Between Faith and Silence

A Brief Interlude Between Chapters 2 and 3 of A Grief Observed

I wrote a “Chapter 2” essay as part of this series. It was called The Problem of Cruelty, and looking back, it treads the same ground as the earlier piece on theodicy—probably more than anyone but a theologian would ever want to read. So rather than repeat myself, I want to take a step sideways here.

Let me be clear: I’m not a theologian. My background is in social theory and, by extension, philosophy and economics—overlapping fields that sometimes interact with theology, though often uneasily. My interest isn’t in defending or dismantling belief but in examining how we reason our way toward it or away from it. That’s probably why I find A Grief Observed compelling, if somewhat disappointing: it’s less a defense of faith than an autopsy of it.

And A Pleasant Fiction isn’t a theological book—at least not intentionally, and certainly not primarily. Faith and doubt appear in it only as side effects of grief, tangents in the search for meaning. Still, once you’ve written about loss, you eventually bump into the God question whether you mean to or not.

So rather than revisit theodicy, let’s grant Lewis his premise. For the sake of argument, let’s accept that the whole matter—suffering, faith, divine will—is simply beyond human understanding.

What then?

If that’s true, it carries a strange consequence: God made us such that we couldn’t understand Him. And if incomprehension is built into creation, then disbelief can’t be rebellion—it’s obedience to design. We either doubt because we are, by definition, incapable of fully knowing something we cannot understand, or we claim certainty about something we cannot understand, which to someone like Calvin simply feels dishonest. (And yes, I realize we could get into an entirely separate philosophical debate on what “knowing” means, but I’m referring to the Platonic epistemic sense of the word here—because that’s really the point of this sort of discussion.)

I’ll leave it there. Even acknowledging the limits of human understanding—we are, after all, creatures evolved to navigate and survive the physical world, not to unravel metaphysics—I’ve never found the retreat into mystery a satisfying intellectual maneuver. Not when the claim is to engage honestly with the merits of belief. If one chooses to exit the discussion, that’s their right. But let’s not pretend that abandoning the debate is the same as resolving the contradictions. And that’s pretty much what Lewis does.

(And to be clear, I’m not referring to a debate between me and Lewis here on this blog, but rather the one he has with himself in Chapter 2 — a debate I was eager to see him finish, only to watch him walk away from it.)

In any case, that will lead us into Chapters 3 and 4—the subject of our next essay.

Javier

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