The Wound in Being: Wrestling with Evil in the Architecture of Existence
Where Divine Sovereignty Meets Human Agony at Creation's Fault Line
4FORTITUDEI - INTUITION, SPIRITUALITY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION
The Wound in Being: Wrestling with Evil in the Architecture of Existence
Where Divine Sovereignty Meets Human Agony at Creation's Fault Line
"Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him: On the left hand, where he doth work, but I cannot behold him: he hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him: But he knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold." — Job 23:8-10 (KJV)
The Question That Breaks All Systems
In the cancer ward's fluorescent midnight, a child's labored breathing poses the question that shatters every theological system. In mass graves and torture chambers, in tsunamis swallowing the innocent and diseases consuming the pure, the same accusation rises: If God is good and God is powerful, why this? The problem of evil is not philosophy's puzzle but existence's scream—the point where all human wisdom meets its limit and either transforms or breaks.
This ancient wound in being refuses healing by clever apologetics or pious platitudes. It demands we confront the most disturbing possibility: that reality's fundamental structure includes suffering not as accident but as ingredient. Every attempt to justify God's ways to man—every theodicy—ultimately stands trial in the courtroom of actual agony, where abstract arguments meet concrete anguish and are usually found wanting.
Yet we must attempt this wrestling, not because we'll pin down the angel but because the wrestling itself transforms us. Jacob limped forever after his night struggle with the divine, but he limped as Israel—one who strives with God and prevails. Perhaps theodicy's purpose is not solving the problem but becoming the kind of person who can live creatively within the irreducible mystery of suffering's existence in God's world.
The Classical Theodicies: Humanity's Attempt to Defend God
1. The Free Will Defense: The Price of Love
Augustine and countless others have argued that evil exists because authentic love requires freedom, and freedom entails the genuine possibility of rejection. God could create automatons programmed for virtue, but such entities could never truly love, create, or bear the divine image. The price of beings capable of genuine relationship is beings capable of genuine evil.
Philosophical Architecture: This theodicy preserves both divine goodness and human dignity. God remains loving by granting freedom; humans remain significant because choices matter. Love without choice is not love but programming. Virtue without the possibility of vice is not virtue but mechanism. The highest goods—love, creativity, moral beauty—logically require the risk of their opposites.
The Shadow Side: This explanation addresses moral evil—the suffering humans inflict—but stumbles before natural evil. The tsunami cares nothing for free will. The cancer cell's rebellion against bodily order mirrors no moral choice. Unless we accept that all natural evil stems from moral evil (the Fall), vast categories of suffering remain unjustified. Moreover, could not omnipotence create free beings incapable of extreme evil, as we are "free" yet incapable of flying?
The Deeper Question: Does genuine freedom require the capacity for Holocaust-level evil, or could God have limited freedom's scope while preserving its authenticity? Are we truly free if our nature constrains our choices anyway?
2. Soul-Making: The Forge of Character
Irenaeus and John Hick propose that suffering serves pedagogical purpose—souls develop through struggle as muscles develop through resistance. This world is not pleasure palace but training ground, not hedonistic paradise but hero's journey. Suffering teaches compassion, courage, patience, wisdom—virtues impossible in world without challenge.
Philosophical Architecture: This view honors suffering's transformative potential observable throughout history. The greatest souls often emerge from greatest trials. Suffering breaks false attachments, reveals authentic values, forces spiritual growth. Without difficulty, humans remain spiritual infants—pampered, weak, undeveloped. The butterfly must struggle from chrysalis or its wings never strengthen for flight.
The Shadow Side: This theodicy risks romanticizing agony. Tell the torture victim their pain builds character. Explain to the child dying of leukemia how this develops their soul. Some suffering clearly destroys rather than develops, breaks rather than builds. The distribution seems arbitrary—why do some receive soul-making doses while others get soul-crushing overdoses?
The Deeper Question: Could not omnipotence achieve soul-making through less brutal means? Must the curriculum include such extreme lessons?
3. The Best Possible World: Divine Optimization
Leibniz argued God surveyed all possible worlds and actualized the best—not perfect, but optimal given competing values. A world with free will, natural law, soul development, and minimal suffering might be logically impossible, like a square circle. God maximized good within logical constraints.
Philosophical Architecture: This preserves divine omniscience while acknowledging reality's complexity. God becomes cosmic optimizer balancing incommensurable goods. Some suffering might be logically necessary for greater goods—courage requires danger, compassion requires suffering to address, forgiveness requires offense. The tapestry's beauty requires dark threads.
The Shadow Side: This can appear as cosmic utilitarianism—individual agony justified by aggregate arithmetic. It suggests God tolerates preventable suffering for marginal overall improvement. How can this be the best possible world when we can easily imagine better—say, one with slightly less childhood cancer?
The Deeper Question: Are we capable of judging what constitutes "best" from our limited perspective, or does this theodicy simply push the mystery back one level?
Resonant Dissonance Principle #1: Every theodicy succeeds partially and fails ultimately. Each illuminates aspects of evil's existence while casting new shadows. Perhaps this pattern itself carries meaning—that evil's reality exceeds rational capture just as God's reality exceeds conceptual comprehension. The failure of theodicy might be theodicy's deepest teaching.
The Deeper Theodicies: Beyond Justification
4. The Greater Good: Suffering as Means
Some goods logically require evils—forgiveness requires offense, mercy requires misery, redemption requires fall. Perhaps creation's greatest goods could not exist without genuine evil to overcome. The narrative of fall and redemption might surpass the story of unchanging perfection.
Philosophical Architecture: This frames history as divine drama where conflict enables resolution, where descent enables ascent. God permits evil to achieve goods otherwise impossible—not from limitation but from love for the particular goods evil makes possible. The Cross exemplifies this—greatest evil becoming greatest good's vehicle.
The Shadow Side: This makes God seem manipulative, permitting horrors for aesthetic purposes. It reduces suffering individuals to plot devices in cosmic narrative. Can any good truly justify permitting child abuse? The arithmetic of suffering seems to devalue each particular agony.
The Deeper Question: Is there moral difference between causing evil and permitting evil for greater good? Does the end truly justify these means?
5. Punishment and Justice: Cosmic Courtroom
Traditional theology often frames suffering as punishment for sin—either individual or inherited through Adam. Divine justice requires sin's wages, whether paid immediately or ultimately. This preserves moral order and explains suffering's distribution.
Philosophical Architecture: This maintains universe's moral coherence. Actions have consequences; justice prevails even when delayed. It explains why good people suffer (hidden sin or inherited guilt) and why wicked prosper (patience before judgment). Moral order requires enforcement.
The Shadow Side: Job's friends exemplified this theodicy's cruelty—blaming sufferers for their suffering. It cannot explain innocent suffering without theological contortions. It makes God seem vindictive, visiting ancestral sins on children. Jesus himself rejected this framework when asked about the man born blind.
The Deeper Question: Is retributive justice divine attribute or human projection? Does forgiveness require punishment?
6. Contrast Theory: Light Requiring Darkness
Perhaps good becomes recognizable only through evil's contrast. Without pain, would we know pleasure? Without death, would we value life? Without injustice, would we appreciate fairness? Evil might be logically necessary for good's appreciation.
Philosophical Architecture: This reflects deep phenomenological truth—consciousness operates through distinction. We know health through sickness, joy through sorrow. A world of uniform goodness might be experientially empty. Contrast creates meaning through difference.
The Shadow Side: This limits God, suggesting divinity needs evil to achieve purposes. It reduces evil to cosmic seasoning, spicing up bland goodness. Must we really experience agony to appreciate its absence? Don't we recognize degrees of pleasure without needing torture's contrast?
The Deeper Question: Could not omnipotence create beings capable of appreciating good without experiencing evil? Are we limiting God to our phenomenological constraints?
The Eschatological Resolution: Justice Deferred
7. Ultimate Restoration: The Long View
Christianity's distinctive answer involves eschatology—evil is temporary, justice ultimate. Present suffering pales before eternal glory. Every tear will be wiped away, every injustice rectified, every loss restored sevenfold. The resurrection promises evil's final defeat.
Philosophical Architecture: This preserves hope without minimizing present suffering. It acknowledges evil's current reality while denying its final victory. It transforms suffering from meaningless to meaningful-in-the-end. The arc of universe bends toward justice, however long.
The Shadow Side: This can enable passive acceptance of preventable evil. "Pie in the sky when you die" has justified countless oppressions. It asks sufferers to accept promissory note rather than present justice. How does future restoration justify permitting present agony?
The Deeper Question: Can any future good truly compensate for certain evils? Would eternal bliss erase Holocaust trauma or transform it?
8. Natural Law: The Price of Order
God created universe operating by consistent laws enabling science, prediction, and stable existence. These same laws permit suffering—gravity enables walking and falling, cell division enables growth and cancer. Suffering is byproduct of law-governed reality.
Philosophical Architecture: This explains natural evil without blaming God or humans. Regular laws are prerequisite for rational existence, moral development, and meaningful action. A world of constant miracles preventing suffering would be chaos where learning and growth become impossible.
The Shadow Side: Could not omnipotence create laws without harmful byproducts? Why these particular laws with these particular consequences? This feels like cosmic buck-passing—God establishes system then disclaims responsibility for results.
The Deeper Question: Is law-governed reality the only or best framework for creation? Are we assuming necessities that omnipotence could transcend?
Resonant Dissonance Principle #2: The more sophisticated theodicies become, the more they reveal the problem's intractability. Each solution generates new problems, each answer new questions. Perhaps this infinite regress suggests we're asking the wrong question—not "Why does evil exist?" but "How shall we respond to evil's existence?" The shift from theoretical to practical might be wisdom's beginning.
The Mystical Response: Beyond Explanation
9. Divine Hiddenness: The Necessary Veil
Perhaps God remains partially hidden to preserve human freedom, moral development, and authentic faith. Too much divine presence would overwhelm choice; too little would abandon hope. Current hiddenness optimizes conditions for spiritual growth.
Philosophical Architecture: This explains both evil's existence and divine silence. Overwhelming divine presence would create cowering slaves, not loving children. Faith requires uncertainty; moral development requires genuine choice. Divine hiddenness enables authentic relationship.
The Shadow Side: This can justify divine absence when presence seems most needed. How hidden must God be? Current hiddenness drives many to despair rather than faith. The optimization seems poorly calibrated given widespread apostasy.
The Deeper Question: Does relationship truly require such extreme hiddenness? Human parents balance presence and absence without vanishing during children's greatest needs.
10. Cosmic Warfare: The Battle Paradigm
Scripture presents reality as battlefield between divine and anti-divine forces. Evil exists because genuine war rages—not sham battle with predetermined outcome but real conflict with casualties. Humans are not spectators but combatants whose choices matter.
Philosophical Architecture: This honors evil's genuine power without making it ultimate. It explains suffering as war's collateral damage while maintaining hope for final victory. It dignifies human participation—we're not puppets but warriors whose alignment matters.
The Shadow Side: This seems to limit omnipotence—why permit war to continue? If God can end conflict, continuing it seems cruel. It risks dualism, elevating evil to quasi-divine status. The battlefield metaphor might glorify violence.
The Deeper Question: Is warfare the best metaphor for spiritual reality? Does framing existence as cosmic battle create the very evil it purports to explain?
The Existential Turn: From Theory to Life
The Limits of Theodicy
After surveying theodicies, we must acknowledge their collective inadequacy. Like Job's friends, they offer words where only presence suffices. The problem of evil cannot be "solved" because it's not ultimately intellectual but existential. We don't need explanation but transformation.
Consider Ivan Karamazov's challenge: even if universal harmony requires one child's torture, he "returns his ticket." No theoretical justification satisfies when confronted with actual agony. The theodicies might all be partially true yet collectively insufficient. Mystery remains irreducible.
The Practical Response
Perhaps wisdom lies not in explaining evil but in opposing it. Instead of justifying suffering, alleviate it. Instead of defending God, embody divine compassion. The question shifts from "Why does God permit evil?" to "How does God work through us to combat evil?"
This doesn't abandon theology but transforms it. We become theodicy—living arguments for God's goodness despite evil's reality. Our response to suffering speaks louder than our explanations. Love enacted transcends logic defended.
The Mystical Recognition
Mystics across traditions report encountering divine presence most profoundly in suffering's depths. Not explanation but presence, not answers but relationship. The God who suffers with and in creation, who enters evil's domain to transform it from within.
This is Christianity's unique claim—not that God explains suffering but that God experiences it. The crucified God shifts the entire framework. Divine power manifests not in preventing suffering but in transforming it. The resurrection doesn't explain the cross but transfigures it.
Resonant Dissonance Principle #3: The deepest theodicy might be refusing theodicy—acknowledging that some realities transcend rational justification while demanding lived response. We cannot explain evil satisfactorily, but we can oppose it effectively. We cannot justify suffering theoretically, but we can transform it practically. The answer to Job comes not in words but in presence—"Now my eyes see you."
Living Within the Wound
The Both/And Necessity
Mature faith holds multiple truths in tension:
God is absolutely good AND evil genuinely exists
Suffering is meaningless AND suffering can be meaningful
We must accept reality AND we must transform reality
God is sovereign AND human choices matter
Evil is defeated AND evil still rages
These paradoxes aren't intellectual failures but existential recognitions. Reality exceeds our categorical frameworks. Living faith dances between poles rather than choosing sides.
The Transformative Engagement
When suffering arrives—and it will—theodicies provide resources, not solutions:
Free will reminds us that much suffering stems from choice, calling for responsibility
Soul-making invites finding growth within tragedy, not justification for it
Greater good suggests serving others through our pain
Ultimate justice offers hope without bypassing present action
Cosmic warfare dignifies our resistance to evil
Use theodicies as tools, not truths—implements for engaging suffering, not explanations that resolve it.
Embodiment & Transmission
What must now be done—by the hand, the mouth, or the bloodline.
1. The Suffering Journal Document your encounters with evil—personal and observed. Note which theodicies help and which harm in actual crisis. Build practical wisdom about engaging suffering through reflection on experience.
2. The Compassion Practice Weekly, actively alleviate someone's suffering. Don't theorize about evil—oppose it. Become answer to someone's prayer. Let action complement contemplation.
3. The Lament Discipline Learn to lament—the lost art of bringing honest anguish before God. Read Psalms of lament, write your own. Practice Job's honesty over his friends' theology. Sacred complaint maintains relationship through crisis.
4. The Mystery Tolerance Cultivate capacity for irreducible mystery. Practice saying "I don't know" about ultimate questions while maintaining faith. Uncertainty about explanation need not mean uncertainty about relationship.
5. The Presence Ministry When others suffer, resist explaining. Offer presence over answers, silence over solutions. Learn from Job's friends' failure—sometimes showing up matters more than speaking up.
6. The Hope Cultivation Without denying present evil, nurture eschatological hope. Study resurrection accounts, testimonies of transformation, stories of redemption. Feed hope's fire without using it to bypass present responsibility.
7. The Children's Preparation Teach children that world includes both beauty and brokenness, that questions about suffering are sacred not shameful, that mystery doesn't negate meaning. Prepare them for reality without destroying innocence.
8. The Corporate Resistance Join others in opposing systemic evils. Theodicy includes working toward world with less need for theodicy. Transform theological reflection into practical action. Become part of evil's solution, not just its explanation.
The Final Charge
You stand where every human must eventually stand—face to face with evil's reality in God's world. The temptation is either explaining it away or explaining God away. Both are escapes from the harder path: living faithfully within irreducible mystery, opposing evil while acknowledging its permitted existence, maintaining relationship with God while wrestling with divine choices.
The cross stands as Christianity's ultimate theodicy—not explanation but participation. God doesn't justify suffering from safe distance but enters it completely. The answer to evil is not theory but presence, not logic but love, not comprehension but transformation.
Two actions demand immediate implementation:
Today: Identify one concrete evil within your power to address—hunger, loneliness, injustice. Take one action, however small, to reduce suffering's sum total. Become theodicy incarnate through compassionate action.
This Week: Find someone currently suffering. Resist explaining or theologizing. Simply be present. Listen without judging, accompany without fixing. Learn suffering's texture from inside. Let their pain teach what books cannot.
The sacred paradox remains: Evil is genuinely evil—not disguised good, not necessary component, not divine tool. Yet somehow, mysteriously, God remains genuinely good, genuinely powerful, genuinely present. This paradox cannot be resolved intellectually but must be lived existentially.
The Irreducible Sentence: The answer to suffering is not explanation but transformation—of suffering into compassion, of theology into action, of absence into presence.
In the end, we are all Job—sitting in ash heaps of various kinds, demanding answers that don't come, visited by friends who explain too much, waiting for whirlwind that reveals presence over proposition. The difference is whether we'll maintain the conversation, whether we'll say despite everything: "Though he slay me, yet will I trust."
The wound in being remains. But wounds, transformed, become channels for healing. Let your wrestling with evil become someone else's blessing. This is theodicy's deepest wisdom—not solving the problem but becoming part of the solution.