HistoricalChristian.Faith

Protest and anti-theodicy — is refusing to justify God a defensible theological stance?

Type: argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — the position that a believer may (or must) decline theodicy altogether — refusing to justify God, and instead lamenting, protesting, or even arraigning Him — is coherent and has deep biblical warrant in its modest form (the lament tradition; the refusal of glib, victim-silencing explanation), and is genuinely strong there. But its strong forms — John K. Roth’s positive “theodicy of protest,” which convicts a less-than-good God, and the blanket claim that all theodicy is morally illegitimate — are unstable: protest presupposes the very goodness it withholds, and a total ban on theodicy is itself a covert theology. Strong in the pastoral and biblical register, contested in the systematic; no clear winner. · advanced by John K. Roth (“A Theodicy of Protest,” 1981), the post-Holocaust theologians Richard Rubenstein and Elie Wiesel, and the philosophical anti-theodicists Kenneth Surin, Terrence Tilley, and D. Z. Phillips; its literary archetype is Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov

See also: the modern-debate survey, which records the protest strand it here weighs; the biblical book of Job, whose whirlwind speeches give Job no reason for his suffering — the Scripture the anti-theodicist reads as refusing theodicy; the skeptical-theist reply to Rowe, which shares the premise that God’s reasons lie beyond us but draws the opposite conclusion (be silent and trust, rather than protest); and the constructive greater-good and soul-making theodicies this position declines — whose instrumentalizing of one person’s agony is exactly what the moral critique of theodicy targets.

The claim

Every other page in this doctrine’s “Arguments” section weighs an answer to the problem of evil. This one weighs the refusal of answers. The anti-theodicist holds that the whole project of theodicy — searching out the morally sufficient reason a good, omnipotent God might have for permitting evil — should be abandoned, and not merely because the particular theodicies have failed, but because the enterprise itself is theologically and morally the wrong response to suffering. In its place stand two related postures: lament — the biblical cry of complaint that does not explain but protests — and, at its sharpest, protest, which arraigns God rather than acquitting Him and holds the complaint of Job permanently open.

The literary archetype is Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, who — heaping up the tortures of children — will not accept a final harmony bought at that price: “It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.”¹ Ivan does not deny God; he refuses to justify Him. That is the anti-theodical move in miniature, and after Auschwitz it hardened from a novelist’s speech into theology.

Its most developed positive form is John K. Roth’s. Roth calls his own position “a theodicy of protest,” conceding it is “as much an antitheodicy” as a theodicy: it does not excuse God’s injustices or argue that they are not really injustices, but insists on calling them out. Where the free-will and soul-making answers begin by clearing God of blame, Roth begins by fixing it on Him:

Everything hinges on the proposition that God possesses — but fails to use well enough — the power to intervene decisively at any moment to make history’s course less wasteful. Thus, in spite and because of his sovereignty, this God is everlastingly guilty and the degrees run from gross negligence to mass murder.

— John K. Roth, “A Theodicy of Protest” (1981).² The right response, on this view, is neither the theologian’s exculpation nor the atheist’s departure but sustained complaint: “Questions should be raised; answers should be sought. Promises should be fulfilled; the guilty should stand accused!” The adjudicable sub-claim, then: is refusing theodicy — declining to justify God, and lamenting or arraigning Him instead — itself a coherent and defensible theological stance?

Who advances it

The stance runs in two streams that meet. The first is the post-Holocaust theology of protest. Richard Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz (1966) argued that the death camps had made the traditional God of history — the covenant God who acts in Israel’s affairs — unbelievable, since “to posit a just and omnipotent God covenanted to Israel and active in its affairs could only mean that God justly willed the murder of six million Jewish people”; Rubenstein drew the radical conclusion and spoke of the death of that God.³ Elie Wiesel’s Night dramatizes the same crisis without systematizing it: watching the SS hang a child too light to die quickly, Wiesel hears a man ask “Where is God now?” and a voice within answer, “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows”; his later Trial of God stages a faith that puts heaven in the dock and receives silence.⁴ John K. Roth gathered this witness into an explicit theological method in “A Theodicy of Protest,” his contribution to Stephen T. Davis’s Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy (1981), set there deliberately alongside the constructive theodicies it rejects.

The second stream is the analytic anti-theodicy of the philosophers of religion, who reject the theodical enterprise chiefly on moral grounds. Kenneth Surin (Theology and the Problem of Evil, 1986) charges the Swinburne–Plantinga–Hick tradition with an Enlightenment reduction of a concrete horror to a “clean and neat” abstraction that loses the sufferer; Terrence Tilley (The Evils of Theodicy, 1991) argues that “engaging in the discourse practice of theodicy creates evil” — it silences the oppressed, distorts the tradition’s own texts, and can end in a theological legitimation of intolerable social evils; and D. Z. Phillips (The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God, 2004), from a Wittgensteinian angle, holds that the very act of weighing a child’s agony as the acceptable “cost” of some greater good is a moral corruption of the believer’s relation to both God and the sufferer.⁵ Nick Trakakis, drawing these thinkers together, defends the thesis that theodical discourse “can only add to the world’s evils, not remove or illuminate them.”⁶

The evidence for

The Bible’s own dominant register before suffering is lament, not theodicy. This is the strongest single point in the position’s favour, and it is a properly Christian one. Scripture confronts undeserved suffering far more often by complaint than by explanation: the psalms of lament (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”) and the imprecatory psalms, Lamentations, Habakkuk’s “how long?”, Jeremiah’s confessions, and above all Job, who charges God to His face and is vindicated for having “spoken of me the thing that is right” over against the friends who defended God with tidy theodicies. And when God finally answers Job from the whirlwind, He gives no reason for the suffering at all — only His own majesty and the limits of Job’s frame.⁷ On this reading the refusal to construct a justifying reason is not sub-biblical; it may be more biblical than the theodicies, which stand uncomfortably close to the friends Job’s God rebukes.

The moral critique of theodicy has real force against real theodicies. The charge is not merely that theodicies fail but that succeeding at theodicy would itself be corrupt: to show that a child’s torture was “necessary” to an outweighing good is to make oneself its retrospective apologist. This is the same worry the soul-making theodicy meets as the instrumentalization objection — that it uses one person’s agony as raw material for another’s growth — generalized into a warning about the whole genre. Where a theodicy explains suffering it risks explaining it away, dulling the outrage that ought to drive its relief; anti-theodicists press that treating all suffering as justified “would prevent, or at least reduce the likelihood of” the effort to end it.

Protest keeps the relationship the theodicies risk trading for a system. Roth’s move is not atheism: one protests to God, and only a covenant partner can be arraigned. His theodicy of protest “must reckon with despair” yet refuses to settle for it, coupling the accusation with a summons to “do battle against forces that are loose in the world because God permits them” — to reduce evil’s waste rather than to rationalize it. The stance claims, plausibly, to be more honest to the sufferer than a premature answer and more faithful than a silence that mistakes itself for peace.

Adversarial assessment

Protest presupposes the goodness it withholds. The deepest problem is that the arraignment is parasitic on what it denies. To convict God of injustice one must hold Him to a standard of goodness and to promises He is bound to keep — but that is precisely the covenant faithfulness the protest is contesting. If God is genuinely not good, there is no injustice to protest and no promise breached; if He is good, the protest has conceded the premise a theodicy works from. Roth’s own resolution — a God who is “everlastingly guilty,” possessed of full power but deficient in benevolence — does not so much refuse theodicy as quietly answer the problem by revising the God: it trades the classical omnibenevolent deity for a morally ambivalent one. That is a substantive (and minority) doctrine of God, not the mere declining of one — and it inherits the standing objection that if God really is less than good, it is unclear why protest should expect, or accomplish, anything better.

“Refusing to answer” is often a covert answer. The claim that theodicy is immoral is itself a normative thesis resting on a view of God, suffering, and what the believer owes the sufferer — a meta-level theology, not the absence of one. And the biblical anchor cuts less cleanly than advertised: Job receives no propositional reason, but he does receive God’s self-disclosure and restoration, and the whirlwind’s reply — that the divine wisdom exceeds Job’s survey — is nearer to skeptical theism than to protest. The New Testament, further, does not leave the problem in bare protest but sets against it the cross and resurrection as its decisive response. Pressed to a pure refusal with no eschatological hope, protest drifts toward Rubenstein’s death-of-God — which is not a stance within Christian theism but its abandonment.

The moral critique overreaches as a blanket ban. It is strong against glib, totalizing theodicies that presume to name the reason for a given horror; it is weak against a defense, which claims no such knowledge, and against theodicies offered in the epistemically humble mode of skeptical theism, which decline to specify the good at all. Nor does explaining that suffering can be redeemed entail approving it or slackening the fight against it — the same tradition that says God brings good out of evil calls evil evil and commands its relief. Much of the critique’s force, critics note, comes from conflating the theoretical problem (are God and evil compatible?) with the pastoral one (how does a sufferer live with evil?); once these are distinguished, lament and theodicy answer different questions and need not compete.⁸

What holds, and how far. As a pastoral posture — that lament, not premature or totalizing explanation, is the fitting first word before a concrete horror, and that a “successful” theodicy which silences the victim has failed morally even if it succeeds logically — the position is not only defensible but salutary, and it corrects a real vice of the analytic literature. As a systematic stance — that the believer must refuse theodicy as such, or must arraign a guilty God — it is unstable, because it either presupposes the goodness it protests or smuggles in a revised theism under cover of declining to theologize.

Assessment

Contested. The refusal of theodicy is genuinely strong in one register and genuinely strained in another, and the two do not resolve into a clear verdict. In its modest form — the recovery of the biblical lament tradition (Job, the psalms, Lamentations), and the moral warning that a victim-silencing, evil-explaining theodicy can “add to the world’s evils” even when its logic is valid — it is coherent, deeply scriptural, and a needed corrective; the book of Job, whose God rebukes the friends’ tidy defenses and answers from the whirlwind with no reason at all, is a formidable proof-text. In its strong forms — Roth’s positive “theodicy of protest,” which convicts an “everlastingly guilty” God, and the blanket thesis that all theodicy is morally illegitimate — it is contested to the point of instability: protest is parasitic on the very divine goodness it withholds, a total refusal to answer is itself a covert theology, and the sharpest versions either revise the classical God into a morally ambivalent one or slide toward the death-of-God that leaves theism behind. Strong as a pastoral and biblical corrective, contested as a self-standing systematic position — an honest witness, recorded on the timeline, that for some the problem of evil is not solved but survived, and rated here as the live dispute it is.

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