“If there is a God, He will have to beg my forgiveness.”

Imagine the spiritual torture that led a man to etch these words into a prison cell wall at the Mauthausen concentration camp, later discovered and recounted by survivor Joseph Drexel.  We can hear the inmate oscillating, teetering between two positions. On the one hand, he has witnessed and endured collective mass trauma and unimaginable suffering. His apparently prior assumption that there is a God in this world is no longer a given.  But on the other hand, if he is to maintain that God exists, he can no longer conceive of that deity as a benevolent and just God, as he had before.  This is a God with whom he can be—indeed, must be– angry.  This is a God, whom—if he exists—must be confronted and even held accountable.    The inmate oscillates between two poles: either he will abandon his belief in a God altogether, or else he will engage him in vexation and protest.

Often, we are taught that piety allows no place for protest.  The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away; his ways are unfathomable, but, surely, always just.  In the end, it’s all for the best, even if we can’t see it at the moment.

But the psychologist of religion Julie Exline notes........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)