If you have ever watched the evening news, walked through the halls of a children’s hospital, or simply lived long enough to experience profound personal loss, you have inevitably crashed into the most difficult question in human history: Why?

If there is a God, why is the world so deeply, agonizingly broken?

For centuries, philosophers and theologians have attempted to answer this question by writing what is known as a theodicy. Coined in 1710 by the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the word combines two ancient Greek terms: theos (meaning “God”) and dikē (meaning “justice”). Simply put, a theodicy is an attempt to defend the justice, goodness, and power of God in the face of overwhelming human suffering.

To understand why this is so difficult, we have to look at the philosophical trap known as the “Problem of Evil.”

The Logical Trilemma

The Problem of Evil is often framed as a logical triangle, sometimes called the Epicurean paradox. It asserts that there are three statements about the universe, but only two of them can logically be true at the same time:

1. God is all-powerful: He has the ability to stop evil and suffering.
2. God is all-good: He has the desire to stop evil and suffering.
3. Evil and suffering exist.

If you believe God is all-powerful but suffering still exists, perhaps He is not entirely good. If you believe God is all-good and wants to stop suffering, but suffering still exists, perhaps He is not actually all-powerful. If you firmly hold that God is both all-powerful and all-good, then you must somehow explain the overwhelming reality of pain.

A theodicy is the intellectual and spiritual framework that tries to hold all three of those corners together without the triangle collapsing.

The Myth of the Single Answer

When modern readers open the Bible to look for answers to the Problem of Evil, they usually expect to find a single, unified theodicy. We treat the Bible like a modern instruction manual, assuming that because it is bound between two leather covers, it speaks with only one voice.

But from a historical-critical perspective, the Bible is not a single book written by a single author. It is a vast, ancient library written over the course of a millennium by priests, prophets, kings, and peasants. And because these authors lived through vastly different historical traumas—from the brutal conquest of Canaan to the devastating Babylonian Exile, to the crushing oppression of the Roman Empire—they did not all answer the question of suffering in the exact same way.

When we strip away our modern assumptions and read the ancient texts on their own terms, we discover that the Bible actually offers several different, sometimes conflicting, theodicies.

In the upcoming articles in this series, we will explore the five primary “solutions” to suffering found within the biblical library:

• The Retributive Theodicy: We suffer because we broke the rules.
• The Educative Theodicy: We suffer because God is testing and growing us.
• The Inscrutable Sovereignty Theodicy: We suffer, and God’s reasons are completely beyond our comprehension.
• The Apocalyptic Theodicy: We suffer because the world is currently ruled by dark forces, but God will eventually conquer them.
• The Redemptive Theodicy: We suffer, and God suffers with us to redeem the pain.

The biblical writers did not shy away from the brutal realities of the world. They stared into the abyss of human pain and dared to ask God to explain Himself. By understanding the different ways they wrestled with the Problem of Evil, we can begin to see the Bible not as a flat book of simple answers, but as an ancient, ongoing conversation that we are invited to join.

Crash Course

This video of CrashCourse on Youtube gives a basic explanation of the problems