An Indepth Consideration of Theodicy

I ended up taking a difficult (all right, nutty) parishioner to a Christian healing centre as our conversations have become completely pointless. The centre is Charismatic in style but at least Anglican in authority and form. He, thankfully, found it peaceful and welcoming, while I loathed the entire experience, very, very quietly. You feel a rat hating what everyone else seems to be getting so much out of. The trouble is that I can't help disagreeing with nearly everything I hear.

We started with a long and to me completely unaffecting service. First one of the volunteers shared some of the 'words from the Lord' they'd received while praying before the service: she'd seen a vision of Jesus with his sweat dripping down on the congregation here. I trust this wasn't an impression seen in the mind's eye but a real, pulsating, genuine, vision seen with the natural sight, otherwise you wouldn't use the word, would you? Then there was the chaplain's homily.'Do you remember how great it was when you accepted the Lord Jesus?' she said. Actually, I do remember, and it was bloody awful. Oddly enough, she clearly thinks a great deal of CS Lewis, as people often do, and as I recall his conversion was bloody awful as well. But no, we all think the same way and go through the same experiences, don't we. 'God is always with us through our sorrows. Isn't that a wonderful comfort?' Well, oddly enough when I'm actually suffering I don't give a toss whether God is with me or not, and his presence, whatever it is, makes not a stuff of difference. Worse, if I think he's actually causing the pain I am tempted to tell him he can take this sort of 'love' and eternally swivel on it. I can live without God's presence, I want the pain to stop, thank you. I know it's more complicated than that - but that's what it is, complicated.

As my parishioner was having his consultation I was sat in the lounge trying to do some work while three of the volunteers or regulars were chatting opposite me. The conversation went along these lines:

A: Do you know why Haslam wasn't bombed during the War?
B: They were praying in the churches.
A: Well, yes, I expect so, but it's more than that. There's a water tower there that the Germans had decided they were going to use when they invaded, and that's why the area wasn't bombed. God put that idea in the Germans' minds.
B: And God inspired the architect to build it there in the first place.
A: Exactly.

At this stage I was thinking a) what was God bloody well playing at regarding Coventry then and b) how much more convenient it might have been had God put it into the Germans' minds not to invade Poland in the first place.

I don't know why this kind of stuff gets under my skin so badly. I know it represents an insane way of thinking about the world, because it undermines any process of rational cause and effect: it's basically a sort of nihilism, because it removes rational causes for events and predictability and replaces them with a single, sovereign and inscrutable Will which we cannot read or understand. Try and work it out consistently, and it's the high road to madness. It's also authoritarian because it places so much power on those who interpret and communicate the will of God. Say 'God has told me' and it puts the matter beyond debate and scrutiny. If this is Christianity, I want out. I know all this, and reject it, but I can't work out a way of accommodating this sort of worldview within the way I think myself. I don't understand it, don't know how it arises.

I told our Evangelical curate about this and she shared her own experiences. She and her husband once went to speak at a Christian event and got late-night messages shoved under their door from the team leaders saying they hadn't yet contributed any 'words from the Lord' and they should pray to discover why the Holy Spirit wasn't talking to them. At another church she described as 'rational Charismatic' the ministry team would indeed pray together and note their thoughts and impressions, but exercised a certain scepticism about them. They'd write down whatever came out of the meetings and review them a few weeks later to see what sense, if any, they made; they didn't simply assume that the random chaos of the mind were messages from the divine. I've got no problems with that: it permits the human mind, and creation itself, some autonomy as well as allowing God in. It has an element of discussion, scrutiny, and reason. It isn't mad.