Editor’s Note: This essay won third place in The Living Church’s student annual essay contest.
The emergency room doctor examining my hand after the kitten bite had no way of knowing he was looking at the first domino in a year that would test everything I thought I knew about God’s providence. What began as a simple failure to wear gloves while handling our rescue kitten would cascade into emergency surgery, missed opportunities, twin tornadoes, repeated COVID infections, shingles affecting my vision, and ultimately spinal surgery that left me writing these words from a recovery bed. Somewhere along the way, friends began calling me Job, half-joking, but with the nervous laughter that accompanies genuine theological discomfort.
When I missed my mother’s memorial service, attending instead via Zoom with a 103-degree temperature while battling my second COVID infection in six weeks, I found myself confronting the question that has haunted Christian theology since its inception: If God is both all-powerful and all-loving, why does his creation suffer? The Book of Job offers one response, but 21st-century theology demands that we engage more critically with both classical frameworks and contemporary challenges to traditional theodicy. Through examining Augustine’s theological foundation, as interpreted by Cynthia Rigby, alongside the liberation theology critique offered by thinkers like James Cone, my year of trials becomes not merely a personal misfortune but a case study in how the Church can hold onto faith while honestly confronting the reality of undeserved suffering.
Augustine’s Architecture: Evil as Privation and the Limits of Human Understanding
As Rigby explores in Holding Faith, Augustine’s approach to theodicy[1] is grounded in several foundational principles that have shaped Christian thought for over 15 centuries. In Augustine’s framework, evil is not a substance created by God but rather a privation, the absence or corruption of good, much as darkness is the absence of light. This elegant solution preserves God’s essential goodness while accounting for the existence of evil in creation. Human suffering often results from the misuse of free will, either ours or that of others, within a creation that stays fundamentally good despite its fallen state.
Applied to my experience, Augustine’s framework initially seems to hold. The kitten bite resulted from my choice not to wear protective gloves, a clear case of poor decision-making leading to consequences. Even the spinal issues that developed over the months could be traced to years of neglecting proper ergonomics and physical care. Augustine would see in this progression the natural consequences of creaturely limitation and poor stewardship of the body God provided.
Yet Augustine’s theodicy becomes more strained when confronted with the randomness that characterized much of my year. The tornadoes that struck our home six weeks apart followed no moral logic. The shingles that attacked my trigeminal nerve, costing me significant vision in my left eye, emerged from a virus that had lain dormant for decades. The timing that caused me to miss both a travel course at Bexley Seabury and my mother’s memorial service suggests either a divine plan so mysterious as to be incomprehensible or a universe where chance plays a larger role than classical theodicy comfortably admits.
Rigby’s reading of Augustine acknowledges these tensions while maintaining that human reason has limits when confronting divine mystery. The theodicy Augustine offers is not primarily an explanation but an invitation to trust in God’s ultimate goodness despite our inability to perceive the whole picture. From this perspective, my friends’ half-serious comparison to Job becomes more than dark humor—it points toward a fundamental Christian posture of faith kept in the face of inexplicable suffering.
Liberation Theology’s Challenge: The Insufficiency of Abstract Consolation
James Cone and other liberation theologians offer a necessary corrective to purely theoretical approaches to suffering. While Augustine’s intellectual framework may satisfy the mind, Cone argues that such abstract theodicy can become a tool of oppression when it encourages passive acceptance of unjust suffering.[2] Liberation theology insists that any adequate theodicy must account not only for individual trials but for systemic evil that crushes entire communities.
Cone’s critique echoes with my experience in unexpected ways. During the months when spinal compression left me unable to stand for more than a few moments, I gained visceral insight into how physical limitation intersects with social vulnerability. As someone who lives with rheumatoid disease, currently in remission, I was already familiar with the dynamics of disability and the ways society structures itself around an assumption of able bodies. My work in disability ministry has taught me that the Church often fails to recognize how architectural barriers, liturgical assumptions, and pastoral responses can exclude those whose bodies function differently.
This year’s flood of medical crises deepened that understanding. Simple tasks became monumental challenges. The assumed mobility that undergirds so much of modern life, and church life, suddenly revealed itself as a privilege I had intermittently owned but never fully appreciated. When well-meaning friends suggested that God was “teaching me something” through my trials, their words echoed the inadequate comfort offered to those facing poverty, discrimination, or violence. More troubling, they reflected the ableist assumption that disability exists primarily to provide lessons for the able-bodied.
The liberation theology perspective demands that we move beyond individual explanations for suffering to examine how communities respond to those who are brought low. During my recovery from spinal surgery, the practical support offered by my church and seminary communities, meal trains, transportation aid, and help with basic tasks became a theological statement more than any theoretical treatise on divine providence. This embodied theology suggested that God’s response to suffering is not explanation but presence, mediated through the Church’s concrete care for its vulnerable members.
Cone’s emphasis on God’s preferential choice for the oppressed takes on new meaning when applied to physical limitation and chronic illness. The God who sides with the poor and marginalized is also the God who meets us in hospital rooms and during sleepless nights of pain. This perspective does not resolve the intellectual puzzle of theodicy but reframes it as a call to faithful action rather than passive acceptance.
Synthesis: Holding Faith in the Face of Mystery
The tension between Augustine’s classical theodicy and liberation theology’s critique cannot be easily resolved, nor should it be. Both perspectives offer essential insights for understanding how faith persists amid suffering. Augustine’s emphasis on divine mystery prevents us from reducing God to human-sized explanations. At the same time, liberation theology’s focus on concrete response ensures that theodicy serves the cause of justice rather than complacency.[3]
This year of trials has taught me, as a Christian, that the question “Why do bad things happen to good people?” may be less important than “How do we remain faithful when bad things happen?” The former seeks explanation; the latter demands transformation. When I attended my mother’s memorial service via Zoom, feverish and isolated, I was taking part in a fundamental Christian practice of keeping a connection to community even when circumstances separate us from standard patterns of gathering.
It is often informally claimed, but not unhelpfully, that the Episcopal Church offers a tripartite engagement with Scripture, tradition, and reason, and that this framework holds sources for our theology in a healthy, creative tension. Scripture provides a narrative, of which the Book of Job is an integrated part. There we find faithful questioning rather than easy answers. Tradition offers the accumulated wisdom of communities that have wrestled with these questions across centuries, even questions emerging from the biblical narrative. Reason, then, acknowledges the intellectual challenges that suffering poses to faith.
My experience has reshaped my understanding of pastoral ministry. When I return to full health and resume normal seminary activities, I will carry with me embodied knowledge of what it means to watch life unfold from a position of physical vulnerability. The theoretical understanding of systematic theology must be complemented by the practical wisdom that comes from having one’s assumptions about divine providence tested by lived experience.
The Job Comparison Revisited
So, are my friends correct in their half-serious comparison to Job? The answer is both yes and no. Like Job, I have experienced a cascade of losses and trials that follows no moral logic. Like Job, I have been confronted with the inadequacy of conventional explanations for suffering. But unlike Job, I live on the far side of the Incarnation, where God’s response to human suffering is not a voice from the whirlwind but the vulnerable presence of Christ on the cross.
The Job comparison fails because Job’s story is about an individual’s encounter with divine mystery, while Christian theodicy must account for God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. The cross does not explain suffering so much as it proves God’s willingness to enter into suffering alongside creation. This changes everything about how we understand both the problem of evil and the nature of faithful response.
My year of trials has not provided me with satisfying answers to the classical questions of theodicy. Instead, it has taught me that faith is less about understanding God’s ways and more about trusting God’s presence. When friends call me Job, they are recognizing something true about the human condition—that suffering comes to the faithful and unfaithful alike, often without apparent reason. But they are also pointing toward something deeper: the possibility of maintaining faith not because suffering makes sense, but because the God revealed in Christ suffers with us and as one of us.
In the end, that is wisdom enough for the Church, for parishes, for both the seminary classroom and the hospital room where faith is tested by fire.
[1] Cynthia Rigby, Holding Faith (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 2018).
[2] Rigby, Holding Faith.
[3] Rigby, Holding Faith.
Denise Rowe-Dollinger is a Guest Writer. This essay won third place in The Living Church's annual student essay competition. Rowe-Dollinger is a student at Bexley Seabury Seminary.
