theodicy

n., pl., -cies.
A vindication of God's goodness and justice in the face of the existence of evil.

[After Essai de théodicée, a work by Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz : Greek theo-, theo- + Greek dikē, order, right.]

For more information on theodicy, visit Britannica.com.

Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does the innocent child have to suffer when she gets hit by the car driven by a drunk driver, who proceeds to walk away without a scratch? On a much larger scale, why did six million innocent Jews die at the hands of Nazi criminals?

These tough questions are at the heart of the religious/philosophical discipline of study called theodicy. It is not a study involving pity, inherent in a question such as, "Why me?" Instead, it involves philosophical questions concerning the nature of God.

Who or what is God? If God is good, why does God allow bad things to happen? If God cannot prevent them, God is not all-powerful and we are left adrift in a sea of uncertainty. If God can prevent evil but chooses not to, then perhaps God is not good. Why else would God allow the innocent to suffer? How could a good, caring God do that? But if evil springs forth only from our free will, did that catch God by surprise? If so, God is not omniscient, "all-knowing."

What about evil? Is there an evil presence opposed to God, or is evil simply the absence of good? If either is so, God cannot be omnipresent, existing everywhere at once. Because if evil is the absence of good, and God "is" good, there must be a place of evil where God "is not."

The questions go on forever. Even a summary of the responses is really useless, because every argument has been successfully rebutted. There are those who simply throw up their hands and say the ultimate answer can be found only in the mind of God. Others see in the study of theodicy a crack in the armor of any kind of religious belief. Then there are those who like the chase so much they would be disappointed if we ever ran the quarry to the ground and answered the question, once and for all.

(See also Evil)

Sources: Gerstner, John H. The Problem of Pleasure: Why Good Things Happen to Bad People. Morgan, PA: Soli Deo Gloria, 2003. Kushner, Harold. When Bad Things Happen to Good People. New York: Schocken Books, 1989.

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A defense of divine justice. Although the term was coined by the philosopher Leibniz, the concept itself is ancient. From Mesopotamia two literary works pertaining to the problem of theodicy have survived: I Will Praise the Lord of Wisdom and the Babylonian Theodicy. These were preceded by a Sumerian parallel to Job, Man and his God. The only extant Egyptian parallel occurs within the Admonitions of Ipuwer, but belief in an afterlife and in the divinity of the pharaohs probably explains the paucity of references to theodicy in Egyptian texts. In Israel the issue achieved significance because of the conviction that the Lord was moral, a view placed in the mouth of the patriarch Abraham: "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" (Gen 18:25). The prevailing views of priests, prophets and sages took for granted a harmonious universe operating on the principle of reward for goodness and punishment for wickedness. The classic presentation of Israel's divine election, Deuteronomy, and the history based on that work, Joshua-Kings, applied this principle to the nations and thereby offered an explanation for defeat at the hands of Assyria and Babylonia. A later version of this history, Chronicles, took the principle of reward and retribution to an extreme, individualizing a concept that had been applied to the nation. Cracks in this world view, however, are highlighted in the Books of Job and Ecclesiastes. Various attempts to recognize inequities and to explain the deity's role in them occur within the OT: Gideon's audacious response to an angel's reassuring words (Judg 6:13), the prophet Habakkuk's attempt to understand injustice occasioned by divine inaction; Jonah's astonishing complaint because the Lord had compassion on wicked, but repentant, inhabitants of Nineveh; Jeremiah's immensely poignant laments, often labeled confessions, that God has raped and betrayed him; Ezekiel's insistence that people who reject divine justice are guilty of faulty logic; the psalmist's inner struggles to affirm the Lord's goodness (Ps 37, 49, 73). Within the apocryphal literature, one work stands out for the intensity with which it addresses the problem of theodicy (Second Esdras), but other books also reflect on the issue at length (Tobit, Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom of Solomon). No satisfactory answer to what humans perceived to be divine injustice were put forward, but several responses brought a measure of relief: humans are innately sinful, so that they have no claim on the deity; the suffering is temporary and will be removed in a future act by a long-suffering Lord; the presence of the Lord is the supreme good, not health, prosperity and happiness; injustice will be set right in another life. In NT times belief in a resurrection removed some of the sting from such inequities, although they persisted nonetheless. It is noteworthy that Jesus is said to have observed that God bestowed gifts (sunshine and rain) on the just and on the unjust, but the assumption of reward and retribution persisted in the NT as well.

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The part of theology concerned with defending the goodness and omnipotence of God in the face of the suffering and evil of the world. See evil, problem of; free-will defence.

defense of God's goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil