Why Should Christians Know what Theodicy Means?

Theodicy comes from the Greek words theo (God) and dicy (vindication of). It seeks to make sense of the evil in the world and see how God can still be good. Theodicy grapples with the classic question, “How can a good, all-powerful God allow so much suffering in the world?”

Why Is It Important To Learn About Theodicy?

Theodicy deals with one of the most frequent objections to faith. Prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have brought it up throughout history.

Understanding how people have discussed this question helps us answer anyone who asks about the hope we have within us.

It also helps other believers: many raised in the church cite not being able to give a good reason for the word’s suffering, struggling to see God as omnipotent instead of impotent, as a reason they went through deconstruction.

Our response to questions of theodicy should be one of repentance internally, but we also need to respond to a culture that is asking these questions.

What Does The Bible Say About Theodicy?

The book of Job does the best Job of vindicating God in the Bible. In the final chapters of Job, God defends himself by saying that his ways are above our ways. God intricately knows and controls every aspect of creation. So, God is the king with the right to test his subjects’ reliability and trustworthiness. That is what he did with Job and ended up rewarding his suffering. God defends himself by explaining that his ways are higher than ours.

The Bible doesn’t always offer us the neat and tidy solutions that we expect. The hidden things belong to the Lord (Deuteronomy 29:29), and God does what he pleases.

Our response should be similar to Job’s (Job 42:1-6). We must recognize our finitude and repent of our sins. Every human assumes they could do a better job than God did. That prompts us to ask questions we cannot always answer to explain God’s mysterious ways.

Within that humility, we can still seek to understand God’s mysterious ways better. Different views on theodicy can enable us to understand God better and follow him better if we are humble enough to admit learning about theodicy is an ongoing journey of trust.

What Did the Early Church Believe About Theodicy?

The Irenaean view of theodicy developed to disprove gnosticism, a popular early church heresy.

Gnostics believed in the existence of a spiritual elite or an enlightened few who possessed special knowledge (gnosis) that allowed them to transcend the material world and attain salvation. These individuals were often considered to be elected or chosen by divine beings.

Irenaeus emphasized human free will above the gnostic idea of divine election. Unlike most Western Christians today, he said humanity was created as children without knowledge of good and evil. Ireneaus reasons that humans were not created perfect initially because created things must be inferior to their creator. His view of original sin differed from Augustine’s, who taught that humanity was morally perfect at the start.

Augustine is the water the Western church swims in. He has defined doctrine for Christianity’s past 1,500 years—Protestantism and Catholicism alike. Many scholars attribute him with developing the idea of inherited sin from Adam. However, even Irenaeus agreed with this concept. Irenaeus also recognized that the fall changed humanity forever.

As Augustine says in the Summa Theolgiae, “Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil” (Enchiridion xi).

Augustine was one of the first theologians to deal with the problem of evil. His book City of God dealt with the question at length and showed that pagan Rome’s philosophy had no answer to the question either. His above quote is a good summary of his defense of God’s goodness.

Most of the early church’s main arguments were against other philosophies or religions rather than internal debates. Augustine concluded that God uses the evil humans commit for his greater glory and purpose—a view supported by Genesis 50:20: “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.”

Augustine promoted what is now called compatibilism—the idea that we humans have free will, but God has also predetermined what will happen. Augustine founded this idea based on God’s omniscience but rejected the fatalism of the stoics, who said that humans had no free will.

What Are Other Popular Views of Theodicy?

Perhaps the most famous theodicy is the “Greatest of all worlds” idea. This theodicy posits that the world is created in a particular way: God made the world in the best way to allow the maximum number of people to be saved or to maximize his glory. This view vindicates God’s justice by saying that he allows (but doesn’t cause) suffering so people would praise him.

This idea became popular through the man who developed the term theodicy: Gottfried Leibniz. He said, “Now as there are an infinity of possible universes in the ideas of God, and but one of them can exist, there must be a sufficient reason for the choice of God which determines him to select one rather than another. And this reason is to be found only in the fitness or in the degree of perfection these worlds possess, each possible thing having the right to claim existence in proportion to the perfection it involves. This is the cause for the existence of the greatest good; namely, that the wisdom of God permits him to know it, his goodness causes him to choose it, and his power enables him to produce it.”

From this argument, Leibniz concludes that God could have created any world he wanted, but he chose to create ours. Leibniz does not explain why this world is the best but says it must be.

What Do Liberal Theologians Believe about Theodicy?

Several liberal theologians view Irenaeus as their forefather in the faith rather than Augustine, developing what is known as Irenaean theodicy.

The main points of Irenaean theodicy are that God created this best of all possible worlds so humans could be perfected by, suffering and come to know Christ on the other side of that suffering. The view also sought to reconcile evolution and human design, with its ideas about how humans change.

The proponents of this theodicy name it after Irenaeus because he briefly mentions an example of how God used the suffering of one to bring the salvation of the many.

“For as He patiently suffered Jonah to be swallowed by the whale, not that he should be swallowed up and perish altogether, but that, having been cast out again, he might be the more subject to God, and might glorify Him the more who had conferred upon him such an unhoped-for deliverance, and might bring the Ninevites to a lasting repentance, so that they should be converted to the Lord, who would deliver them from death, having been struck with awe by that portent which had been wrought in Jonah’s case.” (from Ante-Nicene Fathers)

In the quote, Irenaeus refers to how Jesus fulfilled the sign of Jonah and saved us (the Ninevites of the world).

This view, often called Irenaean theodicy, actually has more in common with a different early church father: Origen. Origen made several other contributions—his interpretation of the Old Testament dominated the church until the Protestant Reformation. He also believed in universalism, the idea that Jesus would save everyone. This view aligns him closely with proponents of “Irenaean” theodicy.

Various prominent theologians have supported the idea that evil exists to perfect humanity. One notable proponent was Friedrich Schleiermacher, the nineteenth-century German theologian. His universalist views led him to claim that all things were summed in Christ. John Hick later adapted this idea and developed the term Irenaean theodicy. Hick framed human suffering and other bad things as the way that God chose to perfect humanity.

Why Does Theodicy Matter to Us Today?

While every theodicy becomes a bit complicated, that should not keep us from having at least a basic understanding on what it means. It’s important to remember how we look at the evil in the world and who God is.

God’s goodness should be at the forefront of our minds, and theodicy helps us understand that goodness better. Furthermore, we must consider how humanity’s sin contributes to the world’s problems, and theodicy helps us to do so.

We can discuss theodicy with those who don’t know Jesus as well as with practiced philosophers. Illustrations like the three circles diagram do a good job of explaining the idea so we can explain it in everyday conversations.

Photo Credit: © Getty Images/simpson33

Ben Reichert works with college students in New Zealand. He graduated from Iowa State in 2019 with degrees in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, and agronomy. He is passionate about church history, theology, and having people walk with Jesus. When not working or writing you can find him running or hiking in the beautiful New Zealand Bush.