Suffering as Expressed in the Psalter and Beyond: An Unfinished Systematic-Theological Perspective on Evolutionary "Theodicy"

Abstract

From an evolutionary perspective, it is argued in the following exposition that specific expressions of suffering in the Psalter open up a broadened, deeper and gracious understanding of human suffering within a kind God's good creation. From the many and diverse voices of suffering as responses to diverse kinds of suffering, and if hermeneutically embedded in a post-Darwinian evolutionary framework, different existential and theological horizons of interpretation are prompted and revisited. These very horizons that interpretively open up direct us as embodied persons of flesh and blood, on the one hand, to new and other dimensions of our being vulnerable creatures before God, and on the other hand, to different glimpses of a kind creator God in a world of dynamic relationships and forces. Ultimately, embedded in a post-Darwinian evolutionary framework, the Psalter eventuates here and now, in contexts of suffering for embodied persons, a gracious cognitive-affective reappraisal of their faith.