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First, there is no more reason, logically, to ask where God is in tough times than in any other times, there being no logical connection whatever between the times of our lives, tough or otherwise, and the whereabouts of God. This is true, at any rate, if God is to be understood as we assumed at the outset, i.e., as the all-worshipful One of "the greatest and first commandment," and thus as the unsurpassable One, "than which none greater can be conceived." To worship is to trust and to be loyal – ideally, to trust unreservedly and to be loyal unqualifiedly. But worship in this sense is authorized as a proper response only if the object of worship, of trust and loyalty, is worshipful – ideally, all-worshipful. And this the object of worship can be only if it is unsurpassable: absolutely unsurpassable, or unsurpassable by itself as well as all others, in all the respects in which anything can be so; and relatively unsurpassable, or unsurpassable by all others, although not by itself, in all other respects. Although, for any believer in God conceived as all-worshipful and therefore unsurpassable in these senses, good times are rightly accepted as tokens or signs of God's reality and favor, they are in no way evidence, logically, of God's existence and activity and may not be taken, logically, to "prove" them. By the same token, bad times, or tough times, are in no way evidence logically of God's nonexistence or inactivity and "disprove" absolutely nothing that Christian witness and theology have any stake in affirming.

As for the so-called problem of evil, understood as being in some way a disproof of God as Christian faith understands God, it is, in point of fact, a pseudo-problem. It arises from a conception of God's "omnipotence" that is self-contradictory and therefore a pseudo-conception only, altogether apart from the

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fact, or the extent, of evil in the world. Moreover, the only God about whose whereabouts the reality of evil could logically raise even the least problem, anyhow, is not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, not the God of "the greatest and first commandment," but an idol, a fetish, a non-God, or, what Paul dismisses as a "so-called god."

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