August 7 2000

ARTICLE TOOLS

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After writing The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky responded to reviewers who criticized him for writing a novel that deals with suffering but does not point to clear answers. Dostoevsky replied that his critics could not fathom the depth from which his faith had come. He had been an atheist. "It is not like a child that I believe in Christ and confess Him," he said. "My hosanna has come forth through the crucible of doubt."

In Yet Will I Trust Him, John Mark Hicks describes his own crucible—his first wife died and one of his sons suffers from a rare terminal disease—and refines his own faith and the theological debate on suffering.

Hicks was, by his own admission, arrogant and naïve as an undergraduate Bible student. He and his late wife, Sheila, wanted to be missionaries in Germany, where Hicks hoped to study under a well-known theologian. But the first dark clouds of suffering appeared in 1980 when a postoperative blood clot stopped his wife's heart and she died. Hicks, who believes he had set a wrong course for himself, says with the Psalmist, "It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees" (Psalm 119:71).

Harold Kushner's book When Bad Things Happen to Good People became a bestseller in 1981, one year after Sheila Hicks died. Kushner's book gave Americans permission to forgive God for what Kushner sees as God's limited ability to prevent suffering. Kushner advised readers to find that God has worked miracles in suffering, even though he may not do exactly what we expect. More definitive theological studies on suffering also appeared that year, but they flopped at bookstores. Why? Because Kushner's book told a real story of the author's ...