► Listen on Amazon
► Listen on Apple
► Listen on Spotify
► Listen on YouTube
You can find previous episodes of “The Stone Chapel Podcast” at Lanier Theological Library.
“The Stone Chapel Podcast” is part of the ChurchLeaders Podcast Network.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
Jahdiel Perez
Hey everybody. My name is Jahdiel Perez, and I’m an Assistant Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Villanova University in Pennsylvania.
David Capes
Jahdiel, welcome to The Stone Chapel Podcast. Great to see you again.
Jahdiel Perez
Great to see you too. Thanks for having me.
David Capes
Oh, this is a delight. I was deeply impressed by your presentation here, and we’ll say more about that in a few minutes. But for those who don’t know Jahdiel Perez, who are you?
Jahdiel Perez
I’m a Guatemalan and Puerto Rican pastor’s kid that grew up in Boston. I wanted nothing to do with school. I hated school with a passion. When I was about 19 years old, I had this encounter with the writings of C. S. Lewis, and it completely changed my life. I felt like God was waking me up and inviting me to play this really intriguing game with him that I later learned was called philosophy, theology, apologetics.
And after that moment, I just wanted to spend my life wrestling with the some of the most important questions that we can ask as human beings. And then God opened the doors to study theology at Harvard and to get my doctoral degree at Oxford University. Now in this latest stage I’ve taken up a position of Humanities and Sciences at Villanova. So, it’s just a pleasure to be with you
David Capes
Well, having watched you teach when you were at the Lanier Theological Library, I can tell your students are very fortunate to have you, because you’re very clear. You know where you want to go with a lecture. You were here for part of a conference that we did with Amy Orr Ewing entitled “C.S. Lewis and the Problem of Pain.” You did a lecture to a smaller group of people who were gathered here for the Lanier Certificate in Theology and Ministry. You did a talk and called it “C.S. Lewis Among Contemporary Theologians.” I have retitled it “Theodicy versus Anti-theodicy.” In a sense, you pit the two against each other. Let’s just get into the definitions. First of all, you start by defining horrendous evil. We all sort of know the idea of evil, but what do you mean by a horrendous evil?
Jahdiel Perez
Horrendous evil is this idea that this philosopher, Marilyn McCord Adams, introduced in 1990 and the idea was that when we talk about how God relates to suffering, we’re not talking about just ordinary suffering. We’re not talking about the kind of suffering where you have a cavity or a headache. What Adams wanted to do was to distinguish those kinds of suffering where you can point them to a greater good. Like, if you go to the dentist, it’s for health, right? The pain that you feel at the gym is for health as well. There are ways you can easily think about a good reason for suffering.
Horrendous evil is this category of evil where it’s almost impossible to try to find or imagine a good reason why somebody could suffer like that. And she defines it as life-ruining evil. It’s a kind of suffering where you question that your life could ever be meaningful again, or that anything good could compensate for that evil. So that’s basically how she defined the category. And ever since this has been the main term that philosophers and theologians have been debating over. So now we’re not talking about evil anymore. We’re talking about horrendous evil.
David Capes
One of the ways that that philosophers and theologians deal with that is through an idea that you find in philosophy and theology. Theodicy is the key term. When you say theodicy, what do you mean by that?
Jahdiel Perez
There’s a few ways to define theodicy. It comes from these two terms, Theos and Dike, which means God and justice. I’m defending the justice of God, the nature of God in the face of suffering. So there’s this obvious tension between the magnitude of suffering and the goodness of God, right? And maybe you’ve heard of the problem of evil. The idea that, if God is all good and all powerful and morally perfect, how can he allow so much suffering? So theodicy, simply put, is a response to the problem of evil. It tries to defend the nature of God in the face of suffering.
There’s two ways to think about theodicy. One is primarily in terms of truth. I’m searching for the truth about God in the midst of suffering. Another way is, I’m searching for meaning that God can give to my suffering. Those are two different ways that the discussion goes. Some philosophers will want to debate, is theodicy true? Others will want to say, is it helpful? Does it give suffering meaning that allows us to experience it and cope better with suffering?
David Capes
I guess it’s probably the perfect answer, if you find that it is both true and it helps you discover meaning. But now there’s this movement that is called anti-theodicy. What is anti-theodicy?
Jahdiel Perez
This movement really picked up steam in the middle of the past century, during the world wars, from all the carnage and all the unprecedented suffering and terror that that we experienced together. There’s a book called God after Auschwitz, and it says that you can’t look at God the same way. Before we used to imagine evil as something horrendous, but now, after two world wars, after all the carnage of the 20th century, now that it means something so much more, something so much deeper. It’s almost like we share this collective trauma that makes us look at God differently.
So anti-theodicy wants to say this, there is no meaningful relationship between God and horrendous suffering. Their main thesis is this, that horrendous suffering is inherently meaningless, and there’s no way to redeem it. There’s no way to find meaning in it, to justify it, that the most appropriate moral response as a community and as individuals, is to reject the Theodicy. That doesn’t mean we reject God.
It just means we reject the attempt to reconcile God with suffering. They think this is not helpful. They think there are philosophical problems with it, but the big impetus behind anti-theodicy is morality. They think it’s evil to try to impose a kind of God-given meaning to suffering if the people suffering don’t accept it. We used to think this was valid, but after the 20th century, there’s no way we can keep doing this. It’s irresponsible and sometimes harmful.
David Capes
That’s the idea that came across very carefully in your presentation here, that theodicy they claim, harms people. That people are harmed further by attempting to find this meaning and reconcile God with that suffering. You cite a number of people and let me just include two, because I know both. I’ve met both of John Swinton and Rowan Williams, and here’s a statement by Williams, who was Archbishop of Canterbury.
Perhaps it is time for philosophers to look away from the theodicy. Part of the task of good theology and a candid religious philosophy is, I believe, to reacquaint us with our materiality and mortality, and part of that is the knowledge of suffering as without explanation or compensation. It is more religiously imperative to be worried about evil than to put it into a satisfactory theoretical context.
You talk about how in theodicy, what we do is take a faraway view of it. We look at it in an abstract way, but they look at it theoretically. Comment on Williams’s ideas there.
Jahdiel Perez
I think Rowan Williams has a really intriguing perspective on what makes theology good. Up until the anti-theodicy movement, you just assumed that if you have a theology that doesn’t answer the problem of evil, it’s a bad theology. He’s flipping the script and saying, actually, theology can do its job better, it can draw you closer to God if you don’t respond to the problem of evil, if you affirm anti-theodicy.
The important thing to note here is that anti-theodicy is not just an atheist critique of religion, but actually some theologians, very good theologians like Rowan Williams and John Swinton have said, wait, there’s an insight here that can actually help us do theology and pastoral care even better. Now, personally, as I said in my lecture, I have some questions and comments and some reservations about that, but I do think that they’re hitting onto something important. They’re trying to make us aware that when we talk about God, it has consequences. If we’re not careful, we might actually do harm to people because they’re not at the correct stage of processing their loss. My position is not, oh, they’re just all false. Let’s just throw their ideas away. I think this can serve as a very important corrective to how we do theodicy.
