Suffering and the Silence of God: Part One
"The real question is, what does God want to tell us by making us ask?"
In a misguided attempt to defend God they take a biblical concept that could offer profound insight into our situation and trivialize it into a trite intellectual justification for suffering. I find it equally naïve and dumb when atheists coolly condemn God as cruel and impotent as if they could objectively sit above it all, detached, untouched, as if these issues didn't effect them just as much as they do every other human being on Earth.
This is not an abstract concept, these are issues that touch us at the core of our being. We can justify suffering or say that God is unjust, but either way we pull the rug out from under our feet when we do. It is symptomatic of both sides to search for a detached intellectual answer rather than to really face the problem and ourselves. We need to all stop kidding ourselves. We are not above the problem so that we can push it off on God, in a denial of our human need, or say "well praise the Lord" and stick our head in the sand.
Theodicy is not a cold theological question. It is one of passion. "I cry to you God but you do not answer. I stand before you, and you don't even bother to look" screams Job in desperation. Clever intellectual answers won't cut it here. The answer we seek in our pain is not so much one of explanation but of relief. When we cry "Why!" what we mean is "Make it stop."
Before we can really approach an answer to the problem we need to stop for a moment and realize just how close this question is intertwined with our very being. We cannot approach this from a distance. This is not neutral for us. It deals with our lives in the most intimate and central way imaginable. So long as we, or our theories, stay on an intellectual level and do not touch us where we live, they will remain merely academic. We will have to approach these questions from a different angle, a personal angle, if we want an answer that will touch us and heal us rather than a superficial and theoretical explanation. Whether atheist or believer, these are our questions and no amount of mental gymnastics will make the questions, or our need go away.
Suffering and the Silence of God: Part One
"The real question is, what does God want to tell us by making us ask?"
In a misguided attempt to defend God they take a biblical concept that could offer profound insight into our situation and trivialize it into a trite intellectual justification for suffering. I find it equally naïve and dumb when atheists coolly condemn God as cruel and impotent as if they could objectively sit above it all, detached, untouched, as if these issues didn't effect them just as much as they do every other human being on Earth.
This is not an abstract concept, these are issues that touch us at the core of our being. We can justify suffering or say that God is unjust, but either way we pull the rug out from under our feet when we do. It is symptomatic of both sides to search for a detached intellectual answer rather than to really face the problem and ourselves. We need to all stop kidding ourselves. We are not above the problem so that we can push it off on God, in a denial of our human need, or say "well praise the Lord" and stick our head in the sand.
Theodicy is not
 a cold theological question. It is one of passion. "I cry to you God but you do not answer. I stand before you, and you don't even bother to look" screams Job in desperation. Clever intellectual answers won't cut it here. The answer we seek in our pain is not so much one of explanation but of relief. When we cry "Why!" what we mean is "Make it stop."
Before we can really approach an answer to the problem we need to stop for a moment and realize just how close this question is intertwined with our very being. We cannot approach this from a distance. This is not neutral for us. It deals with our lives in the most intimate and central way imaginable. So long as we, or our theories, stay on an intellectual level and do not touch us where we live, they will remain merely academic. We will have to approach these questions from a different angle, a personal angle, if we want an answer that will touch us and heal us rather than a superficial and theoretical explanation. Whether atheist or believer, these are our questions and no amount of mental gymnastics will make the questions, or our need go away.