Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute! I thought “the most globally-minded, diversity-appreciating Christians” were supposed to be us Unitarians. And Unitarians always were “outside the strictly God-in-Christ framework”.

I’m not aware what thoughts the old-fashioned Unitarians may have had on theodicity. However, Charles Hartshorne was a UU, and I’ve seen discussions of theodicy based in a process-theology paradigm of a God who is less than omnipotent that don’t particularly involve Christology one way or the other.

If, instead, we relinquish our own infallibility, then we humbly present ourselves, as well as accepting others, as finite yet loving creatures trying to understand and be in relationship with an infinite and overwhelming love.

As for theodicy, I understand many of the things people say about its problems as expressions of feeling, but I have great difficulty in seeing what are presented as unescapable, watertight arguments posing The Dilemma as very water-tight….

I was very uncomfortable that several members of the colloquy preferred to define theodicy as “God’s justice.” I know that by that they meant no harm, but it still offended my spirit and Jewish memory.

I have to disagree with you that many of the world’s peoples understand the presence of evil as a “necessary” pre-condition without which human free will would not be possible. I think that’s a very Western idea and would be completely nonsensical to lots of indigenous peoples, not to mention Hindus.

I wish you had been at the colloquy. We could have talked for days about this.

I assume by “their” you mean non-Christians, not Christians.

I think you’re focusing too much on what a certain type of Protestant scornfully calls “the traditions of men” rather than the unconditionality and universal availablitity of grace. Just about any sincere, devout Christian would tell you that the power of grace, around which Christian theodicy revolves, belongs not to Christians or their tarnished history or institutions, but only to God. Universalists in particular would say that “accepting Christ” or any other such formula is not a condition to being open to grace or being transformed by grace, even though from a Christian frame of reference Christ is the means of grace.

All religious language is in a sense figurative. It only makes sense within a specific figurative frame of reference. But the underlying meaning to which the figures of speech point can remain true beyond the narrow frame of reference of the specific language. I think the willingness of UUs to explore and integrate religious language and religious understanding from outside our Christian origins, and our widely shared sense that the deepest truths of the world’s great religions are the ones that appear in all of them, are a strong testimony to the broader applicability of even very narrowly framed Christian teachings.

If when you say that Christian theodicy can’t “work” for non-Christians without their invitation, you mean that the specifically Christian vocabulary and frame of reference doesn’t necessarily make sense to others, okay, I can see that. But theodicy does not attempt to explain why Christians have in the past acted evilly toward non-Christians, it attempts to explain why evil exists and is always present. If you mean non-Christians can’t or don’t recognize the existence of evil as a necessary condition without which the human conscience cannot choose good instead, I have a harder time seeing that. Non-Christians (Stoics and Buddhists are examples that come quickly to mind) may express the idea in different figures and words, but all the fingers seem to me to point to the same moon.

Is it perhaps the case that what you’re really struggling with is whether some Christians’ exclusivist premise that Christianity is the One True Faith, and/or the evils that Christians have committed in defense of that permise, conflict with the more universalist sympathies of recent inquirers into theodicy?

I think of all the centuries of exiled and murdered Jews and Muslims being told in Eternity that their sufferings have been explained by earnest Christians. I imagine the great roar of laughter that would go up from the heavens.

An evangelical pastor of my acquaintance, with pronounced universalist leanings, named (of all the possibilities, wouldn’t you know) Rev. Vikki, says of Christ’s work on behalf of those who aren’t in any way Christian: “What matters is not that we know his name, but that he knows ours.” If you draw her out, she’ll usually back it up with quotes from the Book of Jonah about God’s mercy toward the Ninevites.

Not sure that I would frame it the same way as she does, but from her POV it works. I think from a non-Christian POV it works too, at least if you stipulate the identity underlying differing apprehensions of the divine essence. And I think it’s perfectly consistent with what was the traditional theology of the Universalist half of our house.

I hope your conference will be fodder for further posts. I took a theodicy seminar in div school that was very disappointing on an academic level, but has been very fruitful personally for reasons too complicated to explain here.