Theodicy
If there is one subject, more than any other, more than Christian corruption, collusion with the rich, indifference to the poor, schism, torture and murder, smugness or arrogance - all the sins of which a human institution is capable - which has brought us low it is the issue of theodicy: why, we are continually asked, does a God whom we claim as love creating in love, allow infants to die of cancer, the innocent to suffer and the wicked to triumph? If we cannot answer this question coherently, at least in public perception terms, we are fatally handicapped in prosecuting Christ's mission.
You may well think that an excursion into this territory is slightly off my main theme but it is my contention that unless we find a way of talking about things that go wrong, to put it no more dramatically than that, we simply don't have a credible narrative.
It all goes back, as it must do, to the serpent in the garden tempting Eve as she stood before the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If we think that this story is reportage, then we have a narrative which says that evil somehow got into creation to subvert the good, which leaves us with the problem of where evil came from in the first place. Even if we define evil as an absence of God, rather than as a propulsive force, we still have the problem of where it came from. The idea of a "war in heaven" just won't do.
On the other hand, if we think that the story of the serpent is etiological, that it explains how things are what they are, then we have a much better chance of making sense of our world. I, somewhat heretically, think that if there was a serpent at all then God was speaking through it.
The reason for this apparently radical stance is that we can't love unless we have free will and we can’t have free will in a perfect world; so human imperfection is intrinsic to the act of worshipping and loving freely. We are creatures, one might say, imprisoned by chronic choice; we can never get out of it.
Here is the beginning of the explanation of why things go wrong. As a Reader in my Parish I provide light touch supervision over those who lead the "Prayers of the Faithful" and it says a lot that almost all of these good people fall into calling these prayers "intercessions"; and my greatest problem is getting these people to stop asking God to do things 'he' has given us the equipment to do ourselves. For the past few weeks I have had to say: "Until we do something constructive about the refugee crisis we really can't ask God to fix it; we can only ask him to give us the strength to fix it". So the first part of the answer to those who ask why God allows bad things to happen is that many of the bad things are our fault.
That disposes of a great deal of misery but then there is the case of the infant who dies of cancer. This is slightly more difficult but we can still be coherent. We can, and I think we should, say that the world was not created to be perfect according to human ideas of perfection. As well as exercising socio economic free will we also need to exercise the free will of compassion and empathy. This actually makes sufferers so special in the eyes of God because they perform a sacred function. But the difficult part of this argument is to explain that to suffer is not the sin but, rather, the sin is to cause or to be indifferent to suffering. So the question for the sceptics should not really be: "Why does God allow bad things to happen" but, rather, "Why do we allow bad things to happen or why are we indifferent to them".
Then, finally, there's the volcano which kills thousands of innocent people. It isn't very different from the suffering child; it's part of the imperfect world we live in. You might say that such tragedies are the grit that forms the pearl or you might say that a world of flawless, perfect smoothness would simply be bland or, to use a more theological word, angelic.
The underlying point, however, is that unless we come to terms with the necessity of human imperfection and retain an implausible line on the nature of evil, we will be ill equipped to face a hostile world.
At root, what the world wants and what it too often finds in what we say, is a sequence: it starts with a God who is a failed magician who cannot fix what is going wrong; and, worse still, if he's such a good magician, things wouldn't go wrong in the first place; and if he could have stopped them going wrong but hasn't done so, then he is a cruel God rather than a failed magician
But what is at stake here is not so much suffering as our human identity. This is why the really massive fracture in Christian perception, already clear in Paul, is the issue of free will and divine omniscience; and when you say to people: "what about non interventionist omniscience?" they just look blank.
Anyway, the point here, in conclusion, is that hell has disappeared, the devil is in serious disrepute, and we have to find language to talk about things going wrong which is based in our own identity rather than resulting from some cosmic struggle.