A personal theodicy
Consider the following hypothetical scenario:
You are at home one day when you receive an email from an old friend whom you haven’t spoken to in a few months. In it, he tells you that last month his girlfriend was out on a jog when she was hit by a drunk driver. He tells you that she spent several days in and out of painful consciousness at the hospital before finally passing away due to complications from her injuries. He explains that his girlfriend was an amazingly caring person who spent the majority of her free time volunteering at various philanthropic organizations. He can’t understand why God would let something like this happen to someone like that. Anthony finally concludes the email by telling you and that he wants nothing to do with a God that would stand by and do nothing while his girlfriend suffered the way she did just because some idiot chose to drive drunk.
Your task is twofold:
The Response:
Provide a 300-word response to Anthony’s email offering comfort to him in his suffering. In it, you will need to address his concerns from a theological perspective. It is not necessary, however, for you to provide an answer to his concerns in a traditional sense, you may simply address them as you see fit in the context of a comforting letter.
Criteria:
Your response should be written in plain English as any letter would be written.
In it, you should adopt the persona of a friend attempting to comfort Anthony in this time of suffering
You will also need to provide a response to Anthony’s concerns in plain English. Do not try and provide complex or weighty answers and stick only to what can be appropriately referenced in conversational English. But you MUST be mindful of what you say so as not to initiate or encourage a train of thought that might lead to a dangerous theodicy.
Your Response should be at least 300 words, 12 pt. Font, Times New Roman, it should NOT be double space because you would not double space a letter.
Explanatory Footnotes:
In writing your response to Anthony you should have drawn on several deeper and more complex theological concepts that we have discussed in this course. However, because your response to Anthony was written in plain English you should not have spent time downplaying his pain by offering a series of nuanced theological concepts. You will, therefore, need to demonstrate your understanding of the nuanced theological concepts through the use of explanatory footnotes.
Criteria:
These footnotes should not be written as if Anthony would be reading them. They exist solely to defend the more complex theological underpinnings behind the plain English claims you made in the response itself.
You must have at least 6of these explanatory footnotes
These footnotes should:
Correspond directly to a claim mentioned in your response to Anthony. Do not merely recount theological ideas that are not related to the conversation.
Demonstrate your understanding of the theodicy and god and evil.
You will likely need to draw on material from the wider course, not simply from this unit.
Explain your theological reasoning behind the comments you just made to Anthony in your response.
Footnotes can include scripture passages where appropriate.
Your footnotes should be at least 300 words, Chicago Style Format, single-spaced, 10 pt. Font, Times New Roman
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