Chris

Your point is perfectly correct- the issue of God's inaction in the world does not just arise with acts of great evil. To put it another way, if God can intervene in the world to do anything it would be thoughtless if he does not relieve me of my flu symptoms; and monstrous if he does not prevent Auschwitz.

Some people, when confronted with God’s apparent inaction in face of the suffering of the world give up believing in God- thus John Humphrys last year in a radio 4 interview with Rowan Williams

I'm inviting {you} to convert me, to persuade me if you like that God does in fact exist. I believed that once, but for nearly fifty years I've been a journalist and I've seen perhaps too much suffering, too many children dying, too much wanton savagery to continue to believe it. A God of mercy, any God, seems out of the question.

John Humphrys’ reason for not believing in God does not seem very genuine to me. If the victims of the "wanton savagery" gave it as a reason for non belief then I could accept it, but not from a man responding to his sensitive conscience.

A traditional biblical explanation of the horrible things that happen is that they are God’s punishment for disobedience or sin. This has an echo in your post (Auschwitz can also be seen, tragically, as a ghastly example of ‘the wages of sin is death’ or of ‘sin, full grown, leads to death’) and also in Andrew’s view that the AD 70 destruction of Jerusalem is God’s judgement on Israel. This will not do for me. I find it very difficult, in fact impossible, to accept that Auschwitz is the due recompense for sin on the part of an individual or group.

Your suggestion that we approach “theodicy …. as an unfinished issue of mission”, a failure in humanity’s stewardship of the earth entrusted to it in the Garden of Eden is an interesting one and well worth exploring. This idea has application to an issue like global warming but I do not think you could understand Auschwitz as a failure of stewardship- there is something very much darker involved.

As I said in a comment to Andrew, there seem to me to be two broad sorts of problems with the intervention of God in earthly affairs.

The first problem is about what God has done in history: how are we to make sense of the bellicose and vengeful God who so often appears in the Old Testament and of whom there is an echo in the New Testament?

The second problem is about what God has not done. Why, if God has the power to intervene in our earthly affairs, has he stood idly by while people have had to endure the most appalling suffering?

One possible answer to the second question is to say that God is unable to intervene in the world. There are ways of doing this which leaves God’s status as God intact (eg DZ Phillips’ recent book on God and Evil) but they all presuppose that God is a God not of power but of weakness. This poses very serious questions about the God reported in the Bible, especially the OT. In my case it makes me wonder how I can continue to revere a large part of those writings as coming from God.

 Paul