Abstract
AbstractWhat role should theodicy play in the face of loss and acute suffering? Should it keep its distance and remain respectfully silent or should it step forward to illuminate the opaque reality of evil, especially untimely death? In my article, I explore the fraught relationship between the personal experience of loss and its theological interpretation through an analysis of three related bereavement autobiographies: C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Lament for a Son, and William Abraham’s Among the Ashes. Invoking Job’s “friends” as a theoretical framework, I analyze each author’s attempt to reconcile the lived experience of suffering with the theoretical task of theodicy: to explain suffering. I conclude with my own constructive proposal on the place of theodicy in the realm of human anguish.
Highlights
When Job’s friends learn of his dramatic demise, they decide not to send flowers with their deepest condolences – thoughts and prayers – but rather to “go and console and comfort him.”[1]
What role should theodicy play in the face of loss and acute suffering? Should it keep its distance and remain respectfully silent or should it step forward to illuminate the opaque reality of evil, especially untimely death? In my article, I explore the fraught relationship between the personal experience of loss and its theological interpretation through an analysis of three related bereavement autobiographies: C
Nicholas Wolterstorff, and William Abraham. As they journeyed through their shadowlands of grief, they wrote bereavement autobiographies, roughly 30 years apart: A Grief Observed, Lament for a Son, and Among the Ashes.[4]
Summary
When Job’s friends learn of his dramatic demise, they decide not to send flowers with their deepest condolences – thoughts and prayers – but rather to “go and console and comfort him.”[1]. When Joy died soon after, Lewis was devastated.[12] It felt like a cruel joke, especially after her seemingly miraculous recovery He wrote A Grief Observed to process his feelings of loss, fear, and anger. Silence.”[14] Divine absence and silence haunts Lewis in the early stages of his grief All of his brash confidence – his bold claim to have “solved the intellectual problem raised by suffering” – in the Problem of Pain has vanished.[15] The emotional experience of suffering has crippled him spiritually, and the theological casuistry of his younger self offers him no consolation or direction. He starts to perceive the incomprehensibility of God and suffering.[21]
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