September 2025 Feature - When God Makes No Sense

Editor’s Note: This month, we welcome the writing of Dan Kirkpatrick. After more than 20 years leading the pastoral care program for a major hospital in the southeastern United States, Dan is now Director of Grief Resources and Education at Thomas McAfee Funeral Home in Greenville, SC.

Theology, in very simple terms, is a set of beliefs about who God is and how God works.

What happens when our theology gets challenged by tragedy, death and loss? A Covid-19 viral pandemic that claimed the lives of an estimated 7 million people around the world. Countless families are displaced from their homes by wars, tornadoes, wildfires and hurricanes. And most recently, devastating storms in Texas brought record rainfall, unexpectedly causing flash floods which resulted in multiple deaths of young campers and staff at a Christian camp, along with many more people in the surrounding community.

“Where is God in all of this? ” is a question that people have been asking throughout history. 

In one of my seminary theology courses entitled, “Theodicy: The Problem of Evil,” the professor required us to read Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Though the book’s popularity has endured, Kushner (1981) was attempting to make sense of his young son’s death from a terminal disease. In the midst of this profound loss, Kusher was trying to make sense of the question, “Where is God in all of this?,” and reached this conclusion: "God does not, and cannot, intervene in human affairs to avert tragedy and suffering. At most, He offers us His divine comfort and expresses His divine anger when horrible things happen to people. God, in the face of tragedy, is impotent. The most God can do is to stand on the side of the victim; not the executioner” (p. 42-43).    

While I could understand Rabbi Kushner’s explanation objectively, his theology did not mirror mine.  Kushner’s theology ran counter to my Christian beliefs that God is all knowing, present everywhere, and all powerful. After all, why would we pray for God’s help and intervention if God was powerless?

At the time of that reading when I was yet in my mid-20s, I had not given much thought to the question of why bad things happened to good people… or for that matter, why good things happened to “bad” people. I had experienced losses but nothing like the death of a young son.

Within five years after graduating from seminary, my family faced the deaths of both of my grandmothers, the matriarchs who held our families together. Shortly after their deaths, my older brother died from AIDS at age 30. Two years later still, my wife and I faced the death of a foster child on the day before her fifth birthday—also from AIDS. 

In the wake of those deaths, I spiraled into grief, deeply affecting me physically, emotionally and spiritually. It was then that I truly began to wrestle with the question, “Where is God in all of this?” At that time, I did not have words to define how these profound losses affected me, but I later realized that I was experiencing a loss of my “assumptive world.”

“Loss of an assumptive world” or “shattered assumptions” is a theoretical understanding of grief attributed to Dr. Ronnie Janoff-Bulman (1992). She recognized that we are left to pick up the pieces of how we expected life to unfold when trauma fractures our beliefs that “the world is benevolent, the world is meaningful, and the self is worthy” (p. 6). For people of faith who believe that God is benevolent, this can also lead to a condition which is referred to as “complicated spiritual grief” (Neimeyer, et.al., 2013).

Dr. Robert Neimeyer (2006), known for his extensive grief work in the area of “meaning reconstruction,” stated that when someone’s world view is shattered by loss, they will need “to reconstruct a world that again ‘makes sense,’ that restores a semblance of meaning, direction, and interpretability to a life that is forever transformed” (p. 92).  

Those are times when many turn to clergy, therapists, or other counselors to help rebuild their worldview.  Not everyone is comfortable or capable of wading through deep spiritual waters with people who are struggling with their theology, however. Tedeschi and Calhoun (2006) emphasized that “All clinicians must recognize that they have entered territory where they have little concrete to offer their bereaved clients when it comes to the content of their belief system about death. Instead of offering clear answers to the kinds of questions of faith that clients bring up, clinicians do best when they regard themselves as companions on the journey through grief’s unfamiliar territory” (p. 105).

For several years following my profound losses, I saw a very capable therapist to help me as I worked through my grief. I still felt that my spiritual issues were not being addressed, however, so with the help of a colleague, I also began meeting with a spiritual director who was skillfully trained to journey with me into the “unfamiliar.” She gently helped me reconstruct my theology through compassionate listening.  She patiently helped me to embrace the mystery of God’s presence through the power of simple rituals like lighting a candle at the beginning of each session. She modeled an understanding that prayer is not just about asking for an outcome by helping me reframe my understanding that faith is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen” (Hebrews 11:1, King James Version, Holy Bible).

No theology can fully explain God or define exactly how God works. By embracing both the tension of faith and uncertainty, however, through the slow work of companioning those who are grieving, spiritually sensitive bereavement providers can help grieving souls rebuild their worldview with a reconstructed understanding of who and where God is in loss.