There’s a debate (or “blogalogue”) between N.T. Wright and Bart Ehrman over at beliefnet on the subject of theodicy entitled “Is Our Pain God’s Problem?” N.T. Wright:

Near the heart of Jesus’ proclamation lies a striking redefinition of power itself, which looks as though it’s pointing in the direction of God’s ‘running of the world’ (if that’s the right phrase) in what you might call a deliberately, almost studiedly, self-abnegating way, running the world through an obedient, and ultimately suffering, human being, with that obedience, and especially that suffering, somehow instrumental in the whole process. What ‘we would want God to do’ – to have God measure up to our standards of ‘how a proper, good and powerful God would be running the world’! – seems to be the very thing that Jesus was calling into question.

[HT]: Exploring Our Matrix via N.T. Wrong