Theodicy and the holocaust: a critical examination

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Theodicy and the holocaust: a critical examination

Borysov E.A.

This article provides an overview of main Jewish responses to the problem of evil, particularly in light of the Holocaust. These answers range from an atheistic rejection of theodicy as such to a mysterious sacrifice of the Jewish nation for the benefit of others. All accounts have to be considered before reaching an adequate assessment of theodicy. Historical, philosophical, psychological, religious, and social dimensions of the questions will play an essential role in this judgement. jewish religious holocaust

Keywords: theodicy, free will, the Holocaust, sacrifice, atheism, theism.

Дана стаття дає огляд основних єврейських відповідей на проблему зла, особливо у світлі Голокосту. Ці відповіді варіюються від атеїстичного відкидання теодицеї як такої до таємничої жертви єврейського народу на благо інших. Всі виклади повинні бути розглянуті до досягнення адекватної оцінки теодицеї. Історична, філософська, психологічна, релігійна та соціальна складові цих питань будуть відігравати істотну роль у цьому судженні.

Ключові слова: теодицея, вільна воля, Голокост, жертва, атеїзм, теїзм.

Introduction

During the previous seven decades following World War II, liberal and Orthodox Jews, Christian theologians of different varieties, secular humanists, and radical Muslims have been discussing the mass extermination of six million European Jews in the Nazi death camps. It is no surprise that reactions to the Holocaust vary from the absolute rejection of any justification for either thehuman or divine failure to prevent such an atrocity to the denial of its genocidal nature. A number of responses have been producedto reveal the apparent absurdity of faith in a benevolent God after Auschwitz. At the same time, Jewish and Christian theists have offered variations of theodicy.

The goal of this essay is to examine different types of theodicy and anti-theodicy to see if any theodicy is possible to account for the events of the Nazi era. In an excellent article on the state of theodicy after the Holocaust, Steven T. Katz [11] has presented nine general responses to the Holocaust that were elaboratedby Jewish scholars. The complexity of responses and methods caused Katz to conclude that «no single response seems adequate» [11, p. 392]. In this essay I will analyze those responses, combining them into three categories due to their similarity. The first category of answers claims that theodicy is possible. The second category consists of agnostic views that question human ability to construct a theodicy for different reasons. Finally, the third category represents a clear rejection of any possibility for adequate theodicy. There is also the tenth view that is not represented in the article, but which presents a valid alternative and is a part of the second category. In my analysis of these views, I will attempt to show that the second category presents a more adequate response to the Holocaust than the other two, albeit not without shortcomings. One will find that honest recognition of human limitations and the mystery of God is a key for theodicy.

I. THEODICY IS POSSIBLE

The majority of Orthodox Jews felt the need to revisit their theology in order to explain the rationale for believing the God of the fathers in the postHolocaust era. Zachary Braiterman summarizes the theistic attempts, stating,

These include theories of just deserts, spiritual or ethical catharsis, the free-will argument, privation theories of evil that deny its ultimate existence, and epistemological doubts about the human capacity to know the ways of God or theologically interpret moral experience. Some theodicies ascribe blame to victims, others merit. The author of one type of theodic statement interprets suffering as a punishing sign of divine displeasure. Another might understand it as a sign of God's passionate love for the persons suffering. Another might profess the human inability to read such signs [2, p. 4].

The author himself has a pessimistic attitude in relation to the possibility of genuine theodicy: «In my view, any utterance that attributes positive spiritual or moral «meaning» to genuine evil, any attempt to «redeem» suffering, risks entering into this family resemblance» [2, p. 4].

The following four views represent a position that theodicy is still possible despite God's seeming silence in the hour of horror. The formulation of the nine views is taken from Katz [11, p. 392].

(1) The Holocaust is like all other tragedies and merely raises again the question of theodicy and the problem of evil, but it does not significantly alter the problem or contribute anything new to it.

Among those Jewish scholars who criticize virtually all theodic or antitheodic theories are Michael Wyschogrod [26, p. 294] and Jacob Neusner. In their view, there is no essential difference or uniqueness in the Holocaust that modify our views on God or humanity. It is the only faith in God of those who have survived that keeps them alive. Moreover, Neusner's [15, p. 307-308] evaluation of the Holocaust brought him to the conclusion that the dark history canalterneither the faith nor the disbelief of the Jew: What then are the implications of the Holocaust? In one sense, I claim there is no implication - none for Judaic theology, none for Jewish community life - which was not present before 1933. ... In fact, Judaic piety has all along known how to respond to disaster.

Thus, according to this response, there is no value in talking about a new Jewish identity or a new epoch in post-Holocaust theology. The Shoah is one of the many occurrences of evil that Jews have had to deal with throughout their history as the part of theodicy.

(2) The classical Jewish theological doctrine of mipenei hata'einu («because of our sins we were punished»), which was evolved in the face of earlier national calamities, can also be applied to the Holocaust. According to this account, Israel was sinful and Auschwitz is her just retribution. This «explanation» has been advanced especially by rabbinic sages and theologians of a more traditional bent. The Hasidic (Satmar) Rebbe, Joel Teitlebaum, for example, puts this claim forward clearly and with certitude: «Sin is the cause of all suffering» [11, p. 392].

Traditionally, it has been taught that sufferings in this life are caused by sin, and their degree is insignificantly less than the eternal torment of the afterlife. A number of contemporary representatives of this view have tried to construct a post-Holocaust theology from the optimistic side of the spectrum. Michael Goldberg [6, p. 73, 81], for example, finds a positive notein the fact that two - thirds of the world's Jewry remained alive after the Holocaust, while the country that instigated the extermination of the Jews was defeated. However, he recognizes that, eventually, we do not know the reason why the innocent suffered in Auschwitz. Norman Solomon [21, p. 10; 8, p. 52] quoted from the speech of Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman before his martyrdom in 1941:

It seems that in Heaven we are regarded as Tzadikkim, for we are being asked to atone with our bodies for the sins of Israel... We are about to fulfill the greatest Mitzvah of all - `With fire you destroyed it, with fire you will rebuild it' - the fire which destroys our bodies is the selfsame fire which will restore the Jewish people.

It is the feeling of regret regarding the assimilation of the Jews in Europe before the Second World War that fills the confessions of Orthodox spokesmen like Wasserman. A substitutionary sacrifice was necessary to atone for the loss of faith and for the adherence to secularization among the Jews. This theodic response essentially views the Holocaust as a part of God's holy and purifying plan for the benefit of Israel.

(3) The Holocaust is the ultimate in vicarious atonement. Israel is the «suffering servant» of Isaiah (ch. 53ff.) - it suffers and atones for the sins of others. Some die so that others might be cleansed and live [11, p. 392].

(4) The Holocaust is a modern Akedah (sacrifice of Isaac) - it is a test of faith [11, p. 392].

A Reformed Jew, Ignaz Maybaum, found in the traditional rabbinical views on providential history a satisfactory theodic explanation to the tragedy of Jews in Germany. Israel's unique purpose and destiny are connected with the surrounding peoples and are revealed via two types of cataclysms. Human history consists of hurban, catastrophic events which «make an end to an old era and create a new era» [11, p. 397] and gezerah («evil decree»), local pogrom and massacre-type events that do not bring in a new epoch. The Holocaust is a hurban, a divine destruction - by means of God's agent, Hitler - that has an impact not only on Israel, but also on the history of the whole world. Unlike gezerah, it cannot be averted. In spite of its destructive nature, mass murder in Auschwitz had a positive result for the advancement of the humankind. As an example, the two destructions of Jerusalem Temple produced the diaspora and synagogues for the benefit of the world.

This optimistic view of the Holocaust is based on the Jewish motif of Akedah, the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22. According to this idea, progress to maturity, happy family and natural death at the end, can be achieved without tragic death of a hero, e.g., Isaac. On the contrary, Christianity, in the tragic crucifixion of Jesus, presents the idea of meritorious martyrdom, whereby happiness and the development of others is dependent on someone'sdeath. Thus, for a Jew to be understood by a Christian, he needs to travel the way of martyrdom and death in order to show «the higher religious meaning of the Akedah» [11, p. 398]. A whole generation of Jews had to be innocently sacrificed in Auschwitz for the sins of others so that the Christian world, as well as the remainder of the Jews, would become conscious of their erroneous medieval thinking and could progress on the way to Enlightenment and emancipation. We should not forget about the salvation of two thirds of the Jews who survived during World War II, which is no less a redemption of God than that at the Red Sea [14]. Those Jews who escaped death in the concentration camps, nevertheless, continue to psychologically struggle with memories as witnesses of a sacrifice they have brought for the world [27, p. 519]. Zerner incorporates psychological research on survivors from [12, p. 343]. The event of the rebirth of the state of Israel is itself a justification of the sacrifice that was offered in the crematoriums. This aspect of post-Holocaust theology was challenged by a feminist writer, Melissa Raphael [16, p. 108]. She says: «To regard the acquisition of the land of Israel (at the expense of its previous occupants) as a providential sign of ultimate divine favor and beneficence has been a central element of almost all post-Holocaust theology». Again, for Maybaum, justification of God is possible on the ground that sufferingof innocent is sometimes unavoidable for the progress of humanity.

The classical theodicy that puts the blame on Jews is in fact justifying the evil of Nazis, and when it makes Jews a substitutive sacrifice, it ascribes them messianic sufferings. If this be the case, all sufferings of genocidal victims would have the same messianic merit. At the same time, it would be insensitive to the victims of the death camps to argue for positive results of the period, like a progress of the humankind. Thus, the traditional approaches to theodicy need to be revised in light of the next category that acknowledges human disability to justify God's non-interference.

II. THEODICY IS QUESTIONABLE

The next five views agree about the limited abilities of men to comprehend God and the history controlled by a Super Being. They thus prefer to avoid any classical positive statement for theodicy.

(5) The Holocaust is an instance of the temporary `eclipse of God' - there are times, when God is inexplicably absent from history or unaccountably chooses to turn His face away [11, p. 392].

According to Eliezer Berkovits, there is no theological uniqueness in the Holocaust. There have been many Holocausts in the history of Jewish nation. The theodicy problem is the same, whether one Jew or six million Jews are slaughtered [11, p. 399]. Among traditional theodic responses, Berkovits singles out Kiddush ha-Shem - death for «the sanctification of the Divine Name» [11, p. 401]. The same idea is manifested in the «Memorial Prayer for the Victims of the Holocaust» in the Book of Remembrance [London: Central Synagogue 1997/5758, p. 46] noted in [17, p. 28-29]. This is a manifestation of ultimate trust in God by way of martyrdom. In spite of their inexplicability, the atrocities of the Nazis could degrade neitherthe faith nor the righteousness of pious Jewry.

Unlike traditional Jewish thinkers who place ultimate guilt for suffering on the shoulders of the victims, Berkovits acknowledges the notion of hesterpanim («the hiding face of God») [11, p. 399]. This is the idea that God conceals his presence from people for no obvious reason. God's unfathomable and mysterious nature allows for moments of hiddenness, which does not necessarily imply his non-existence or anger. On the contrary, his hiddenness is necessary for man is to experience freedom. It is the fact of free will that accounts for the problem of evil [1]. For the human will to be truly free, God needs to refrain from intervention and be deaf to the victim's cry, even in the case of violence. Therefore, if love toward a free agent is an integral component of the divine nature, then evil is possible and perhaps unavoidable in creation. God's presence in history is closely interdependent with the survival of Israel on the geopolitical map after numerous Holocausts [1, p. 134, 156]. Moreover, Auschwitz should not be discussed in isolation from events, such as the Red Sea crossing or the establishment of the state of Israel. Berkovits in his theodicy made a step toward the agnostic position of a hidden Deity, which allows God to keep the divine attributes and at the same time to respect human choice, however immoral it is.

(7) The Holocaust is the maximization of human evil; the price mankind has to pay for human freedom. The Nazis were human beings, not gods; Auschwitz reflects ignominiously on humanity; it does not touch God's existence or perfection [11, p. 392].

A somewhat similar view to the previous one is presented by Lawrence L. Langer, who suggests that, unlike Job's and Jesus' sufferings, extermination of the European Jewry was not a part of a divine plan, but totally human. He insists that evil human will is responsible for the disaster:

Everything the Nazis did conspired to deprive victims of their dignity: they lied, mocked, humiliated, starved, beat, refused to differentiate by eliminating names and substituting numbers truly, the murder of the word as well as the man and woman [13, p. 51].

The inhuman conditions of survival and death in Auschwitz, when one is spared because someone else is executed, brought bitterness to those who remained alive, depriving them of martyr's status. The natural idea of what is good was perverted in the concentration camps, so that a sheer act of care could cost life to the one who received that care. Who would dare to call that absurd cruelty a meaningful or atoning suffering? For the survivors, it was not a problem of God's justice, but exclusively social evil. Since the cruelty the Jews endured were beyond natural sufferings, we are dealing with something beyond classical theodicy. Thus Langer [13, p. 53] concludes: «Instead of examining the relevance of the Holocaust to theodicy, perhaps we need to re-examine the relevance of theodicy to the Holocaust». For him, theodicy is questionable because the Holocaust represents not divine, but strictly a human problem.

(8) The Holocaust is revelation: it issues a call for Jewish affirmation. From Auschwitz comes the command: Jews survive! [11, p. 392].

Irving (Yitz) Greenberg argues for a three-cyclical Jewish history. The first cycle was dominated by the God of Israel who initiated the covenant with his people and enforced adherence to it from the junior partner. This biblical period ended with the first destruction of Solomon's Temple. The second cycle was marked by equality of the partners that put Israel on the same terms in covenant relationships with God whose theophany was less evident from this point on. Greenberg's innovation comes to the fore in the third phase where, after the Holocaust, God can no longer require covenantal submission from Israel. Instead, Jews are free to keep the covenant or reject it. They have become the senior partners in the covenant with God voluntarily. The decision to live as Jews after Auschwitz indirectly points to existence of the God of Israel, and at the same time, the impermissibility of any divine or human coercion and discrimination. Greenberg's response to the burning children of Treblinka reveals atension between skepticism and belief. We should live in dialectical manifestations of the «moment faiths» when God is present and during an absence of such moments [7, p. 533-534].

Emil Fackenheim searches for a middle ground between Jewish minimalists - who do not see a need for theodicy after the Holocaust - and Jewish demythologizers, such as Rubenstein, who see only extreme meaninglessness in theHolocaust. In the words of Steven Katz [11, p. 393], Fackenheim's agenda is expressed through balance, whereby «[b] oth [Hitler's] victims and God have to be held together in dialectical tension after Auschwitz; neither can be devalued without resulting distortion and loss of truth». In spite of the inadequacy of any theodicy, we need not terminate our belief in the God of history, but can believe in the inexplicable ways of the Almighty. God was in Auschwitz, and he was not silent. His revelation in the gas chambers was as unfathomable and terrifying to the people of Israel as it was on Sinai.

The Holocaust is one of the many «epoch making events» in the history of Israel that tested the «root events» foundational for the faith of the Jewish people, such as delivery from Egypt and the crossing of the Red Sea [11, p. 394]. The Holocaust witnessed in a negative sense to faithfulness of God, who shared harsh experience along with his people. In the midst of Auschwitz, God commanded Israel to preserve her beliefs, while to reject one's faith in God would be unpardonable sin before the martyrs and the God of the martyrs. To discard God, means to affirm Hitler's agenda. Fackenheim [5; 9, p. 213] declares:

Jews are forbidden to hand Hitler posthumous victories. They are commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. They are commanded to remember the victims of Auschwitz lest their memory perish. They are forbidden to despair of man and his world, and to escape into either cynicism or otherworldliness, lest they cooperate in delivering the world over to the forces of Auschwitz. Finally, they are forbidden to despair of the God of Israel, lest Judaism perish.

This also implies a shift in the worldview of Jews: it is life not martyrdom that is sacred. Although no one would dare to speak about a saving work of God in Auschwitz, still the establishment of the State of Israel is a sign of redemptive divine prospect [5, p. 96]. One can conclude with the representatives of this view that God's saving presence in the midst of Jewish destruction wasdefinite, although inexplicable from the human stand point.

(9) The Holocaust is an inscrutable mystery; like all of God's ways it transcends human understanding and demands faith and silence [11, p. 392].

Arthur Cohen expresses his pessimism in the human ability to explain the classical understanding of a powerful and benevolent God in light of massive unaccountable death. In the outbursts of «antiJudaist» [9, p. 208] aggression, God remained silent, mysterious, terrifying, and, using Luther's words, remaining in his «dark side». Thus Cohen-Sherbok [4, p. 46; 9, p. 213] eloquently states:

The holocaust itself is the tremendous mystery of humankind resisting to the Mystery of God's Tremendum. It is an orgiastic celebration of death in protest against the God of life. This God can never be grasped, nor exhausted in theological language. The Tremendum of the Holocaust reveals the fundamental inadequacy of theological language.

God does not control or plan our future, nor does he interfere with human acts. The fate of humankind is solely in the hands of men.

There are, perhaps, two possible responses to the absolute otherness and unfathomability of God. The first is a theological agnosticism, whereby all reasoning is ceasing, due to an inability to comprehend the subject. The second response eventually comes to the same result, which is silence, but it is not an intellectual capitulation from the start. Elie Wiesel, in his descriptive narratives Night and All Rivers Run to the Sea, comes to the point when no word can account for the brutal reality, and silence is the only suitable response to the mystery of «solitude and madness». «Of Solitude and Madness» was the title of Elie Wiesel's address March 5, 1978, at the ninth annual Scholars' Conference on the Church Struggle and the Holocaust, sponsored by the Rational Conference of

Christians and Jews, in New York, cited by [27, p. 519]. The author expresses his shock and loneliness in a world without God, but it created strong feelings, instead of despair: «This day I had ceased to plead. I was no longer capable of lamentation. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused» [24, p. 65]. There is no adequate theodicy for the «reign of night» [23, p. 241; 25, p. 497] when an awesomely mysterious God took back the Torah from Israel. Wiesel did not renounce his faith, but took the side of Job «...who chose questions and not answers, silence and not speeches. Job never understood his own tragedy which, after all, was only that of an individual betrayed by God.» [22, p. 181]. This is not a denial of the divine Being, but a denial to comprehend the purpose of his ways. Thus, from a purely agnostic stance this view confirms that theodicy is hardly possible due to absolute otherness of God.

The tenth view is not part of Katz's article, but it presents an alternative explanation of God which enables these scholars to present a variation of theodicy. Since this position considers that theodicy is impossible in the classical framework without major revision of the view of God, I placed it into the second category.

(10) The traditional view of God as omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent Being needs to be revised in light of «process theology», «open theology» and «feminist theology».

Several contemporary Jewish scholars propose to avoid classical problems of theodicy by redefining attributes of God. Arthur A. Cohen [3] advocates for a God who is not in charge of our history and therefore is not responsible for national catastrophes. The human agent is absolutely free to love God, but cannot demand him to interferewith our conditions and to prevent evil such as the Holocaust. Only in the divine-human relationship can the world be perfected because it is man who is the cause and agent of events in history.

Hans Jonas [10] considers that the image of a passible God who suffers along with his people is more adequate than the classical impassible one. A number of Christian theodicists mistakenly, in Marcel Sarot's [20, p. 136, 24, p. 62] opinion, follow J. Moltmann in advocating a compassionate God in the concentration camps, who, in the words of Elie Wiesel, «was hanging on the gallows». She points out that Moltmann misread the Wiesel's text, bringing in Christological ideas that are foreign to the author. Besides, Sarot [20, p. 144-145] argues, it is possible to claim that God can be absolutely benevolent and lovingwhile not being emotionally affected, i.e. impassible.

Melissa Raphael suggests that the traditional patriarchal view of God in Auschwitz contradicted the reality of a compassionate and caring God-mother. This feministic Jewish approach to theology is based on the idea of Shekinahpertinent to rabbinical mysticism. God is the loving, compassionate and caring mother that sustained her children amidst of turmoil [17]. Consequently, only the redefined God compassionate but not sovereign over history can be justified in light of the Holocaust.

The positive side of theodic agnosticism is that it does not affirm omniscience of man to explain the hidden reasons of God, and it acknowledges human responsibility for a free choice with the presence of a compassionate God in the midst of sufferings (in case of the tenth view). The negative side is that this is an overly pessimistic view on God's ability to control events and his silent estrangement from men to the extent of losing some of his divine qualities.

III. THEODICY IS IMPOSSIBLE

(6) The Holocaust is proof that «God is dead» - if there were a God, He would surely have prevented Auschwitz; if He did not, then He does not exist [11, p. 392].

Unlike the previous positions, this one allows no place for theodicy. The traditional rabbinical faith in God of history was no longer valid for Richard Rubenstein [18], because the history of Nazism proved otherwise. The classical example of Job, which was an explanation of gratuitous sufferings for centuries, can no longer illuminate our understanding of Treblinka and other death camps. According to Rubenstein, this ancient book of the Bible expresses a worldview of a group of men in the biblical period, who were not wholly convinced of then on -existence of God, nor could they accept the idea that human suffering could be simply a punishment for some sin. The traditionalist friends of Job were asking the suffering man to concede that it was the result of divine punishment for the guilt he could not understand, «lie [to yourself] for the sake of humanity... bow before a God who may not exist» [19, p. 423, 428] so that the rest of the mankind would not live in the wasteland of uncontrolled fate. Moreover, Rubenstein argues that the majority of Jews who entered the death camps could not be compared with Job, but only with Job's children who did not survive the family tragedy. Besides, most of the inmates, unlike Job, were deprived of their dignity and identity. Therefore, to use Job's model for theodicy is an oversimplification [19, p. 434].

He could not reconcile the idea of Israel as chosen people of God in light of the uncontrolled antiSemitism in Germany. Furthermore, he considers the very notion of «chosen people of God» attached to Israel as one the major reasons that produced antiSemitic impulses. It is impossible to find a justifiable explanation to the enormity of horror in the traditional Jewish paradigm. Rubenstein [4, p. 82] says:

The thread uniting God and man, heaven and earth, has been broken. We stand in a cold, silent, unfeeling cosmos, unaided by any powerful power beyond our own resources. After Auschwitz, what else can a Jew say about God?

There was no omnipotent Deity in Auschwitz that could attach any meaning to human existence.

Rubenstein's Jewish nihilism acknowledges the value of life as it is, but not because of an externally imposed value [11, p. 393]. The human life is purposeless and void of any transcendental aim. The concentration camps showed that the meaning of life can and should be construed only subjectively by a man for himself in a community with other people.

Thus, Rubenstein comes to the conclusion that the Jews must abandon their theological illusions and create meaning for life in their religious community. If God is dead, where else would people find meaning if not in a community of other human beings? The Jewish community becomes the bearer of life experience, culture and tradition that defines authenticity of a Jew.

According to Rubenstein, nothing can account for the evil of the Holocaust. Consequently, God does not exist, and people are left to define the meaning for life in their socium. One, however, would face a problem when two different social identities clash, such as occurred during World War II. If there is no external moral standard, then extermination of the opposed identity is not morally liable for blame.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it seems reasonable to state that the antitheodicy of the third category wasunable to deal a death blow to a theodicy. To say that the Holocaust proved the non-existence of God would amount to have the omniscience of God and would reject the logic behind the reality of human free choice.

One is left to modify the classical view of a God who punishes sins, by means of empowering evil forces, and sacrifices innocent for the benefit of others (the first category) or to modify one's view on the ability of a person to understand God's ways (the second category). To engage in the dialogue on theodicy, in my opinion, one needs to acknowledge human limitations in understanding God's reasons for allowing such evil as the Holocaust. But at the same time, we should not downplay divine qualities in an attempt to justify God.

In light of the discussed theories and attempts to «theodicize», Steven Katz came to the conclusion that, «.there is no simple set of facts that can be easily seized upon and manipulated in order to get a result that is both meaningful and possesses integrity» [11, p. 401]. Some of the reasons for inadequacy of the responses are different presuppositions, methodologies, utilization of fragmentary accounts and, presumably, distinct agendas. The researcher should account all existing theodicies and antitheodicies before claiming whether a theodicy is possible.

I find thoughts of Eliezer Berkovits persuasive, because he recognizes both human free choice that God had to respect - even in Auschwitz - and God's mysterious plan, which may manifest itself in a way as if God is absent. Elie Wiesel expresses honest puzzlement and anxiety as a prisoner about heaven's silence that helps the reader to not oversimplify the issue of theodicy. In spite of my disagreement with the atheism of Rubenstein, I need to acknowledge that his logic and criticism of the traditional theists are well grounded and thought-provoking. Moreover, he does not just deconstruct theodicy for the sake of destroying it, but he provides an alternative meaning for life that a Jew needs to identify in his religious community.

Further research is needed to examine compatibility of the presence of a compassionate God in the destruction zones permitting evil for unknown reason, with a sovereign God of history working out things for good. Also, a question can be discussed: To what extent can God control moral evil without limiting human evil choice?

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