theoretical response. It does not really want an explanation of God’s apparent absence, so much as an end to it. Concretely, it requires justice for the oppressed (v. 18) and retribution for the oppressors (v. 2b). The theodicy question inevitably arises in situations of political evil and oppression. Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, the mayor of Leipzig whose Christian convictions drove him into the German resistance to Hitler, wrote from prison in 1945, after being sentenced to death: Is there a God who