Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

114 BRUNO HIDBERBut theology has to be sensitive to the horrible experiencesand sufferings of evil in the contemporary era and to seekappropriate language both at the level of method and content.It is not helpful to undertake such a discourse with methodologicaland abstract precision alone, for sensitivity to the experience,the questions and the concerns of contemporary humanbeings is also needed. It needs to be emphasized that to posequestions about evil does not necessarily mean a desire to trampleover sensitivity and concrete experience with abstract theories.Here, experience and research do not stand over againsteach other like theory and praxis; rather, they work togetherwith each other. It is actually experience which shows howhuman beings have reflected most profoundly about evil preciselywhen they have also had to experience, in the most profoundway, suffering, loss of meaning, vulnerability and guilt...Job did not start to think about evil and dispute with God whileeverything was going well, but rather when he was stricken byevil on all sides. 50Where man encounters evil, he experiences it as somethingthat contradicts his most intimate aspirations, that enslavesand destroys him. Evil strikes at the core of the person.Therefore, he cannot help but cry out: Why must I suffer? Whyare innocent children tortured? Why does evil erupt in the livesof those who are just toward God and neighbor? Consequently,the believer is always bound to ask himself: How can I abandonmyself unreservedly to God in faith, without doubting Hisgoodness and power in the face of evil?Such questions do not run along the lines of abstract theory;rather, they express a misery experienced personally, a miserywhich yearns to know: How can I overcome evil? Does lifestill have meaning despite all this evil, and can we still believein God in the face of evil’s extraordinary depths? All of these are50Brian V. Johnstone makes this same point: “The immediate confrontationwith pain and affliction stirs protest and provokes questions, but theexperience is, at this point, mute and inarticulate. It needs words if itshuman significance is to be expressed.” Johnstone, “Learning through suffering:the moral meaning of negative experience,” in R. Gallagher and B.McConvery, eds. History and Conscience: Studies in Honor of SeanO’Riordan, C.Ss.R. (Dublin, Ireland: Gill and Macmillan, 1989),146.