Divine Lament and the Problem of Systemic Evil: A Participatory Theodicy of Tragic Agency.

This article proposes divine lament, God's active grief over creation's vulnerability to systemic evil, a grief intrinsic to divine love's participatory structure, expressing covenant fidelity. Expanding biblical precedents where divine grief expresses covenant faithfulness rather than moral failure...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science Vol. 61; no. 1; pp. 288 - 310
Autor principal: Espartinez, Alma
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Open Library of Humanities Mar2026
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
Descripción
Sumario:This article proposes divine lament, God's active grief over creation's vulnerability to systemic evil, a grief intrinsic to divine love's participatory structure, expressing covenant fidelity. Expanding biblical precedents where divine grief expresses covenant faithfulness rather than moral failure, I argue that divine lament emerges through constructive appropriation of participatory ontology, process theology, and evolutionary cosmology. These frameworks converge on a crucial insight: genuine divine–creaturely relationship entails divine grief over creation's wounds. The framework distinguishes covenant grief from moral culpability. God bears relational sorrow over structures that make evil possible without culpability for evil's actualization by free agents. Tested against the Holocaust, colonial slavery, and climate collapse, divine lament proves adequate where classical immunity and contemporary co-suffering falter, offering both ontological coherence and pastoral solidarity. The framework reveals a consistent pattern across systemic failures: participatory structures weaponized (Holocaust), persuasion's intergenerational inadequacy (slavery), and scalar–temporal mismatch (climate). Divine lament materializes through practices—Holocaust remembrance, reparations initiatives, climate liturgies—transforming theodicy from justification into embodied solidarity.