Befriending Job: Theodicy Amid the Ashes

• Main Author: Scott Mark Stephen Murray
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: De Gruyter 2020-06-01
• Series: Open Theology
• Subjects: the problem of evil; theodicy; suffering; bereavement; grief; mystery; silence; job
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2020-0022

What role should theodicy play in the face of loss and acute suffering? Should it keep its distance and remain respectfully silent or should it step forward to illuminate the opaque reality of evil, especially untimely death? In my article, I explore the fraught relationship between the personal experience of loss and its theological interpretation through an analysis of three related bereavement autobiographies: C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Lament for a Son, and William Abraham’s Among the Ashes. Invoking Job’s “friends” as a theoretical framework, I analyze each author’s attempt to reconcile the lived experience of suffering with the theoretical task of theodicy: to explain suffering. I conclude with my own constructive proposal on the place of theodicy in the realm of human anguish.