It wasn’t long after the current crisis in Haiti broke that I was sent the following YouTube clip of Pat Robertson ascribing the devastation of Haiti to the work of the devil, indeed a pact of the devil (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59NCduEhkBM). Cue usual snorts of derision from non-Christians (and many Christians no doubt too), and cue usual despair that the rather more sophisticated — it’s not hard to be rather more sophisticated — apologists are not given the same airtime.
Then there was also the link I was sent of some former evangelical professor who seemed to suggest that the ‘clever ones’ (or some such phrase) offering an attempted theodicy would be trying to so do by saying it was all a ‘mystery’.
The best we can do?
I’ve no doubt at some level it is a mystery, in some sense; after all Job is not given an answer for all his suffering (talk about a ‘pact with the devil’), but simply presented with the awesome God and brought to his knees in worship. That is an answer of a sort, but, in an intellectual, philosophical sense (rather than a strict New Testament theological sense), it could be fitted within some broad category of a mystery. But when someone says it’s more clever to say it’s simply a ‘mystery’, they seem to be suggesting that the best — and it’s not very good — that Christians can do in face of such devastation is to throw up our hands and say, ‘Who knows? We certainly don’t. Let’s hope God does’.
