THEODICY the problem of evil in the world

THEODICY: This is the theological term for the study of the problem of evil. Recent question: How can a loving God allow a disaster that can kill so many innocent children and families in the recent East Indian Tsanami on December 26. Some Christians were heard to say that was God's punishment for not being Christian.

By the way, visit a theological library of any size, and you will scarcely find a half shelf of books on "Evil," but many shelves on "Sin."

The question of the justification (dike) of God Himself (theos) is raised as a response to the problem of actual human experience within a world in which fulfillment is qualified or shattered by premature death, mental or physical retardation, destructive social conditions including war, the accidents of natural or man-made catastrophe, or the terror of history itself.

How can a benevolent, loving God create a world of such good and evil: e.g. when bad things happen to good people, how does a person of faith understand and explain this, e.g. the Holocaust, etc., or personal loss. Thus Job’s questioning of God in the Old Testament would be a study, as I understand it, in Theodicy.

The term appears first in the title of a work published by G.W. Leibnitz in 1710, and the ensuing discussion is shaped by the spirit of the so-called Enlightenment; but the problem is ancient, as illustrated 'by reference to the religio-secular wisdom literature of the Near East; Babylonian, Egyptian, and biblical. Presumably the problem rests ultimately in the effort to do justice to finite freedom in relation to divine creativity.

From The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church, J.D.Douglas, Zondervan, 1974.

Question: Does the human shadow emerge in our attempts to use faith or religion to explain evil? Does religion have anything to say at all about the problem of evil? Job was "stuck" --a good man to whom bad things kept happening. His friends kept saying: "Admit your sins, brother!"