In this week’s New Yorker, James Wood excoriates the arrogant fumblings of popular theodicy, which quickly brands every calamity-averted as “Gods’ protection,” while discreetly invoking “the mystery of providence” when true catastrophe rears forth. Wood outlines an “anti-theodicy” stemming from an outrage that, according to theologian David Bentley Hart, should be profoundly Christian.

Wood, whose agonies over the problem of evil gradually eroded his childhood faith into apostasy, scorns popular treatments of evil, from the weeping university students who praised God for preserving them from tornadoes (apparently doing so by sending the tempest to kill other area residents), to the Archbishop who, in article after the 2004 Asian tsunami, cautioned his Communion against expecting God “constantly to step in if things are getting dangerous.”

Wood lampoons the appeal either to selective intervention, or to mysterious providence–the former, because it seems to have God perenially “on holiday,” idly diverting a car wreck while the masses writhe and weep; and the latter, because it implicates God in “the Holocaust, the killing fields, the five people who die of malaria every minute.” Even if such suffering were justified, even if “the sound of weeping and of crying were heard no more,” Wood would have no part of such redemption.

This view, of course, is profoundly paradoxical, in that such outrage against the silent God is coherent only if there is in fact a God who is silent. Wood, still shivering in the tattered rags of his faith’s former finery, recognizes this contradiction, and, with heart-rending sincerity, calls his belief “permanent rebellion,” a state of “wounded theism, condemned to argue ceaselessly against a God is is not supposed to believe in.” Wood links arms with Ivan Karamazov, whose “Rebellion” speech in The Brothers Karamazov made famous this sort of anti-theodicy, in declaring war on any redemption that would seek to justify the senseless suffering of children.

In a recent interview, Dr. Hart, author of The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?, remarked, “The pathos of [Ivan’s] protest is…exquisitely Christian.” For Ivan, and–Hart contends–for every Christian, “the suffering of children is an infinite scandal, and his conscience could never allow it to sink to the level of some provisional passage through darkness on the way to some radiant future.”

Rather, Hart insists, “The gospel of the ancient church was always one of rebellion against those powers — death chief among them — that enslave and torment creation; nowhere does the New Testament rationalize evil or accord it necessity.”

The truly Christian view, according to Hart, which requires “the eye of charity and a faith in Easter,” is to insist upon the beauty and wonder of creation, to shout obstinately in the face of suffering and death: “Where is your victory? Where is your sting?” If Hart is correct, then perhaps many Christians ought to fortify their theology with heavy doses of Wood’s outrage, that they might learn to speak, not of God’s justifying evil, but of His conquering it.

What were you doing Saturday night? I was laid out on the floor of a restaurant lady’s room, yellow as a plastic kidney-shaped sputum cup and with a heart rate of 32 beats per minute. The EMTs and ER staff efficiently performed various functions on my body and handed me a “Final Diagnosis” of “vasovagal syncope” — which is more of a description than an explanation.

The whole illness lasted about an hour. It was all good. I know that I will have more compassion toward sick people from now on, having stored up in my heart how it felt to be stupid and helpless and humbled with illness, and what words and gestures ministered to me then.

Also, I gained insight into suffering from an eternal perspective, which helps considerably with my protracted philosophical wranglings about “the problem of evil”:

Did you mark how naturally — as if he’d been born for it — the Earthborn vermin entered the new life? How all his doubts became, in the twinkling of an eye, ridiculous? I know what the creature was saying to itself! ‘Yes. Of course. It always was like this. All horrors have followed the same course, getting worse and worse and forcing you into a kind of bottleneck till, at the very moment when you thought you must be crushed, behold! You were out of the narrows and all was suddenly well. The extraction hurt more and more and then the tooth was out. The dream became a nightmare and then you woke. You die and die and then you are beyond death. How could I ever have doubted it?’ (The Screwtape Letters, C.S.Lewis)