Constructing Meaning in the Face of Suffering: Theodicy in Lamentations

Abstract

Suffering is an age old problem. The experience of suffering brings disjunction and discordance, and in the existential crisis which follows severe suffering, human beings -both individually and in community -struggle to construct meaning.For communities which adhere to ethical monotheism, the struggle to construct meaning in light of suffering is an urgent task given the belief in a benevolent and loving God. Suffering raises questions about the nature of God, and God's relationship to evil. The quest to justify God in the face of suffering is the task of theodicy. Driving this quest are three central tenets; "the belief in God's goodness, the belief in his power" and "the belief in the real occurrence of suffering." 1 The book of Lamentations represents one example of a community's struggle to construct meaning in the face the severe suffering which followed the destruction of Jerusalem in 587/6 BCE. Within these poems we hear the cries of the suffering community, a suffering which encompasses not only physical pain and distress, but also a loss of coherence and the collapse of the very traditions which helped to form community identity. The Temple had been destroyed, the political system dismantled and the social fabric of society torn apart. The collapse of meaning echoes the physical ruin of the city.Within this existential crisis the Jerusalem community talks about and addresses God.The poems of Lamentations are profoundly theological; God is spoken of and spoken to. Over and above this, it can also be argued that these poems are also profoundly theodic. Lamentations incorporates speech which explores the relationship of God to the suffering, and while it cannot be argued that the book itself is a theodicy in its own right, it does grapple with theodic issues. In doing so, it not only reflects the present crisis, but proposes, and in turn subverts, possible theodic solutions to this crisis. God which implicitly brings the pain and suffering before God in the hope of response. In this way the poets affirm God's ongoing potency. He also argues for theodic strains being evident in those places where the causality of human sin in the destruction is identified. 8 Dobbs-Allsopp argues, however, that to read Lamentations as theodic is to ultimately misread it, as anti-theodic strains are also evident. This antitheodicy occurs in the refusal "to justify, explain or accept as somehow meaningful the relationship between God and suffering." 9 It is seen in those places where there is a refusal to defend God's actions in the face of the suffering, and in the protest against the very suffering itself. It is also evident in the treatment of sin, which both identifies sin as the cause of God's actions (the theodic element) but also denies any sense of correspondence between sin and the suffering experienced. Renkema's definition, here at least, seems to indicate that to constitute "theodicy" a divinely articulated explanation of the suffering is required. 12 By its very nature, however, this definition precludes finding...

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