Our capacity to understand, explain, and thereby control is broken by the concrete bodily reality of embraced pain. None of our theological reasoning has a reliable resolution to the questions of theodicy* and the force of unmerited pain. Such pain is dealt with only by embrace as body touches body in compassion. The testimony of this textual tradition is that God's holiness embraces pain, and that God's holiness forms an alliance with pain that cuts underneath every explanation we may offer.
- Walter Brueggemann Journey to the Common Good p.69
*Theodicy - A theodicy (from Greek theos "god" + dike "justice") is an attempt to resolve the evidential problem of evil by reconciling the traditional divine characteristics of omnibenevolence, omnipotence, and omniscience with the occurrence of evil or suffering in the world.
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