I often encounter this question in the form of the "problem of evil" objection to theism. I have always found Christianity to be an odd target for this objection, not because it renders the problem of evil inert, but because the problem is actually heightened: God Himself suffers and dies. If it's a logical inconsistency for an omnipotent, benevolent God to allow His creatures to suffer, what are we supposed to make of such a God that becomes a creature and suffers along with them? The Cross is both the apotheosis of the "problem of evil" ...and the only compelling response to it.
Without theodicy, there is no hope for the apologist to respond to the problem of evil, there is only the Cross. As you write, "the only honest response to a God whose goodness infinitely transcends every creaturely concept of goodness is not to defend it, not to accuse it, but to fall silent before it in a silence that is not emptiness but the fullest possible mode of creaturely attention to what cannot be said." I feel this in my bones, but it is also, in an important way, the end of apologetics and arguing people into faith. Theodicy cannot fit through the eye of a needle.
One other thing: "Absence and mystery are not the same thing. This is everything." That reminded me of your article on Neo-Palamism, in which you wrote: “Inexhaustibility is not distance; it is depth.” Not quite the same statement, but they seem closely related. I'll have to let that sit for a while.
So true Henry about "the end of apologetics and arguing people into faith." Rather than 'defense' I see it more like an unpacking of life's mysteries. Indeed how do we defend God dying? If we see that as one more point to argue about, instead of being absolutely stunned by the deep mystery that presents us, well then it seems to me we have already veered of the path. Silence before the mystery, that infinite depth, that inexhaustible excess of love and of presence. I hear the call, "Wisdom, let us stand!" - and we behold, we receive, we are taken up.
Well, Robert. This will come as a surprise, because you and I ‘never’ disagree on anything, right? Ha!
First, what I love – the move from theodicy as defense to lament/presence. Yeah. “Theodicy wants an answer. Job receives a turning toward” is excellent.
My issue is with your claim that theodicy “requires univocal predication.”
To begin with, as far as I can tell, you have a quite narrow definition of ‘theodiy’ as a 'defense' or justification of God's permission of suffering. That’s not wrong. Just a bit narrow. I wonder if many contemporary philosophers would define theodicy more broadly as an attempt to explain how God and evil are compatible. More an ‘account’, not necessarily as ‘justification’. You choose the stronger forensic term—defense, vindication, justification. If theodicy means “justification,” you’re attacking it. If it means merely “giving an account,” the target becomes less clear.
And then this gets connected to univocal predication. What seems to happen is that anyone seeking some account or explanation of the compatibility of God and evil are pegged as only having the problem because they proceed on the basis of univocal predication. But that seems pretty clearly not to be the case. There is plenty of room for wanting/needing some plausible account of the compatibility of God’s goodness and evil in our world while viewing all God-talk as analogical, because theodicy only requires enough commensurability for moral assessment, the same (analogical) commensurability as Hart argues in his moral-modal collapse argument. Theodicy is possible because the terms we use of God (good, just, loving, etc) are (to borrow Hart’s phrase) “however apophatic” are still capable of grounding rational objections and explanations.
Last thought. I think an anti-theodicy argument like yours is strongest when grounded in ‘Christ crucified’, not apophaticism alone. Apophaticism can sound like a “We don’t know” copout, but Golgotha says positively: God’s answer to suffering is not explanation but solidarity. But in any case, I think faith is right to seek an account of some kind that makes it possible for one to believe God is good in a world as overrun by evil as ours, and I don’t see how analogical predication changes that. Just a thought.
That's how I learn Tom, I don't mind the disagreement at all, I am grateful for your reply! It's a good sign, I am getting under your skin 😊
That's a fair criticism on the Christological ground. You are right - the argument from Golgotha is not a supplement to the apophatic argument but its deepest grounding, and the way I framed the structure of the post left the impression that apophasis carries the primary weight, and that's not right. The homoousios section was always meant to be the climax; I should have made that clearer from the outset. Golgotha first. Apophasis as the deepening of what Golgotha already shows.
On the definitional question: also fair. I am using "theodicy" in its forensic sense — defense, vindication, justification. As you point out not everyone who seeks some account of the compatibility of God and evil is doing that. I chose the forensic sense deliberately, because I think it is what theodicy actually does, whatever its stated goals. I should have said so more explicitly rather than letting the narrowness appear to be an oversight.
As to your central objection, which I find the most interesting. You argue that theodicy requires only the same analogical commensurability Hart deploys in his moral-modal collapse argument. God-talk, however apophatic, still grounds rational objections and explanations. And if Hart can use analogical predication to say a certain kind of God could not create a world like this, the theodicist can use the same analogical predication to say a certain kind of God could.
I want to argue that these are not parallel operations, and that the asymmetry between them is precisely my point.
Hart's argument moves in one direction: from what has been disclosed about divine goodness (i.e. in the Incarnation, in the moral character of God revealed in Christ) to a negative judgment of incompatibility. It does not require that we trace divine purposes, weigh them against specific instances of suffering, or assess whether the balance is sufficient. It requires only enough knowledge of divine goodness to recognize that this disclosed God could not create a world of this kind for any purpose a rational creature could recognize as adequate. That is a refusal, not a vindication. And refusal requires far less commensurability than vindication does. I hope you see this. Refusal can operate on minimal information (I know enough about this person to know they would not do this), while vindication requires much more (I know enough about this situation to say why they did what they did and that the reason was sufficient).
Here's the crux: theodicy runs in the opposite direction: from admitted suffering to an account of how divine goodness is compatible with it. Not merely that this disclosed God is incompatible with gratuitous creation, but rather that this particular suffering can in principle be seen as compatible with divine goodness, given divine purposes that are in some sense traceable or inferrable. The former requires commensurability sufficient for refusal. The latter requires commensurability sufficient for specific positive vindication. These are not even close to the same cognitive task.
Ivan's revolt and the theodicist's project sit on opposite sides of this asymmetry. Ivan needs only to know enough about goodness to refuse, and that much the analogical account supplies. The theodicist, on the other hand, needs to know enough to vindicate. The analogical account does not supply, because it gives real reference to the nature of divine goodness without giving access to the specific relation between that goodness and particular instances of suffering. To know that God is good by analogical participation is one thing. To know that God permits this child's suffering because of this specific good that will be served is categorically different. It requires not analogical proportion but a comprehensive knowledge of the divine providential plan that no creaturely participation affords.
So when you say theodicy requires only enough commensurability for moral assessment, I want to ask: moral assessment of what? Of the general character of divine goodness? Yes, analogy supplies that, and it is enough for Hart's negative judgment and Ivan's refusal. Of the specific compatibility between divine goodness and this particular suffering? No, analogy does not supply that, and it is this specific positive judgment that theodicy in its forensic sense requires.
As to broadening terms: theodicy as "giving an account" rather than "justification". If giving an account means: here is how I understand the relationship between divine goodness and creaturely suffering, while acknowledging I cannot assess or vindicate the specific purposes at work, then that is not theodicy anymore. That is apophatic theology of the cross, which is closer to the position I am defending than to the one I am criticizing. If giving an account means something more (here is why divine goodness is compatible with this kind of suffering) then it has quietly reintroduced the positive cognitive claim that requires the commensurability that I am questioning. The broadening either collapses into my position or reintroduces the requirement it was meant to dissolve.
As to your final point that faith is right to seek some account that makes it possible to believe God is good in a world overrun by evil, this is genuinely compelling. I do not intend to dismiss it. I do want to distinguish two very different things that might be meant by "account." One is the kind of account theodicy offers, a structured argument that the suffering is compatible with divine goodness, given accessible divine purposes. The other is the kind of account Job receives: a turning toward, a presence that does not explain but does not abandon, a darkness inhabited by the God who calls by name. The second is not an absence of account. Rather it is a different kind of account altogether. It is the account available to a person whose participation in divine goodness is real but whose cognitive access to divine purpose is not comprehensive. Lament and faith are not the abandonment of seeking. They are the form that seeking takes when it is honest about what can and cannot be known. Which is, I think, close to what you are pointing toward, even if we have arrived there by different roads.
1. Negative moral judgment (God could not do that)
2. Positive vindication (Suffering is justified because...)
You’re arguing for the first and against the second. And as you say, the first requires much less cognitive access than the second, which it does.
However, there’s a real gap here. You repeatedly say things like:
‘The theodicist needs to know enough to vindicate.’
and
‘To know that God permits this child's suffering because of this specific good that will be served’.
and
‘Theodicy requires a specific positive vindication’.
But theodicy (a sufficient theodicy that seeks to vindicate God’s goodness in the light of all evil) does not require this.
Take Hart himself. He does not say:
‘This child's suffering happened because God needed this specific outcome’.
Hart actually rejects that sort of providential bookkeeping (as do you and I), fine. Rather, he says something more like:
‘God permits a world of finite freedom, contingency, and suffering because only such a world can culminate in the free union of creatures with God, and every evil will ultimately be overcome and healed’.
That is certainly a positive account. It’s certainly more than lament. And it’s certainly more than a mere negative refusal. But it is not a claim to know the specific providential rationale behind each particular suffering.
In other words, there seems to be a middle category between your two poles:
As I say, Hart does admit he has positive reasons for vindicating God’s goodness in our evil world. He says as much in his Notre Dame ‘ex nihilo’ paper. Type-2 statements don’t have to claim to know the specific providential workings of every particular evil. They can be general positive statements like.
Anyhow, one may agree with Hart or not. I’m just saying, it would be difficult to argue that his 2nd type (positive vindication) claims require him to assume a univocal predication re: God.
Last thought. Logically speaking, God’s final end (about which you and I claim to know a good deal – that end being the deification of all sentience creatures) has to vindicate God’s choice to create a world that became as overrun by evil as ours. This is certainly categorically/generally true even if we don’t now have in hand the details that lay bear all the workings of providence for every particular evil. But that’s just footnotes essentially. In the end, the same final end (our shared beatitude in Christ) does vindicate God’s providence for all of history. Paul says as much (Rom 8) – the whole history of the world’s suffering and evils will not be worth comparing to the glory that shall be revealed in us. That’s not a negative ‘God can’t do that’. That’s a positive claim that all evil can ‘now’ be seen in light of the final end.
But if your argument stands – that is, if only negative moral judgments of the sort ‘God could not do that’ are possible – then you have to abandon all claims to have any confident notion about the final ends of things, since those final ends logically vindicate God’s choice to create the sort of world we’re in.
2Corinthians 4: "This light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison."
Again, not merely a refusal. Not merely lament. A positive teleological claim.
And universalism intensifies this.
If all creatures are finally healed, reconciled, deified, and brought into the beatific life of God, then one is inevitably making some claim about the meaning of history as a whole. Not "I know why little Sarah suffered on April 17, 1997" (which no proponent of any theodicy claims, or need claim). But: "know enough about the final end to say that creation itself is justified." That's a positive judgment that vindicates all conceivable nightmares (whether our actual history or any other) because God's infinite beatitude more than compensates, relativizing all evils to 'not worth comparing to'.
Tom, told you I be learning! Excellent pushback, you are right that I have been arguing as though the only alternatives are the specific providential bookkeeping and the bare negative refusal. This leaves a middle category unaddressed, and I/we hold something very close to that middle category.
That middle category perhaps we can call that "general teleological vindication." It's not "I know why little Sarah suffered on April 17, 1997," but it is: "I know enough about the final end to say that creation itself is justified." It is Hart's claim that God permits a world of finite freedom and suffering because only such a world can culminate in the free union of creatures with God. As is Paul's "not worth comparing to the glory that shall be revealed." And we can include universalism's insistence that the final healing of all creatures vindicates the whole of history. None of these require specific providential bookkeeping. All of them are positive and not merely lament. I totally acknowledge the force of this.
However, and hear me out, I want to press what "vindication" means in this middle category, because I think there are two quite different things it might mean, and only one of them is theodicy in the forensic sense I have been criticizing. Allow me to unpack these.
The first is vindication as compensation: the final glory is sufficiently large to outweigh every particular evil, so the balance-sheet comes out positive. On this reading, the teleological claim functions as a kind of cosmic audit: the losses are real, the gains are larger, and the net result justifies the whole enterprise. This is theodicy. It requires knowing not only that the final end is real and good, but that its goodness stands in a rationally assessable compensatory relation to every particular evil. And this is precisely where the analogical account reasserts its pressure. Why? Because to assess that compensatory relation requires a degree of cognitive access to the relation between the final good and particular evils that exceeds what analogical participation supplies.
The second is vindication as eschatological transfiguration: the final end does not outweigh the evils but takes them up, transforms them, makes them 'unrememberable.' But not as the larger number on a balance-sheet but as the light that shows what the darkness was always pointing toward. This is not theodicy. It is eschatological hope grounded in Christological confession. And crucially, it does not require the cognitive access that theodicy needs, because it does not claim to trace a rational compensatory relation between particular evils and the final good. It claims something more eschatological and less forensic: that the God who is the end of all things will bring all things to himself in ways that exceed rational assessment in advance.
Now look at your Paul quotation in this light. "Not worth comparing to the glory that shall be revealed." "Not worth comparing" is not a balance-sheet claim but an incommensurability claim, and incommensurability cuts the other way from what theodicy needs. If the glory and the suffering are genuinely incommensurable, they cannot be placed on the same scale. And if they cannot be placed on the same scale, the glory does not straightforwardly vindicate the suffering in the forensic sense. It overwhelms it, transforms it, renders it finally as nothing. But that is transfiguration, not compensation. The difference matters precisely because transfiguration does not require the prior rational assessment of adequacy that compensation does.
The same distinction runs through universalism. If all creatures are finally healed and deified, I agree that this is a positive claim, not merely a refusal. But knowing the final end does not tell us whether that end justifies the route. It doesn't tell us whether a God of infinite wisdom and goodness could not have achieved the same final union by a path that did not include the suffering of children. Importantly: the theodicist still needs to show not only that the end is good but that the means were necessary, or at least not gratuitous. And that requires the specific cognitive access I have been challenging. I hope you see that. The final end is known to us by Christological disclosure, not by reasoning backward from it to the rational justification of every particular step. Knowing where we are going does not tell us that every feature of the path was rationally adequate. It tells us that the one who is the path, the truth, and the life will not lose any of those for whom he has come.
Now to your last challenge: if only negative moral judgments are possible, must I abandon all confident claims about the final ends of things? No, absolutely not. Because the epistemic ground of my confidence in the final end is different from the epistemic ground theodicy requires. I know the final end because it has been disclosed in Christ, not because I have reasoned from the character of suffering to the adequacy of its resolution. I trust you see the difference. That is Christological confession, not theodicy. The distinction is not between confidence and uncertainty. It is between two different sources and modes of knowing: the knowledge that comes from what God has shown us in Christ, and the knowledge that theodicy requires in order to assess whether particular evils are rationally adequate to the good that justifies them. The first is available. The second is not.
Which brings me back to where I think your feedback has really fine tuned my position. I argue from apophasis as the primary ground, with Christology arriving as confirmation. You have helped me see that this should be inverted. The positive Christological confession is primary: God's answer to suffering is not explanation but entry, not justification but solidarity, not the divine bookkeeper but the crucified Theanthropos. Apophasis is then the consequence of that confession, not its ground: we cannot explain suffering precisely because the God who meets us in it infinitely exceeds every explanation we could bring. I am going to make some edits and give you the ole' tip of the hat. Do you wear fedoras also?
Thank you for this, Robert!
I often encounter this question in the form of the "problem of evil" objection to theism. I have always found Christianity to be an odd target for this objection, not because it renders the problem of evil inert, but because the problem is actually heightened: God Himself suffers and dies. If it's a logical inconsistency for an omnipotent, benevolent God to allow His creatures to suffer, what are we supposed to make of such a God that becomes a creature and suffers along with them? The Cross is both the apotheosis of the "problem of evil" ...and the only compelling response to it.
Without theodicy, there is no hope for the apologist to respond to the problem of evil, there is only the Cross. As you write, "the only honest response to a God whose goodness infinitely transcends every creaturely concept of goodness is not to defend it, not to accuse it, but to fall silent before it in a silence that is not emptiness but the fullest possible mode of creaturely attention to what cannot be said." I feel this in my bones, but it is also, in an important way, the end of apologetics and arguing people into faith. Theodicy cannot fit through the eye of a needle.
One other thing: "Absence and mystery are not the same thing. This is everything." That reminded me of your article on Neo-Palamism, in which you wrote: “Inexhaustibility is not distance; it is depth.” Not quite the same statement, but they seem closely related. I'll have to let that sit for a while.
So true Henry about "the end of apologetics and arguing people into faith." Rather than 'defense' I see it more like an unpacking of life's mysteries. Indeed how do we defend God dying? If we see that as one more point to argue about, instead of being absolutely stunned by the deep mystery that presents us, well then it seems to me we have already veered of the path. Silence before the mystery, that infinite depth, that inexhaustible excess of love and of presence. I hear the call, "Wisdom, let us stand!" - and we behold, we receive, we are taken up.
Well, Robert. This will come as a surprise, because you and I ‘never’ disagree on anything, right? Ha!
First, what I love – the move from theodicy as defense to lament/presence. Yeah. “Theodicy wants an answer. Job receives a turning toward” is excellent.
My issue is with your claim that theodicy “requires univocal predication.”
To begin with, as far as I can tell, you have a quite narrow definition of ‘theodiy’ as a 'defense' or justification of God's permission of suffering. That’s not wrong. Just a bit narrow. I wonder if many contemporary philosophers would define theodicy more broadly as an attempt to explain how God and evil are compatible. More an ‘account’, not necessarily as ‘justification’. You choose the stronger forensic term—defense, vindication, justification. If theodicy means “justification,” you’re attacking it. If it means merely “giving an account,” the target becomes less clear.
And then this gets connected to univocal predication. What seems to happen is that anyone seeking some account or explanation of the compatibility of God and evil are pegged as only having the problem because they proceed on the basis of univocal predication. But that seems pretty clearly not to be the case. There is plenty of room for wanting/needing some plausible account of the compatibility of God’s goodness and evil in our world while viewing all God-talk as analogical, because theodicy only requires enough commensurability for moral assessment, the same (analogical) commensurability as Hart argues in his moral-modal collapse argument. Theodicy is possible because the terms we use of God (good, just, loving, etc) are (to borrow Hart’s phrase) “however apophatic” are still capable of grounding rational objections and explanations.
Last thought. I think an anti-theodicy argument like yours is strongest when grounded in ‘Christ crucified’, not apophaticism alone. Apophaticism can sound like a “We don’t know” copout, but Golgotha says positively: God’s answer to suffering is not explanation but solidarity. But in any case, I think faith is right to seek an account of some kind that makes it possible for one to believe God is good in a world as overrun by evil as ours, and I don’t see how analogical predication changes that. Just a thought.
Ciao!
That's how I learn Tom, I don't mind the disagreement at all, I am grateful for your reply! It's a good sign, I am getting under your skin 😊
That's a fair criticism on the Christological ground. You are right - the argument from Golgotha is not a supplement to the apophatic argument but its deepest grounding, and the way I framed the structure of the post left the impression that apophasis carries the primary weight, and that's not right. The homoousios section was always meant to be the climax; I should have made that clearer from the outset. Golgotha first. Apophasis as the deepening of what Golgotha already shows.
On the definitional question: also fair. I am using "theodicy" in its forensic sense — defense, vindication, justification. As you point out not everyone who seeks some account of the compatibility of God and evil is doing that. I chose the forensic sense deliberately, because I think it is what theodicy actually does, whatever its stated goals. I should have said so more explicitly rather than letting the narrowness appear to be an oversight.
As to your central objection, which I find the most interesting. You argue that theodicy requires only the same analogical commensurability Hart deploys in his moral-modal collapse argument. God-talk, however apophatic, still grounds rational objections and explanations. And if Hart can use analogical predication to say a certain kind of God could not create a world like this, the theodicist can use the same analogical predication to say a certain kind of God could.
I want to argue that these are not parallel operations, and that the asymmetry between them is precisely my point.
Hart's argument moves in one direction: from what has been disclosed about divine goodness (i.e. in the Incarnation, in the moral character of God revealed in Christ) to a negative judgment of incompatibility. It does not require that we trace divine purposes, weigh them against specific instances of suffering, or assess whether the balance is sufficient. It requires only enough knowledge of divine goodness to recognize that this disclosed God could not create a world of this kind for any purpose a rational creature could recognize as adequate. That is a refusal, not a vindication. And refusal requires far less commensurability than vindication does. I hope you see this. Refusal can operate on minimal information (I know enough about this person to know they would not do this), while vindication requires much more (I know enough about this situation to say why they did what they did and that the reason was sufficient).
Here's the crux: theodicy runs in the opposite direction: from admitted suffering to an account of how divine goodness is compatible with it. Not merely that this disclosed God is incompatible with gratuitous creation, but rather that this particular suffering can in principle be seen as compatible with divine goodness, given divine purposes that are in some sense traceable or inferrable. The former requires commensurability sufficient for refusal. The latter requires commensurability sufficient for specific positive vindication. These are not even close to the same cognitive task.
Ivan's revolt and the theodicist's project sit on opposite sides of this asymmetry. Ivan needs only to know enough about goodness to refuse, and that much the analogical account supplies. The theodicist, on the other hand, needs to know enough to vindicate. The analogical account does not supply, because it gives real reference to the nature of divine goodness without giving access to the specific relation between that goodness and particular instances of suffering. To know that God is good by analogical participation is one thing. To know that God permits this child's suffering because of this specific good that will be served is categorically different. It requires not analogical proportion but a comprehensive knowledge of the divine providential plan that no creaturely participation affords.
So when you say theodicy requires only enough commensurability for moral assessment, I want to ask: moral assessment of what? Of the general character of divine goodness? Yes, analogy supplies that, and it is enough for Hart's negative judgment and Ivan's refusal. Of the specific compatibility between divine goodness and this particular suffering? No, analogy does not supply that, and it is this specific positive judgment that theodicy in its forensic sense requires.
As to broadening terms: theodicy as "giving an account" rather than "justification". If giving an account means: here is how I understand the relationship between divine goodness and creaturely suffering, while acknowledging I cannot assess or vindicate the specific purposes at work, then that is not theodicy anymore. That is apophatic theology of the cross, which is closer to the position I am defending than to the one I am criticizing. If giving an account means something more (here is why divine goodness is compatible with this kind of suffering) then it has quietly reintroduced the positive cognitive claim that requires the commensurability that I am questioning. The broadening either collapses into my position or reintroduces the requirement it was meant to dissolve.
As to your final point that faith is right to seek some account that makes it possible to believe God is good in a world overrun by evil, this is genuinely compelling. I do not intend to dismiss it. I do want to distinguish two very different things that might be meant by "account." One is the kind of account theodicy offers, a structured argument that the suffering is compatible with divine goodness, given accessible divine purposes. The other is the kind of account Job receives: a turning toward, a presence that does not explain but does not abandon, a darkness inhabited by the God who calls by name. The second is not an absence of account. Rather it is a different kind of account altogether. It is the account available to a person whose participation in divine goodness is real but whose cognitive access to divine purpose is not comprehensive. Lament and faith are not the abandonment of seeking. They are the form that seeking takes when it is honest about what can and cannot be known. Which is, I think, close to what you are pointing toward, even if we have arrived there by different roads.
Thanks Robert.
So, you’re making a distinction between:
1. Negative moral judgment (God could not do that)
2. Positive vindication (Suffering is justified because...)
You’re arguing for the first and against the second. And as you say, the first requires much less cognitive access than the second, which it does.
However, there’s a real gap here. You repeatedly say things like:
‘The theodicist needs to know enough to vindicate.’
and
‘To know that God permits this child's suffering because of this specific good that will be served’.
and
‘Theodicy requires a specific positive vindication’.
But theodicy (a sufficient theodicy that seeks to vindicate God’s goodness in the light of all evil) does not require this.
Take Hart himself. He does not say:
‘This child's suffering happened because God needed this specific outcome’.
Hart actually rejects that sort of providential bookkeeping (as do you and I), fine. Rather, he says something more like:
‘God permits a world of finite freedom, contingency, and suffering because only such a world can culminate in the free union of creatures with God, and every evil will ultimately be overcome and healed’.
That is certainly a positive account. It’s certainly more than lament. And it’s certainly more than a mere negative refusal. But it is not a claim to know the specific providential rationale behind each particular suffering.
In other words, there seems to be a middle category between your two poles:
As I say, Hart does admit he has positive reasons for vindicating God’s goodness in our evil world. He says as much in his Notre Dame ‘ex nihilo’ paper. Type-2 statements don’t have to claim to know the specific providential workings of every particular evil. They can be general positive statements like.
Anyhow, one may agree with Hart or not. I’m just saying, it would be difficult to argue that his 2nd type (positive vindication) claims require him to assume a univocal predication re: God.
Last thought. Logically speaking, God’s final end (about which you and I claim to know a good deal – that end being the deification of all sentience creatures) has to vindicate God’s choice to create a world that became as overrun by evil as ours. This is certainly categorically/generally true even if we don’t now have in hand the details that lay bear all the workings of providence for every particular evil. But that’s just footnotes essentially. In the end, the same final end (our shared beatitude in Christ) does vindicate God’s providence for all of history. Paul says as much (Rom 8) – the whole history of the world’s suffering and evils will not be worth comparing to the glory that shall be revealed in us. That’s not a negative ‘God can’t do that’. That’s a positive claim that all evil can ‘now’ be seen in light of the final end.
But if your argument stands – that is, if only negative moral judgments of the sort ‘God could not do that’ are possible – then you have to abandon all claims to have any confident notion about the final ends of things, since those final ends logically vindicate God’s choice to create the sort of world we’re in.
2Corinthians 4: "This light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison."
Again, not merely a refusal. Not merely lament. A positive teleological claim.
And universalism intensifies this.
If all creatures are finally healed, reconciled, deified, and brought into the beatific life of God, then one is inevitably making some claim about the meaning of history as a whole. Not "I know why little Sarah suffered on April 17, 1997" (which no proponent of any theodicy claims, or need claim). But: "know enough about the final end to say that creation itself is justified." That's a positive judgment that vindicates all conceivable nightmares (whether our actual history or any other) because God's infinite beatitude more than compensates, relativizing all evils to 'not worth comparing to'.
Tom, told you I be learning! Excellent pushback, you are right that I have been arguing as though the only alternatives are the specific providential bookkeeping and the bare negative refusal. This leaves a middle category unaddressed, and I/we hold something very close to that middle category.
That middle category perhaps we can call that "general teleological vindication." It's not "I know why little Sarah suffered on April 17, 1997," but it is: "I know enough about the final end to say that creation itself is justified." It is Hart's claim that God permits a world of finite freedom and suffering because only such a world can culminate in the free union of creatures with God. As is Paul's "not worth comparing to the glory that shall be revealed." And we can include universalism's insistence that the final healing of all creatures vindicates the whole of history. None of these require specific providential bookkeeping. All of them are positive and not merely lament. I totally acknowledge the force of this.
However, and hear me out, I want to press what "vindication" means in this middle category, because I think there are two quite different things it might mean, and only one of them is theodicy in the forensic sense I have been criticizing. Allow me to unpack these.
The first is vindication as compensation: the final glory is sufficiently large to outweigh every particular evil, so the balance-sheet comes out positive. On this reading, the teleological claim functions as a kind of cosmic audit: the losses are real, the gains are larger, and the net result justifies the whole enterprise. This is theodicy. It requires knowing not only that the final end is real and good, but that its goodness stands in a rationally assessable compensatory relation to every particular evil. And this is precisely where the analogical account reasserts its pressure. Why? Because to assess that compensatory relation requires a degree of cognitive access to the relation between the final good and particular evils that exceeds what analogical participation supplies.
The second is vindication as eschatological transfiguration: the final end does not outweigh the evils but takes them up, transforms them, makes them 'unrememberable.' But not as the larger number on a balance-sheet but as the light that shows what the darkness was always pointing toward. This is not theodicy. It is eschatological hope grounded in Christological confession. And crucially, it does not require the cognitive access that theodicy needs, because it does not claim to trace a rational compensatory relation between particular evils and the final good. It claims something more eschatological and less forensic: that the God who is the end of all things will bring all things to himself in ways that exceed rational assessment in advance.
Now look at your Paul quotation in this light. "Not worth comparing to the glory that shall be revealed." "Not worth comparing" is not a balance-sheet claim but an incommensurability claim, and incommensurability cuts the other way from what theodicy needs. If the glory and the suffering are genuinely incommensurable, they cannot be placed on the same scale. And if they cannot be placed on the same scale, the glory does not straightforwardly vindicate the suffering in the forensic sense. It overwhelms it, transforms it, renders it finally as nothing. But that is transfiguration, not compensation. The difference matters precisely because transfiguration does not require the prior rational assessment of adequacy that compensation does.
The same distinction runs through universalism. If all creatures are finally healed and deified, I agree that this is a positive claim, not merely a refusal. But knowing the final end does not tell us whether that end justifies the route. It doesn't tell us whether a God of infinite wisdom and goodness could not have achieved the same final union by a path that did not include the suffering of children. Importantly: the theodicist still needs to show not only that the end is good but that the means were necessary, or at least not gratuitous. And that requires the specific cognitive access I have been challenging. I hope you see that. The final end is known to us by Christological disclosure, not by reasoning backward from it to the rational justification of every particular step. Knowing where we are going does not tell us that every feature of the path was rationally adequate. It tells us that the one who is the path, the truth, and the life will not lose any of those for whom he has come.
Now to your last challenge: if only negative moral judgments are possible, must I abandon all confident claims about the final ends of things? No, absolutely not. Because the epistemic ground of my confidence in the final end is different from the epistemic ground theodicy requires. I know the final end because it has been disclosed in Christ, not because I have reasoned from the character of suffering to the adequacy of its resolution. I trust you see the difference. That is Christological confession, not theodicy. The distinction is not between confidence and uncertainty. It is between two different sources and modes of knowing: the knowledge that comes from what God has shown us in Christ, and the knowledge that theodicy requires in order to assess whether particular evils are rationally adequate to the good that justifies them. The first is available. The second is not.
Which brings me back to where I think your feedback has really fine tuned my position. I argue from apophasis as the primary ground, with Christology arriving as confirmation. You have helped me see that this should be inverted. The positive Christological confession is primary: God's answer to suffering is not explanation but entry, not justification but solidarity, not the divine bookkeeper but the crucified Theanthropos. Apophasis is then the consequence of that confession, not its ground: we cannot explain suffering precisely because the God who meets us in it infinitely exceeds every explanation we could bring. I am going to make some edits and give you the ole' tip of the hat. Do you wear fedoras also?