What is theodicy?

Question 60107.

Theodicy is the technical name for the attempt to defend the goodness and power of God in a world that contains suffering. The word was coined by Gottfried Leibniz in 1710, from the Greek theos and dike, God and justice, and it means something like the justification of God.

That phrase should make a Christian slightly uncomfortable, and I think the discomfort is instructive. Still, the questions the discipline addresses are real ones, and refusing to think about them does nobody any good. Here is a survey of the main approaches, what each is worth, and where I think Scripture actually leaves us.

What Theodicy Attempts

The problem theodicy addresses was stated in its classic form by Epicurus and sharpened by David Hume. Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then He is not almighty. Is He able but not willing? Then He is not good. Is He both able and willing? Then where does evil come from?

A theodicy attempts to show that the three claims can be held together without contradiction: that God is entirely good, that God is genuinely able to act in the world He has made, and that the evil we encounter every day is real rather than illusory. It is worth distinguishing this from a defence, which is a weaker and often more honest project. A defence shows only that the claims are not logically inconsistent. A theodicy tries to say what God’s actual reasons are.

That distinction matters, because the more ambitious project involves claiming to know the mind of God, and Scripture is markedly reticent about that. Every theodicy I have read is stronger as a defence than as an explanation.

The Free Will Theodicy

The oldest and most durable approach argues that moral evil is the price of genuine freedom. God made creatures able to love, and love that cannot be refused is not love, so the capacity to choose rightly entails the capacity to choose wrongly.

Alvin Plantinga’s version, usually called the free will defence, is generally regarded as having settled the logical form of the problem. He showed that there is no formal contradiction between an all good, all powerful God and the existence of evil, provided it is even possible that a world containing free creatures is better than one without.

The limitation is obvious enough. This theodicy handles moral evil well and natural suffering poorly, since no free creature chose the earthquake. Attempts to extend it, by attributing natural evil to angelic rebellion, are speculative and I would not press them. See why does God allow evil.

The Soul-Making Theodicy

A second approach, associated with Irenaeus in the ancient church and John Hick in the modern period, argues that suffering is the environment in which character is formed. A world without difficulty would produce beings without depth, courage, patience or compassion.

There is something to this, and Scripture says something like it. Paul writes that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. James tells his readers to count it all joy when they meet trials, knowing that the testing of their faith produces steadfastness.

But as a complete theodicy it fails badly, and it fails at the point where it matters most. A great deal of suffering destroys rather than refines. The child who dies at four develops no character. The victim of prolonged abuse is frequently ruined by it rather than deepened. Any account that requires all suffering to be productive will end up saying obscene things at some bedside, and Hick’s own version, which drifted towards universalism to make the arithmetic work, illustrates the pressure.

The Greater Good Theodicy

A third family argues that God permits particular evils because they are necessary to goods that could not be obtained otherwise, and that we are not in a position to see the connections.

Joseph is the biblical case study, and it is a strong one. Sold by his brothers, imprisoned on a false charge, forgotten by a man he helped, he ends up in a position to preserve a nation through famine. You meant it for evil, he says, but God meant it for good. The evil is not called good. It is overruled.

The difficulty is in the generalisation. Joseph got to see the outcome; most people do not, and it would be a cruel pastor who told a bereaved family that their loss will turn out to have been necessary for something. Held as a general confidence in God’s competence, this is faith. Applied as an explanation of a particular death, it is presumption.

Sceptical Theism

A fourth response is more modest and, I think, more defensible. It grants that we cannot see a reason for a given instance of suffering, and denies that our inability to see one is evidence that there is none.

The reasoning is straightforward. If God exists, His knowledge exceeds ours by an enormous margin, and our failure to detect a justifying reason tells us about the range of our vision rather than about the reason’s existence. A child cannot see why the surgeon is hurting him.

This is not a theodicy in the full sense; it is a refusal to concede that the objection has been proved. It is also very close to what the book of Job actually does, which is one reason I take it seriously. The critics are right that it offers no comfort, and I would answer that comfort was never supposed to come from an argument.

Where Philosophy Reaches Its Limit

Here is my central reservation about the whole enterprise. Every theodicy is an attempt to make suffering intelligible, and Scripture consistently declines to do that. The Bible does not explain suffering. It tells you what God is doing about it.

Job runs to forty two chapters and is the fullest treatment of the subject in the Bible. Job never learns about the conversation in the heavenly court. He asks for an explanation and receives instead a tour of the constellations, the storehouses of snow, the wild ox and the behaviour of the ostrich. And he is satisfied.

That should discipline our expectations. The most extended biblical engagement with this question ends with a question, not an answer, and with a man saying that he had heard of God by the hearing of the ear but now his eye sees Him. See what about Job’s suffering.

What Scripture Offers Instead of a Theodicy

If Scripture does not give us a theodicy, what does it give us? Four things, I think, and they are worth more than any of the philosophical proposals.

It gives an origin. Suffering entered a good creation through rebellion, and the world we inhabit is not the world as made. It gives a companion. God did not stay outside the problem but entered it, and the fullest answer to suffering that Christianity possesses is a man on a cross. It gives a purpose. God works in and through suffering, without authoring it, to accomplish things we would not otherwise receive. And it gives an ending. Death, mourning, crying and pain are all listed among the former things that pass away.

Notice that none of those is an explanation of your particular grief, and that is deliberate. The Christian faith answers suffering with a person and a promise rather than with a syllogism, and the person has scars. See Revelation 21:4.

The Word Itself Is the Problem

I said at the start that the term theodicy should make a Christian uneasy, and I want to explain why. To justify God is to put Him in the dock and produce a defence, and Scripture never allows the relationship to run in that direction.

When Job demanded a hearing, God’s reply began: who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man; I will question you, and you make it known to me. The roles are reversed. The one asking the questions is the one being questioned.

That is not an intellectual brush off. It is a correction of standing. We are not competent to audit God, and the discipline of theodicy, taken too confidently, forgets it. Which is why I would rather do apologetics here than theodicy: showing that the objection does not succeed is a different task from claiming to know God’s reasons. See Job 38:2-3.

Using All This Pastorally

So what do you actually say when somebody asks? Very little, and not straight away. The pastoral order is presence first, then listening, then, much later and only if it is wanted, any of this material at all.

When the moment comes, I would use theodicy defensively rather than offensively. You do not need to explain why this happened; you need to show that what happened does not disprove the goodness of God. Those are very different burdens, and only the second one is yours to carry.

And I would go to the cross rather than to Leibniz. Whatever a sufferer needs, it is not a demonstration that this is the best of all possible worlds. It is the knowledge that God has not left them alone in it, and that He knows from the inside what it is to be forsaken.

The Logical and the Evidential Problem

Philosophers distinguish two versions of the challenge, and any account of theodicy needs to keep them apart. The logical problem claims that the existence of God and the existence of any evil are formally contradictory. The evidential problem grants that they are compatible and argues that the amount and distribution of suffering make God’s existence unlikely.

The logical version is generally regarded as answered. Even atheist philosophers such as William Rowe have conceded that Plantinga’s free will defence disposes of the claim that there is a strict contradiction, and the debate has moved on.

The evidential version is harder and is where the discussion now lives. It asks not whether God could have reasons but whether it is plausible that He does, given the fawn dying unseen in a forest fire and the child dying unnoticed in a war. That question cannot be settled by logic alone, and any honest theodicy has to admit it.

Theodicy and the Character of the Questioner

There is something else worth naming, because it changes how this subject should be handled. The same words can come from two entirely different places. One person asks about theodicy as a genuine intellectual difficulty. Another asks because something unbearable has happened to them and the question is a cry.

The words are identical and the appropriate responses are not remotely the same. Answering the second person with the first person’s answer is one of the most common failures in Christian conversation, and it explains why so many people find the church cold precisely when they need it most.

So the first skill in this area is not knowing the arguments. It is discerning which question is actually being asked, and that requires listening rather than preparation. When in doubt, assume it is the second.

Where I Land on Theodicy

After all of it, my own position is this. I think the free will defence succeeds in showing that there is no contradiction. I think the greater good and soul-making accounts contain real insights that should never be turned into general rules. I think sceptical theism is right about the limits of our vision.

And I think that no theodicy explains suffering, that Scripture does not attempt one, and that the attempt to construct a complete one usually ends either in cruelty or in a smaller God. Job was not given a theodicy. He was given God, and it turned out to be what he had actually been asking for all along, even though he could not have said so at the beginning of his ordeal and would probably have denied it in the middle.

So I would say to anyone working through this: use the arguments to answer the objection, and use the cross to answer the person. The two tasks are different, and the second one matters more. I have come to think that the church’s real failure in this area has rarely been a lack of good arguments. It has been the habit of producing them at the wrong moment, to people who needed something else entirely, and then wondering why the answer did not land.

Leibniz and the Best of All Possible Worlds

Since Leibniz gave us the word, his own proposal deserves a paragraph. He argued that God, being perfectly good and knowing every possible world, must have actualised the best one, and that the evils it contains are the minimum necessary for the greatest overall good.

Voltaire demolished the popular version of this in Candide, where Dr Pangloss keeps insisting that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds while calamity piles on calamity, and the satire has stuck more firmly than the argument ever did. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed tens of thousands on All Saints’ Day while churches were full, did more damage to optimistic theodicy than any philosopher.

The deeper objection is that the idea of a best possible world may be incoherent, in the same way that a greatest possible number is incoherent, since any world could presumably be improved by the addition of one more happy creature. If so, Leibniz’s theodicy fails not because God is not good but because the standard it invokes does not exist. See Isaiah 55:8-9.

So, now what?

If you are working through this intellectually, read Job slowly, all of it, including the speeches everyone skips. Then read Romans 8. Between them you have the biblical alternative to theodicy: a God who does not explain and a hope that does not depend on His explaining.

And if you have picked this up because you are in the middle of something, put the philosophy down. None of it will help tonight. What might help is saying out loud to God exactly what you think of the situation, which is what the Psalms are largely made of, and letting somebody sit with you. Who is that person for you, and have you let them in?

I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.

Job 42:5 (ESV)

For Further Study

Alvin Plantinga’s God, Freedom, and Evil is the standard statement of the free will defence and is short enough to read in an evening. John Hick’s Evil and the God of Love sets out the soul-making approach at length and is worth reading critically. For an evangelical treatment, Millard J. Erickson’s Christian Theology surveys the options carefully, and Charles C. Ryrie’s Basic Theology gives a concise account of providence and permission. D. A. Carson’s How Long, O Lord is pastorally serious even where I would not follow every conclusion, and Christopher Ash’s commentary on Job is the best guide I know to the book that matters most here.