What Shall We Say? Evil, Suffering, and the Crisis of Faith
Overview
Tsunamis, earthquakes, famines, diseases, wars—these and other devastating forces lead Christians to ask painful questions. Is God all-powerful? Is God good? How can God allow so much innocent human suffering? These questions, taken together, have been called the ‘theodicy problem,’ and in this book Thomas Long explores what preachers can and should say in response. Long reviews the origins and history of the theodicy problem and engages the work of major thinkers who have posed solutions to it. Cautioning pastors not to ignore urgent theodicy-related questions arising from their parishioners, he offers biblically based approaches to preaching on theodicy, guided by Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares and the ‘greatest theodicy text in Scripture’—the book of Job.
Top Highlights
“Susan Neiman claims that Lisbon marks the birth of modernity” (Page 16)
“More recently, though, theodicy has come to have a somewhat different meaning, one that is less about putting God on trial and more about putting our faith to the test.” (Page xii)
“Maybe so, but for many intellectually alert Christians today, the theodicy problem poses a deep challenge to their faith” (Page xiii)
“Preachers do not preach because the sermon is finished; they preach because it is Sunday. The time has come” (Page 114)
“it is instead about who God is and what it means to be human at all when God is understood truly to be God” (Page 96)
- Title: What Shall We Say? Evil, Suffering, and the Crisis of Faith
- Author: Thomas G. Long
- Publisher: Eerdmans
- Print Publication Date: 2013
- Logos Release Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- Subjects: Theodicy; Doctrinal preaching
- ISBNs: 9780802871398, 0802871399, 1467440523, 9781467440523
- Resource ID: LLS:WHTSHLLWSY
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2023-01-03T03:45:03Z