DON'T HAVE TO BE COOL:

"Many Christians are convinced we see the world more transparently than the Scriptures themselves warrant," the theologian Mark Labberton once told me. "Our faith should be humbly courageous and confident, but it should not spontaneously and arrogantly multiply. When this happens, often in an effort to exert power or to deny mystery, it can leave us and those we may lead searching for certainty beyond what God has provided."

It seemed impossible to me that the problem of theodicy - why an all-powerful God allows the existence of evil - could be answered in a neat and tidy way. And I was hardly alone.

Earlier this year I listened to several  interviews where Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, discusses Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a famous Russian novelist and devout Christian who had a profound impact on Williams's own theology. Williams has a deep knowledge of Russian literature and philosophy; in 2008 he put that knowledge to work in an acclaimed book, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction.

Talking about The Brothers Karamazov, widely regarded as Dostoyevsky's greatest novel, Williams said it raised questions that "should go on worrying you for the rest of your life if you're a Christian." This intrigued me. Dostoyevsky, I discovered, believed that, as a Christian, he could prosecute the case against God better than an atheist ever could. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky lays out a searing indictment of the Christian God. And then he switches sides, and makes the case for the defense. Reading through three chapters of The Brothers Karamazov earlier this year with some of my friends - "Rebellion," "The Grand Inquisitor," and "The Russian Monk," which Dostoyevsky called the "culminating point" of the novel - I discovered an approach to doubt radically at odds with the apologetics I had been familiar with. Dostoyevsky doesn't answer the hard questions with neat and tidy solutions. He answers them with a kiss.

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