In the past couple of weeks, our community has received news of numerous tragedies. Diagnoses and deaths are troubling, despite our faith in God and in the resurrection of the body. One question comes, almost without fail, in the middle of every tragedy: Why?

The persistence of evil among our belief in a good God is typically framed as the so-called “problem of evil.” When someone proposes a solution to the problem, in theology we call that a “theodicy.” A theodicy is an answer to the question, a way to make sense of a few things we believe: God’s power, God’s goodness, and the tragic.

I want to offer another perspective. Any “solution” to the “problem of evil,” I think, will end up somewhere we do not want to land. This is because if we say that we know the reason for evil’s existence, we are saying that there is, in fact, a place for evil in the good creation of God. It would be to say that evil is indeed part of God’s plan.

For instance, take C. S. Lewis’s illustration from his book The Problem of Pain. For Lewis, pain is pedagogy. He uses the example of a puppy who needs training. Naturally, a dog is smelly and rather impolite; but, by training, washing, and teaching – which can involve pain – the trainer can, therefore, love the dog more fully. The puppies may not appreciate the pain that this training involves, but a well-trained, healthy, clean dog can be more fully loved by its trainer. So, for Lewis, pain is necessary for our development as human beings. Pain and moral disorder are rationally integrated within a cosmic moral order ultimately justified by divine goodness. A solution like this is, at one level, certainly attractive. It offers us an answer to give to those who question the goodness of God, especially among tragedy.

But such an answer is not sufficient. Any solution, including Lewis’s, fails to truly account for the tragic. So much of the tragedy around us simply does not make sense. Real life is far too complicated and messy to fit into neat systems. The tragedies of our world should not be reduced. What if we are simply not capable of giving a reason for evil?

To use a contrary example, our own scriptures offer us plenty of tragedy (the story of Saul, the rape of Dinah, and that particularly horrific narrative of the levite’s concubine in Judges 19, to name a few) that only add to the tension and resisting theological coherence. The Bible does not tell these stories as pieces in a harmonized system; they are told honestly.

By definition, we are limited beings: we are not self-created, and only in this context is our agency found. Therefore, any form of human action, including intellectual capabilities, are also limited to this constraint. Because we have not created this world and its systems, why should we assume that we have the capability of comprehension and systemization? We should acknowledge our limits and thus avoid cheap justification. Lewis wanted to harmonize tensions between the goodness of God and the existence of evil through reason. But any critical thought which has got everything ironed out – all of the world's most complicated problems solved – is not honest, but illusory; they truncate and reduce the irredeemable features of so much of our suffering. It seems to me that we have the option to avoid the cost of theodicy. Faith must live with tragic tension – occupy it and face it – and not resolve it.

So when we discover that members of our communities are in the middle of the most demanding and direful experiences of their lives, the Christian response is not to harmonize tensions in the language of platitudes (“God has gained another angel”), but to witness to the presence of Christ in the middle of tragedy. In our darkest moments, Christ is closest. In a diagnosis, death, or disaster, Christ is there and grieves with us. He does not offer an explanation, but a promise: “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.”