Alma Espartinez

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This study rethinks theodicy by proposing divine apology as co-creative accountability, moving beyond justifying God’s goodness amid suffering. Grounded in participatory theodicy—where divine power works through collaborative vulnerability, not control—it integrates David Bentley Hart’s participatory metaphysics, John Cobb’s process theology, and John Haught’s evolutionary cosmology. Divine apology is ontologically necessary and ethically urgent, unfolding in four dimensions: (1) ontologically, as mutual divine-creaturely participation (Hart); (2) ethically, as God’s responsibility for systemic evils (Cobb); (3) historically, addressing ruptures like the Holocaust; and (4) cosmologically, grieving ecological loss (Haught). Replacing detached justification with practical repair, it exemplifies climate lament liturgies, bridging theology and crisis. As the first synthesis of Hart, Cobb, and Haught on divine remorse, participatory theodicy shifts from sovereignty to solidarity, framing apology as divine love in a suffering world.

This article examines Karol Wojtyła’s concept of participation and alienation by starting the discussion on his personalist anthropology, leading to his structure of the human community. Wojtyła’s personalist anthropology reveals to us the nature of the human person as a unique, unrepeatable personal subjectivity. According to Wojtyła, the human act takes us to the knowledge and understanding of the person’s interiority and simultaneously allows us to have a glimpse of the human person’s specific complexity. Then, I analyze the correlation between person-action in living and acting with other persons. Here, I attempt to demonstrate that if our existence has to acquire any human significance, it is that, rather than alienation, which makes such a unique experience possible. Finally, I explored the impact of the failure to grasp a genuine understanding of the human person and the capacity to participate in the humanity of other persons, setting a profound sense of alienation that dehumanizes us to our very core. This paper aims to answer the following questions: Given the actions that can be performed ‘together with others,’ how does the person’s acting with others affect the dynamic correlation of the action with the person? What is the significance of this participation for the personalistic value of the action? Why is alienation antithetical to participation?

Our whole discussion has focused on man’s self-fulfillment in and through the marital union. The mutual self-donation of man and woman is a participative act in that whenever acting is performed ‘together with the other,’ the husband and wife transcend themselves in action and thereby realize the authentically personalistic value of the action and man’s self-fulfillment in it. This mutual self-giving of husband and wife finds its expression in and through the body. This self-fulfillment, however, is attained only when the husband and wife become responsible for each other and meet the demands of the personalistic norm. The marital union must adapt itself to the objective demands of the personalistic norm, without which the act of mutual love between husband and wife is degraded to the ‘utilitarian’ level. The structure of responsibility which demands reference to the object in accordance with its true value must be satisfied.