When God Didn’t Cause It: Rethinking Tragedy, Birth Defects, and Scripture’s Poetic Claims (Q&A Series #2)

Voxology

Religion & Spirituality, Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.7 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2017

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How do we reconcile a loving God with the pain of birth defects, child loss, and perceived divine silence? This honest and moving Q&A episode tackles some of the most deeply personal and theologically challenging listener questions about suffering, scripture, and how God's will interacts with real-world tragedy. Mike and Andy explore whether Psalm 139 and Jeremiah 1 teach that God literally forms every child in the womb, and what that means for children born with trisomy 18 or Down syndrome. Offering empathy, biblical insight, and honest wrestling, they aim to create space for faith that allows for heartfelt mourning and hope beyond trauma.

They also respond to questions about the accessibility of Scripture for those without formal education, examine the role of biblical scholarship versus everyday spiritual understanding, and talk through how to sit beside fellow believers—whether LGBTQ+ or ideologically different—with humility, grace, and hospitality. From divine sovereignty to stigmatization in the church, this episode doesn’t hold back.

Key Takeaways:
• God Did Not Cause It – Unpacking a non-Calvinist theology of suffering that affirms God’s goodness in a broken world without attributing tragedy to God’s active will.
• Poetry, Not Prescription – Psalm 139 and Jeremiah 1 offer deeply personal metaphors about God’s knowledge of us, not literal step-by-step accounts of fetal development or divine intention of abnormalities.
• Grieving Without Platitudes – A compassionate challenge to Christian clichés and a call to be honest with God, especially amid heartbreaking loss.
• Scripture Is for Everyone – Encouragement that the Bible's message of grace is accessible to all, while recognizing the added richness that deeper study and scholarship can provide.
• Sitting Beside Difference – Wrestling with how to love people we disagree with, whether they are white supremacists or LGBTQ+ Christians, and how the church's historic inconsistencies have contributed to present stigmas.

Resources Mentioned:
• Previous Voxology episodes on suffering, evil, and God’s will – VoxologyPodcast.com
• Peter Enns – Works on interpreting difficult scripture and biblical complexity
• “Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes” by E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien
• The story of the man born blind – John 9
• Matthew 20 – Parable of the Day Laborers

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Music by Timothy John Stafford | Instagram & Twitter: @GoneTimothy

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Music in this episode by Timothy John Stafford

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Greetings, Internet.
0:13.4	Mike and Andy here from the frigid headquarters of the Vox podcast.
0:21.7	Andy's actually in California, but I am here in the great state of Ohio.
0:26.9	And it is frigid, Andy.
0:29.3	It is the high, the high temperature today is 29.
0:36.3	So, so I finally met a, met a temperature that my flip-flops, although I wore
0:42.8	them out to take, to take hand into school this morning, I was in shorts, flip-flops,
0:46.9	and a sweatshirt. And, and I will say for the first time in a long time, my feet were cold.
0:52.7	Yeah.
0:53.8	Yep, I know. I know. So, so it's wearing me down. It's wearing me down. say for the first time in a long time my feet were cold. Yeah. Yep.
0:54.4	I know.
0:55.2	I know.
0:55.8	So it's wearing me down.
0:57.7	It's wearing me down, Andy.
0:59.2	It's supposed to be fall.
1:00.8	It feels like winter.
1:01.9	Not acceptable.
1:04.7	Andy, I thought, you know, you did this really nice thing for me.
1:09.3	And I remember it specifically because it so rarely happens. But you,
1:15.4	you set up this Google Doc form that automatically populates when people email in questions to
1:24.2	the Vox podcast. Correct. You remember that? Oh, yeah. And you did that in August.
1:29.8	Yes. And I checked it for the first time about three days ago, we're recording in November.
	...

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