In today’s New York Times, Stanley Fish gives us a heads up on two soon-to-be-published books on the theodicy question. The two authors are Bart D. Ehrman (a theist turned agnostic) whose book is entitled God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer, and Antony Flew (an athiest turned theist) whose book is entitled There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. While both come from opposite directions they meet, or rather cross paths, on the subject of suffering and evil.

Fish suggests that while ‘Flew is for the moment satisfied with the intellectual progress he has been able to make … Ehrman is satisfied with nothing, and the passion and indignation he feels at the manifest inequities of the world are not diminished in the slightest when he writes his last word’. Fish asks, ‘Is there a conclusion to be drawn from these two books, at once so similar in their concerns and so different in their ways of addressing them? Does one or the other persuade?’ Fish contends that while the odd reader may have their mind’s changed as a result of reading either book, ‘their chief value is that together they testify to the continuing vitality and significance of their shared subject. Both are serious inquiries into matters that have been discussed and debated by sincere and learned persons for many centuries. The project is an old one, but these authors pursue it with an energy and goodwill that invite further conversation with sympathetic and unsympathetic readers alike’.

Fish concludes: ‘In short, these books neither trivialize their subject nor demonize those who have a different view of it, which is more than can be said for the efforts of those fashionable atheist writers whose major form of argument would seem to be ridicule’.

While these two books testify to humanity’s ongoing quest for a theodicy (or an atheodicy), Forsyth was right to press that the real question is not the justification of evil – as any attempt at a theodicy is ultimately to retreat into an ideology, which is the one thing we must not do – but the justification of God for whom there can be no rational vindication, as the Cross bears witness. I am reminded here of Bonhoeffer’s assertion in Creation and Fall, Temptation (pp. 84-5), that the question of why evil exists is not a theological question, for it assumes that it is possible to go behind the existence forced upon us as sinners. If we could answer it then we would not be sinners. We could make something else responsible. Therefore the ‘question of why’ can always only be answered with the ‘that’, which burdens humanity completely. The theological question does not arise about the origin of evil but about the real overcoming of evil on the Cross; it asks for the forgiveness of guilt, for the reconciliation of the fallen world.