Theodicy And Anti-Theodicy

Theodicy is what attempts to answer the question of why a God allows or permits suffering and evil in the world. Anti-theodicy opposes theodicy in which it refuses to consider the relationship between God and suffering and places all the experience of evil onto God. The theodicy in the world religion, Judaism, and what that tradition believes about theodicy, is to be examined. To understand theodicy in Judaism, firstly, the questioning of theodicy (especially after the Holocaust), must be examined. John K. Roth argues that no statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children . This being said Roth is saying that there can be no logical explanation for theodicy in the presence
Roth also takes Greenberg’s principle to be a protest against theodicy, for with the exception of what he has called a theodicy of protest, theodicies depend on making the reality of evil compatible with God’s uncompromised justice and/or love. To make that compatibility credible one would have to instrumentalize and transcend the presence of the burning children by saying that they are part of a providential process that ultimately produces, to use John Hick’s words for illustrative purposes, a future good “so great as to render acceptable, in retrospect, the whole human experience, with all its wickedness and suffering as well as all its sanctity and happiness.” Or one would have to offer excuses for God on the grounds that divinity always does its best in a creation where human freedom necessitates immense restrictions on God’s ability to intervene directly in history. Talking about a theodicy of protest or about anti-theodicy would not be much more credible in the literal presence of the burning children. Efforts to rescue the children and to resist the powers that took their lives would be the only statements that could fully approach credibility in those dire straits, but if philosophy and theology are unavoidable in this suffering world of ours – and they are – then one of their challenges
In the Judaism tradition, Jews have addressed the relation between God, evil, and human suffering by demonstrating a spectrum between those who defend, justify, or accept God’s relationship to evil and those who refuse to ascribe any positive meaning for the presence of evil in the world, even reaching the extreme of protesting against God on behalf of their respective communities . Although, in between those extremes exist the bulk of Jewish responses to evil. Visions of God’s omnipotence, omnipresence, and goodness are radically compromised and God’s relationship to evil is blurred in the face of unjustified suffering, illustrating the continually swinging pendulum between theodicy and anti-theodicy throughout history. In early Judaism, biblical and First Temple periods, evil was not even discussed, based on the assumption that God is just. During the Second Temple period, the Book of Job was the first individual, critical response to the doctrine of retribution in the Jewish Written Law, or the Torah. In the Book of Job, the author clearly expresses a tension between theodicy, an undying faith in God’s justice despite terrible personal tragedy, and an active protest in which God is put on trial.