Hi all,
Just to add my brief two cents on theodicy...I follow the thinking of several on this list in saying that I don't see "natural evil" as truly evil. Pain and suffering simply exist and are spiritually "neutral" from my perpsective. What's important is our response to them. I tend to think of it this way - we are God's children, yes? And He has entrusted us with gifts called "free will" and "reason". Well, how do we figure out how to use them properly? Send us to "school", it seems to me, and give us "homework" and "tests" to exercise our skills by. The complexities, the problems, the pain and the suffering that we experience, all of this promotes learning and growth, both at the individual level and at the society level. We wouldn't know half as much about the world and about ourselves as we do if the pain and suffering we encountered through nature didn't encourage us to outwit it.
This is not to diminish the "theology of the cross". Indeed, I think that Christ's partaking of our pain is a profound part of the answer to our questions about suffering, perhaps the most important part - certainly at the spiritual level, if not also the intellectual level.
In Christ,
Christine
"For we walk by faith, not by sight" ~II Corinthians 5:7
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Received on Mon Nov 30 13:57:13 2009
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