You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Not every response to the problem of evil tries to justify God's permission of suffering. Some of the most searching responses take the form of protest: a refusal to accept any justification for innocent suffering, often coupled with a moral rejection of the whole enterprise of theodicy. This material is enrichment rather than part of the AQA-named set (the spec names Hick, the free will defence and Griffin's process theodicy), but it is invaluable for evaluation, because it challenges the very legitimacy of the theodicies studied elsewhere. The tradition draws on an ancient biblical source (the Book of Job), the most famous literary statement of the case (Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov), the post-Holocaust thought of survivors and theologians (Elie Wiesel, Richard Rubenstein, Emil Fackenheim), and two distinct philosophical positions: the protest theodicy of John K. Roth, which protests to God while keeping faith, and the anti-theodicy of D.Z. Phillips (1934-2006), which rejects theodicy as morally corrupt. A crucial early distinction: protest against theodicy is not the same as protest against God's existence. Most figures in this tradition continue to believe in God; what they reject is the attempt to explain and thereby excuse the suffering of the innocent.
The Book of Job is the oldest and most profound treatment of innocent suffering in the Western tradition, and it licenses protest from within scripture itself. Job is presented as "blameless and upright" (Job 1:1), yet he is stripped of his wealth, his children and his health. His three friends - Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar - insist his suffering must be punishment for hidden sin, voicing the retributive theology that all suffering is deserved. Job refuses this consolation, maintains his innocence, and demands that God answer him directly. Several features make the book the charter of the protest tradition.
The framing device of the prologue (the wager in the heavenly court that tests whether Job serves God "for nothing") is widely read not as the book's own theodicy but as a foil that the rest of the work overturns: the reader, unlike Job, is told a "reason", and is meant to feel how inadequate even that reason is to the agony it sets in motion. The enduring power of Job for the protest tradition is precisely that it refuses to let the suffering be settled by an explanation, and instead validates the sufferer who demands to be heard.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) gave the protest its most powerful literary form in The Brothers Karamazov (1880). In the chapter "Rebellion", the sceptical Ivan confronts his devout younger brother, the novice monk Alyosha, with a series of true horrors drawn from Russian newspaper reports - all concerning the suffering of children, deliberately chosen because children are unmistakably innocent and cannot be said to deserve their fate or to be morally improved by it:
Ivan then springs his argument. He does not deny that God exists, nor even that God may have reasons for permitting suffering and that a final cosmic harmony may one day reconcile all things. His point is moral, not metaphysical: he refuses any harmony bought at such a price.
"Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature - that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance - and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears: would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth."
Alyosha, the believer, answers quietly: "No, I would not consent." Ivan's conclusion is that no future bliss can retroactively justify the torture of even one innocent child; a happiness founded on such suffering is morally intolerable however great. He therefore declares that he "most respectfully returns the ticket" - he will not buy entry to God's harmonious universe at the cost of complicity in the suffering of children. The phrase has become the motto of the protest tradition. Note its precise target: Ivan does not reject God, he rejects the theodicist's deal - the trade of present innocent suffering for future cosmic good.
The Holocaust gave the problem of evil a new and terrible concreteness, and Jewish thought after Auschwitz is central to the protest tradition.
Elie Wiesel (1928-2016), Nobel laureate and Auschwitz survivor, recounted his experience in Night (first published in Yiddish, 1956). Wiesel did not argue that the Holocaust disproves God; his response was subtler. In the book's most famous passage he describes the camp being made to watch the slow hanging of a young boy, too light for the rope to kill quickly:
"Where is God? Where is He?" someone behind me asked. ... For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. ... Behind me, I heard the same man asking: "Where is He now?" And I heard a voice within me answer him: "Where is He? Here He is - He is hanging here on this gallows."
The line is deliberately open, and has been read in three ways: as the death of God (faith in a providential God dies here); as God's solidarity with the victims (God suffers on the gallows alongside the boy, a reading akin to a theology of the cross and to process theology's "fellow-sufferer"); and as the inadequacy of all theology (the only fitting response is silence, memory and witness, not explanation). Significantly, Wiesel did not abandon Judaism; in later works such as the play The Trial of God (1979) he dramatises putting God on trial - and the trial ends not in unbelief but in the resumption of prayer. His is a faith that includes protest.
Richard Rubenstein (1924-2021) drew the most radical conclusion in After Auschwitz (1966). He argued that the traditional theistic claim - that an omnipotent God acts purposefully in history and that Israel is God's covenant people - cannot survive the death camps without making God the author of the Holocaust, "the ultimate, omnipotent agent" behind Auschwitz. Rather than accept so monstrous a God, Rubenstein concluded that "the God of history" is dead: we live in "the time of the death of God". His reasoning was uncompromising: the traditional theology holds that God is the omnipotent Lord of history who rewards and punishes Israel according to the covenant, but to apply that framework to the Holocaust would force the believer to say that the murdered six million somehow merited their fate as covenant punishment - a conclusion Rubenstein found morally unbearable. The only honest alternative, he argued, was to give up the providential God altogether. He did not abandon Jewish community and ritual, which he valued as humanly sustaining sources of identity and meaning, but he abandoned the God who acts purposefully in history. Rubenstein's position is the limiting case of protest - protest that cannot keep the traditional God, and so passes over into a form of religious humanism.
Emil Fackenheim (1916-2003) responded very differently, refusing both glib theodicy and Rubenstein's death-of-God conclusion. He argued that to abandon Judaism or faith in God in response to Hitler would hand Hitler a posthumous victory by completing the destruction of Jewish life he had begun. Fackenheim therefore spoke of a "614th commandment" (added to the traditional 613): Jews are forbidden to grant Hitler posthumous victories - they must survive as Jews, remember the victims, and not despair of God or the world. This is protest harnessed to fidelity: the refusal to explain the evil is matched by a refusal to let it have the last word.
Key term: Anti-theodicy is the position that the project of theodicy - constructing justifications for God's permission of evil - is itself morally and/or religiously illegitimate, not merely that particular theodicies fail. It contrasts with protest theodicy (Roth), which protests to God about evil while continuing to believe, without claiming to justify the evil.
The American philosopher John K. Roth developed the most fully articulated protest theodicy in his essay "A Theodicy of Protest", written for Stephen T. Davis's symposium Encountering Evil (1981), where it stands deliberately alongside more conventional theodicies as a dissenting voice. Roth's position is striking because, unlike Phillips, he does not abandon the language of theodicy, and unlike the free-will theodicists, he does not let God off the hook. His distinctive moves are:
Roth's protest theodicy is valuable in evaluation because it occupies a position the other responses miss: it keeps the omnipotent God (against process theology), refuses to justify evil (against the free will defence and soul-making), and yet does not collapse into unbelief (against Rubenstein) or into Phillips's wholesale rejection of theodicy. It is, in effect, theodicy turned into accusation - faith that holds God to account.
The protest tradition is not a free-floating mood; it makes pointed objections to each of the theodicies studied earlier in this course, which is why it is so useful in the synoptic, evaluative parts of an answer.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.