Setting Our Hearts upon the Deep: Acknowledging Lament in Christian Life, Worship, and Thought

In a recent monograph titled Evil in Modern Thought, Susan Neiman has argued that the history of European philosophy can be told as the history of thinkers who wrestled with the problem of evil. Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau, as well as the great philosophical schemes of Kant and Hegel, all in their respective ways sought to resolve the problem of evil. The notion of progress in his­tory was especially endorsed by Hegel who proposed that the world is advancing by means of a dialectical process: first (A), then its opposite (B), then a synthesis of the two ( C), and so on. "Everything was moving toward a better, fuller, more perfect end; and if there had to be suffering on the way, if there had to be problems as the dialectic unwound, so be it; such things are the broken eggs from which delicious omelets are made:' 1 Hegel's dialectic was a totalizing dialectic in which the tragic and the logi­cal coincide everywhere: "Something has to die for something greater to be born ... misfortune is everywhere, but everywhere it is surpassed, to the degree that reconciliation always wins out over dissent."2 This belief in the rational progress of history was further bolstered by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859), which is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. Darwin's work was then applied to fields other than biology, as evidenced by the ehich is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. Darwin's work was then applied to fields other than biology, as evidenced by the emergence of social Darwinism where the biological concept of natural selection was applied to sociology, economics, and politics.