Editor’s Note – Job’s Lament
By Cameron D. Kirk-Giannini“[God] destroys both the blameless and the wicked. When disaster brings sudden death,
he mocks at the calamity of the innocent. The earth is given into the hand of the wicked;
he covers the faces of its judges — if it is not he, who then is it?”
Job 9: 22-24 (English Standard Version)
Our finitude is palpable. We see it in the mangled bodies of victims of war and natural disaster; we smell it in the acid-sweet stench of sickness and the stuffiness of declining years. We experience it firsthand in our own foolishness and immorality and in the mistakes of the ones we love. We are born into it, and we die of it. It colors every day of our lives, the dim glass through which we view our world.
Moreover, the horrors we encounter in our finite existences seem indiscriminately distributed. The righteous suffer while the evil slip away unscathed. Wealth wrongfully acquired brings countless advantages, but virtue counts for little to the poor. Not even after years of waiting are we sure to get our just deserts. And yet God, we say, is omnipotent, omniscient, and good.
Thus Job’s lament: Why, God? Why, if you are good, do you permit such horrors? Our theme for this issue is the question — Where is God? How do we reconcile the pervasiveness of evil with the Christian conception of a powerful and benevolent Deity? How do we understand the Bible’s insistence that God has commanded the deaths of entire nations, including civilians? Can a loving God truly be behind such stories? Or do these considerations count as evidence against Christian faith?
We certainly cannot hope to settle these questions within a single issue of The Ichthus. But we are confident that in the pages that follow, we have gathered together a collection of writings that can offer both believers and non-believers an invaluable entrée into the ideas employed and positions defended by Christian thinkers in today’s academy. We are especially pleased to feature contributions by celebrated Notre Dame philosopher Peter van Inwagen and Harvard’s own Tyler VanderWeele, a biostatistician and member of the faculty of the School of Public Health. Both offer timely additions to Christian scholarship at Harvard and elsewhere.
I invite you to join us in our corporate reflection and discussion of these important and difficult issues. We sincerely hope that God will reveal to us His truth and character, so that we may see clearly for the sake of the Church and the world. But even if philosophical clarity is not forthcoming, we will still rejoice in the opportunity to proclaim God’s final answer to the evils of this world, which is Christ in us, the hope of glory.
Many blessings now and in months to come,
Cameron D. Kirk-Giannini Editor-in-Chief
