsunami that killed an estimated 225,000 people. Throughout his reflection, Hart wrestles with the hauntingly brilliant statement of the theodicy question posed by Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov. Herewith a few of the things Hart says in this very impressive little book: “God has fashioned creatures in his image so that they might be joined in a perfect union with him in the rational freedom of love. For that very reason, what God permits, rather than violate the autonomy of the created world, may be in itself contrary to what he wills. But there is no contradiction in saying that, in his omniscience, omnipotence, and transcendence of time, God can both allow created freedom its scope and yet so constitute the world that nothing can prevent him from bringing about the beatitude of his Kingdom..."

Marvelous! Read the entire essay here.