Beyond theodicy, in the days after Sandy Hook

There are reasons to highlight the horrible theodicies offered by the likes of Mike Huckabee and Bryan Fischer, when a tragedy happens like the one that happened in Connecticut last week. These men lead, and aspire to lead, and hold positions of privilege. Publicizing their comments serves to marginalize them. Everyone, even those who might otherwise find these men reasonable and believable, gets a chance to be horrified, and side with those who are suffering rather than the ideologues' ghastly ideologies. Which is what happened.

Their comments, though, shouldn't be taken for a fair representation of the bulk of those Christians, or even evangelicals, or even conservative evangelicals who listen to the likes of Huckabee and Fischer. These theodicies aren't widely embraced. Even where they are, in theory, accepted, most recoil from that kind of talk when it would actually be applicable, when they're actually a tragedy to be explained.

The more common response, the one you would have heard in most evangelical churches in America last Sunday, was more likely of the character of Ross Douthat's recent column. Evangelicals, like the Catholic columnist for the New York Times, for the most part understand God to be on the side of the suffering, and not the ultimate cause of violence. While that may, in terms of theology, leave violence unexplained, and leave unanswered the very real question of there could be such violence and also exist a totally good and totally powerful God, it nevertheless allows the believers to respond with empathy, and to understand God to respond that way too.

As Douthat wrote:

the only thing that my religious tradition has to offer to the bereaved of Newtown today — besides an appropriately respectful witness to their awful sorrow — is a version of that story, and the realism about suffering that it contains. 

That realism may be hard to see at Christmastime, when the sentimental side of faith owns the cultural stage. But the Christmas story isn’t just the manger and the shepherds and the baby Jesus, meek and mild. 

The rage of Herod is there as well, and the slaughtered innocents of Bethlehem, and the myrrh that prepares bodies for the grave. The cross looms behind the stable — the shadow of violence, agony and death.

Others echoed this. James K.A. Smith, himself a Calvinist, responded to the tragedy of Sandy Hook Elementary by arguing against a Christian theodicy:

Let's not pretend we have an answer to the question, "Why?" We can only lament in that space between the Resurrection and kingdom come.
— James K.A. Smith (@james_ka_smith) December 16, 2012

Eric Metaxas, the author of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer biography that's been so wildly popular among evangelicals, and a radio commentator on the late Chuck Colson's radio show, Breakpoint, responded similarly, if more hamhandedly:

I grew up in Danbury, CT, next door to Newtown. What happened today is unfathomable, except perhaps as proof that we need God desperately.
— Eric Metaxas (@ericmetaxas) December 15, 2012

Where can we go in this tragedy except to the foot of the Cross, where an Innocent died to defeat Death and open the door to our true home?
— Eric Metaxas (@ericmetaxas) December 16, 2012

There are plenty of reasons to talk about and criticize the kind of "Christian answer" being offered by Huckabee, Fischer, and those like them, but an actual consideration of how conservative Christians theologize a response to evil in 21st century America would do better to look at these other sorts of statements. If theodicy's going to be criticized, it should be this theodicy.

And it can be criticized.

I, for one, wonder about where such statements of God's "understanding" leave you. Empathy can also mean paralysis. These sorts of statements, while not attributing the violence to a divine cause and asking people to simply submit, don't seem to clearly offer anyone the resources to respond to such a situation. They're compatible, at least, with a kind of nihilism, surrendering to and accepting of such irrationality and violence as being just the way things are. It's possible to view the idea that "God understands" as saying, in some sense, that hope for something different, something better, is futile.

Despair, God knows, has been common enough response this last week. Maybe aestheticized and spiritualized despair, despair with God, is the best we can hope for, given everything.

I know, though, that Christian theology does have resources within it to suggest that something can be done, beyond just mourning. The gospel reading assigned for the third Sunday in Advent -- last Sunday -- begins, for example, with the question, "What should we do?"

There is an answer given.

It seems to me to be different than talk about "our true home."

Still, the only place to start, the only acceptably human place to start, with any theological response dead children, has to be in mourning. Has to be in solidarity with the suffering. Unlike those who rush to God's defense, and in doing make claims for the divine rationality of such irrationality, the Godly sense of such violence, most of the ministers wrestling with how to respond to the sort of overwhelming despair that comes with such tragedies did try to start with empathy, whether that was enough or not.