Alma 42: Theodicy and a restricted God

24 For behold, justice exerciseth all his demands, and also mercy claimeth all which is her own; and thus, none but the truly penitent are saved.
25 What, do ye suppose that mercy can rob justice? I say unto you, Nay; not one whit. If so, God would cease to be God.

From an England essay in response to Rabbi Kushner:

Kushner thinks [p.96] that the author of the Book of Job has God appear out of the whirlwind not to reinforce Job’s position by asserting that he doesn’t have to explain suffering to his ignorant and weak creation, man, but rather to teach Job that it is too difficult even for God to keep cruelty and chaos from claiming their innocent victims (Job 40 and 41). In other words, the author of Job gives up statement number 1, that God is omnipotent, the cause of everything—and Kushner agrees:

If God is a god of justice and not of power, then He can still be on our side when bad things happen to us…. Our misfortunes are none of His doing, and so we can turn to Him for help…. We will turn to God, not to be judged or forgiven, not to be rewarded or punished, but to be strengthened and comforted.

It is unfortunate that this resolution to the problem of evil should be seen as utterly new, because, of course, it is the one revealed nearly 150 years ago to Joseph Smith.

David Bailey on the lack of scriptural support for omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence:

The terms omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and omnibenevolent play a central role in the definition of God for traditional Christian faiths, although at the present time they are used more often by conservative and evangelical denominations. Some Latter-day Saints also use these terms (at least the first two). Nonetheless it is a curious fact that these words, with the sole exception of “omnipotent” in one highly poetic verse in Revelations [Rev. 19:6] do not appear in the Bible. Instead, these terms and corresponding doctrines were devised with the creeds of early Christianity during the first few centuries after Christ, when Christian theology was recast in terms of Greek metaphysics.

England again on “The Weeping God of Mormonism“:

Traditional theodicies tend to solve the paradox of evil existing in an omnipotent God’s universe either by (1) redefining evil (as not really evil from God’s infinite perspective, as illusory, or necessary to build souls, or as merely the absence of good, the holes in God’s swiss-cheese universe) or by (2) equivocating on agency (it is given because for some unexplained reason an omnipotent God has to in order to have beings who freely love him). Some Mormon thinkers have used similar approaches, but the theodicy revealed to Enoch and foundational to Mormonism orthodoxy, I believe, questions the other pole of the paradox, God’s omnipotence. It suggests that God allows evil because there is much of it he cant prevent or do away with. And therefore, like a human, he weeps. Of course, this approach doesnt suggest that most or even much evil is beyond God’s literal power to prevent. That would make him impotent indeed. Certainly he can and often does interfere with evil. The weeping God of Mormonism I am trying to describe creates a world for soul-building which can only succeed if its includes exposure of our souls to the effects of natural law and maximum latitude for us to exercise our agency as we learn how that universe works. Evil is a natural condition of such a world, not because God creates evil for soul-building but because evil inevitably results when agency is freed to grapple with natural law in the universe. You cant have one without the othernot because God says so but because the universe, which was not created ex nihilo and thus has its own intractable nature, says so. And thus God is not absolutely omnipotent in the traditional Christian sense; he has limits imposed by the co-eternal nature of other components of the universe which he did not create, such as matter (D&C 93:33) and eternal laws (D&C 130:20-21) and especially human intelligences (D&C 93:29). As modern revelation teaches us, God is bound when we do what he says (D&C 82:19), that is, he is limited to some extent, required to respond in certain ways by our obedience to the eternal laws he teaches us. In other words, besides being infinite in many important ways (such as providing an Atonement infinitely able to save those who will accept it), he could in some ways be thought of as finite.