Here is a new word for most of us-Theodicy. Leibniz the coiner of this word was a renown mathematician. He was the gentleman who gave us the integral rule for particular types of integration. He was also a Christian thinker as most mathematician were during the time of the enlightenment. Pain and suffering we know resulted from the fall of man due to sin. Until sin is removed we will have pain and suffering. Isn't it amazing that even the cosmos groans because of sin. Pain and suffering though can be redemptive. If you are in the midst of your storm today call on the Jesus within.
Pax Vobiscum <
Robert A. Stewart
The following is addition to the article sent by Elder Stewart. It is a definition from the Bible Guide:
ReplyDeleteA 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.
Paul