What is it about?
I wrote this article as a way to engage Pentecostals in dealing with why bad things happen to good people without simple formulas or quaint cliches or excessive Bible quotations. Pentecostals have not dealt adequately with issues related to long-term suffering and why God seems to allow (or even cause) such suffering.
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Why is it important?
What is unique about this essay is its call to Pentecostals to enter the struggle, to seek this elusive and mysterious God despite their disappointments and pain. I believe the Spirit of God can provide wisdom, hope, and even "answers" if only suffering people are willing to listen carefully to what God might be saying. I even encourage my readers to accept the "thorns in the flesh" that might come in dealing with our suffering and attendant spiritual formation God wants to do (see 2 Cor 12).
Perspectives
As the father of a severely handicapped child, I have struggled deeply with a sense of God's absence and have longed also deeply for a sense of God's presence. God has remained the irascible one, the one who will not be tamed, the one who calls believers into the struggle, through the pain, and past the disappointment. It is no easy way, but I believe it is the way to discovery. After all, Job's quest for God was filled with much pain, quesitoning, complaint, disappointment, and silence. However, past all that God did "arrive" and commend Job over Job's friends who were sure they had all the certitudes in their possession.
Dr. Steven Fettke
Southeastern University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Practical Pentecostal Theodicy?, Pneuma, January 2016, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/15700747-03801002.
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