More Dostoyevsky. So far, Alexey has just been running around the town, trying to keep his father and his oldest brother, Dimitri, from killing each other--and yet he seems to pack an awful lot of contemplation and long conversations in between the family intrigues.

For example, a sample of his dinner conversation with the middle brother, Ivan, who's a flaming agnostic:

"I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened with men--but though all that may come to pass, I don't accept it. I won't accept it" (279-280).

Why is Ivan so set against believing that God will work out a final redemption for all suffering?

"Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature--that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance--and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth" (291).

Ivan tells horrific stories for about ten pages of child abuse in order to lead up to this point. In other words, he asks the basic questions about why God allows evil and suffering in the world, and he asks these questions on emotional and ethical grounds. He confronts Alexey, an Orthodox novice who believes fully in God, with the problem of pain: how can God lead up to a final resolution when that final resolution will be built upon the most terrible human suffering, the suffering of innocent people? How can any justice pay back that suffering?

I haven't yet read Alexey's response, and I suspect that Dostoyevsky is going to put his (naive) character through a lot before the novel itself responds to these questions. Of course, in Calvinist terms, the innocent child really isn't innocent--he or she is a sinner and suffers the wages of sin just like everyone else.

Is that the logical conclusion? Abuse and sickness, abandonment and loneliness, these are simply the facts of living in a world where we have all chosen to sin? Can we then demand a resolution to the world that could pay back abuse and torment, when we have by our sinful natures deserved far greater torments at the hands of the angry God?

I struggle with these questions. To update them, what justice could pay back the elderly people left to drown in their beds during Hurricane Katrina? What justice could pay back the creation that has been so badly stewarded by humankind? What justice could heal aborted babies? If God prizes suffering, as He sometimes seems to in a world so full of pain, in what sense is suffering precious to Him?

I've read Job recently. I've recently listened again to Rut Etheredge's sermons on Christ our Cornerstone and God's hard doctrines and hard providences. But I'm also thinking about the recent suicides and deaths-by-sickness of friends' parents, and the news that another friend has been diagnosed with a chronic, potentially fatal illness.

With Ivan, I believe that God will someday renew the creation and bring a harmony between Heaven and earth. But I'm not sure that he asks the right question in his last quote--or that the questions I just asked are the right ones, either. God Himself has also suffered, suffered the ultimate. How does that give an answer?