Whether it’s framed by heated personal anecdotes or cool-headed syllogisms, the problem of evil has always posed the thorniest challenge to belief in the Christian God. It runs something like this:
- The Bible says God is omnipotent, omniscient, and good.
- Yet there is evil in the world.
- So the Bible must be wrong about God: he either didn’t/doesn’t account for evil somehow (isn’t omniscient), can’t do anything to remove it (isn’t omnipotent), or refuses to do anything (isn’t good).
- So the God of the Bible can’t exist. [Drops microphone.]
That’s at least the crux of the matter logically. But cool-headed logic hardly enters into it for most unbelievers. Because the real problem of evil is that everyone has suffered through it personally. You might say to a grieving unbeliever, “You just have to trust God. He has a plan, even if you don’t see it right now.” They reply, “Really? The fact that I was sexually molested by my priest is part of God’s plan? That’s disgusting. And offensive. Get out of my face.”
I’ll be honest. That kind of personal pain requires far more care and attention than any article could ever offer, even if this article is, I hope, a little more nuanced than merely an easy call to “trust God.” But I also understand that the better part of the visit from Job’s friends was when they sat there with their mouths shut.
Job’s concern was far from rational and syllogistic. He had been deeply wounded by God, and he demanded a divine face-to-face for redress. He wanted an explanation for why his righteousness had been repaid with suffering. This was not an unholy sentiment. But lest we forget, God didn’t actually give Job an explanation.
The reader of the book of Job is narratively transported into the heavenly court to hear Satan’s challenges and God’s response. So we may know that Job’s suffering was, at its heart, an opportunity for Job to establish even for himself that his faith was not mercenary. And it was also for our edification. But Job, as far as the book tells us, never got the answer to his question: “Why?” Job’s only answer from God was, in so many words, “I am God.” And Job’s final stance was, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.” If that’s not at all troubling to you, you might want to lower the dosage on your meds.
So, that brings us to the question of the hour: Is God evil? The immediate gut reaction of most Christians would be to say, “No. God is not responsible for evil at all. Evil originated with humans.” But, as I hope to establish in the remainder of this article, that’s not really biblical. God himself claims responsibility for evil:
I am the LORD, and there is no other,
the One forming light and creating darkness,
causing well-being [good] and creating calamity [evil];
I am the LORD who does all these. (Isa. 45:7)Who is there who speaks and it comes to pass,
unless the Lord has commanded it?
Is it not from the mouth of the Most High
that both good and ill [evil] go forth? (Lam. 3:37–38)
In these cases, the words “calamity” and “ill” should be translated “evil,” and probably would have been if not for the timidity of most modern Bible translators (the KJV has “evil” in both places, for instance).
Before you get all bent out of shape, I am not fixing to make a case that we serve a multi-moral God. God is not capricious or fickle. He has “no shadow of turning.” But when we say that God is not evil in order to “protect” his reputation, we are capitulating to a materialist dualism that is simply not biblical.
In other words, who says God can’t do evil and be righteous? Bear with me on this because it requires a lot of explanation. In fact, the very words we use to talk about this need to be carefully explained, if not redefined.
The problem with the problem of evil has always been a fundamentally incorrect and simplistic understanding of “evil.” And for that matter, of “good.” And to be fair, this has been cultivated in no small part by Christians and Bible translators.
Christians can all agree that God is the author of good. But we often use the word to mean both that which is pleasing and that which is right. This isn’t helpful. “Good” is, by a biblical definition, anything which supports life or pleases people. Delicious food, sex, stimulating conversation, comfortable slippers, etc. These are all good. But they are not always right. For instance, I could have “good” sex with my neighbor’s wife. But it would still be wicked.
In the same way that we conflate goodness and moral uprightness, we use “evil” and “wicked” interchangeably today. Again, we shouldn’t. In the contemporary mind, all these words have to do with morality and ethics. In our society, it is always immoral to be evil, and it is always moral to be good. But there’s a major problem with the conflation of evil and wickedness or good and righteousness: good and evil are not intrinsically moral. Biblically speaking, that is.
“Evil” in the Bible always refers to calamity, ill, death, destruction, suffering, injury, displeasure, and related things. And those things actually have no intrinsic moral or ethical quantity. A tornado is not sinful, in other words. Neither is cancer or a broken arm. Or the death of an animal. Or your tears. Certainly none of those things would exist in an unfallen world, but that is a far different thing than to say these things are actually or intrinsically wicked. Tornadoes, cancer, and a non-vegetarian diet are evil, then, in that they destroy life or property or peace. But not necessarily wicked.
Evil, by a biblical definition, is anything that harms or destroys. It is an evil act to prune a bush or pull a weed. You do evil (to bacteria) when you take antibiotics. You do evil when you slaughter an animal for food or clothing or when you crush a roach. Waging war is evil. Taking a life is always evil, no matter what life it is or how you take it. Making someone cry is evil. Evil is nothing more or less than destruction. God is certainly the author of destruction (and evil, in those terms).
In fact, God brought forth evil as the natural consequence of and cure for wickedness. And what is wickedness in biblical terms? It’s receiving a good or delivering an evil which God hasn’t made permissible to you. It is anything in you that contradicts God’s character.
Since God has never contradicted his own character, wickedness is wholly and peculiarly human (it might actually be our only true possession). But in response to our wickedness, according to his immutable nature, God brought forth evil. Evil is the logical consequence of wickedness. You would never have evil without wickedness, but once you have wickedness, evil is inevitable.
This is because evil is not just the consequence of wickedness. It is also its cure. When Adam and Eve tried to cure their shame and self-consciousness without death (by taking a fig leaf for a covering), God killed an animal and clothed them with its skin instead (Gen. 3:21). So we can see that the evil that follows after wickedness is not always itself necessarily or intrinsically wicked.
Sometimes evil is righteous. And sometimes good is wicked. That’s confusing I’m sure, but only because we have collapsed so many of our terms.
Let me explain.
According to the Bible, the death penalty is a necessary evil (Gen. 9:6, etc.). When a man takes another man’s life, he should be executed after a fair and just biblical trial has established his criminal guilt. But let’s not beat around the bush: A just execution is still evil. But at the same time, a just execution is not wicked! Execution takes a life, yes, so it is calamity, destruction, etc. But it accords with God’s Law and character. So it is also righteous. A just execution, a just divorce, a just restitution: all of these are righteous evil. None of these would exist in a perfect world. But we don’t live in a perfect world do we?
Now, think about the converse: When is good wicked? The Bible says, “The plowing of the wicked is sin” (Prov. 21:4). That seems very unfair if you conflate goodness with righteousness. Plowing is certainly a good act. It cultivates the earth to make food for the support of life. What could be more good than that which is necessary and beneficial for life? Lots of people say things like, “It feels so good, it just must be right.” No.
The wisdom of the proverb is that even a good act is not necessarily a righteous act. You can save a life, help a friend, cultivate a garden, have a baby, or feed the poor, and God calls all of those things good. All of those things are the opposite of evil, in that they give and support life. They are the opposite of harm and destruction. Yet, according to the Scriptures, God does not necessarily count them as righteous.
In the same way that a person can do an evil act and it be counted as righteousness, a person can do a good act and it be counted to him as wickedness.
Who is the one who decides then? In the Bible, it is only God who decides because only God contains in himself an immutable picture of the absolute good. What we call good is temporal good or material good, and it is nearly always woefully short-sighted. But what God calls good is eternal good. And short-term evil is very often necessary even for mid-term benefit. When? How? We don’t know. That’s why we wait on God. And do what he says in the meantime.
And that is also why the conflation of wickedness and evil is actually a subtle and effective ploy to drag all moral concerns out of the courtroom of heaven and into the courtroom of men. “Do what you want, as long as you don’t hurt anybody” is the highest moral framework a materialist ethic can achieve with a simple moral dualism. Worded another way, the materialist ethic is: “Do good. Do no harm.” Or, as Google famously adopted as its first mission statement: “Don’t be evil.”
And honestly, that would be enough if we lived in a perfect world. But what happens when someone commits an act of evil for the first time in such an environment? Then what? How do you respond? What about conflicting claims on the same resources? Or mutually exclusive pathways to happiness? What about when your land is invaded by another country? Who decides what goods and what evils are permitted to you?
And if you are committed to never doing any evil ever, you actually will be defenseless against evil when it is pointed at you. Who will defend you? Or will you and all your goodness and all the good and defenseless people just die off the earth and leave it to evil men?
The thing is, it’s just not possible to run a society without a theory on permissible evils and a hierarchy of good. It is a daily concern, in fact. When and for whom is it okay to take, to kill, or to hurt? Whose good is the highest good? This absolutely requires a higher moral structure. Good vs. evil just doesn’t cut it. Someone has to play judge and mediator.
One of the more pop-sensible systems of simple material dualism comes from Star Wars. You know, the Light Side versus the Dark Side. Good vs. Evil. Star Wars never explicitly appeals to a higher morality than that (especially after the materialistic inclusion of midichlorians). Whatever tends to life and building up is good and of the Light Side. Whatever tends to death and destruction is evil and of the Dark Side. So far so good.
Well, kind of. Except when the “good guys” are blowing up the Death Star twice (or three times if you count The Force Awakens, which you should) and all the people in it. Or when Vader throws the Emperor down a ventilation shaft. Or if you’re fighting at all, really. Or showing any passion or sense of possession whatsoever. In reality, Vader channeled the Dark Side to kill Emperor Palpatine just as much as he channeled the Dark Side to kill Obi-Wan Kenobi (or all of those poor children). The point is that the material dualism of “Light vs. Dark” or “Good vs. Evil” is not enough to account for why Vader is a “good guy” in the end. Vader is an instrument of evil to the very end. The question is not whether Vader is evil. It’s whether his evil is permitted or just.
So in order to deliver higher moral judgments on whether an (evil) Dark Side action is permissible or not, given the context, Star Wars is forced to appeal to a higher moral standard that it refuses to openly acknowledge. The merely materialist model of Light vs. Dark cannot account for why some evil (Dark) acts in Star Wars are called righteous in one context while the same evil (Dark) acts are called unrighteous in another context. Who decides which is which?
When I was explaining this whole thing to my eight-year-old daughter, she immediately came to Vader’s defense. She said, “No. Darth Vader was protecting his son! That was good.” I explained to her, “No. Killing is never good. But sometimes it is righteous when God tells us to do it. God says we can kill to protect a life that is being threatened in front of us. So Vader did what was righteous. But we should never call killing good. There will come a time when it is no longer necessary, and we should take no pleasure in it while it is.”
I’m sure you’ve heard arguments about how hypocritical it is that pro-lifers support the execution of capital criminals and yet oppose abortion. Pro-life should be about all and any lives all the time, right? No. There is at least one thing which needs to be of more vital concern to a moral society than life—namely, the character (Law) of God.
It’s interesting, in light of our newly reformed distinction between good and righteousness, that we can say unequivocally that sparing a capital criminal is actually good. It at least benefits that one person’s life. I have no problem saying it: executing a capital criminal is an act of evil. But letting capital criminals live is an act of unrighteousness.
Sparing capital criminals is a good wickedness. Executing capital criminals is an evil righteousness. I understand those terms sound quite perverse in our ears, but I am convinced that the problem of evil holds up or fails on these very distinctions.
See, there is a reason why God responded to Job with a biography rather than an explanation. God’s identity actually is the explanation. Simply because of who he is, only God is able to declare when it is permissible—yes, even necessary—to kill, to take, to break, to destroy, and to undo. Simply because of who he is, only God knows what are the best goods for each of his creatures in their time. His judgment seat is enthroned above (beyond?) good and evil. Notice what God says in that thorny Isaiah passage: “I am the LORD and there is no other.” No one but the Creator is qualified to tell his creation what goods and what evils are permissible and when. There is no other.
By posing the problem of evil, the unbeliever is really saying, “I want to decide for myself what evil is permissible and when. What good is permissible and when. I don’t trust God to make these decisions for me. Especially not a God who would be willing to do what I think is wrong.” So the unbeliever tries to unseat God as Judge and tries to fill the seat himself, usually apotheosized in the State.
To be fair, unbelieving dualists are often more concerned than Christians to pursue the short-term good: good for animals, for the earth, for the poor, for the disenfranchised. But they are also just as eager to utilize evil to accomplish their “good” designs. Take from the rich (evil) to give to the poor (good). Cut off the life of an unborn child (evil) to better the life of the mother (good). Make war on this country or religion over there (evil) to produce a safer, happier society over here (good).
In all of the dualist attempts to rid the world of “evil,” they have only ever produced more evil because they are incapable of ending the wickedness of society, especially with their immoral laws. One regime topples another which topples another. War begets war. Death begets death. They rail against God for the barbarism of the Flood, and then sign off without even a second thought on the lives of many millions of innocent unborn children. It is not that they have a problem with evil. They just have a problem feeling like it’s pointing right at them.
They fell for Satan’s original temptation. The problem of evil is merely a restatement of Satan’s original temptation: “Why trust God? You will determine for yourself good and evil.”
Did you just wonder what I hope you wondered when you read “good and evil”? Of great importance to our discussion, the tree in the Garden of Eden was actually, if I were to translate for modern ears, the tree of the knowledge of good and calamity, not the tree of righteousness and wickedness. (The word “evil” there is the same word that the KJV translates evil in the verses I quoted above.)
As soon as Adam and Eve sinned, their sin necessitated the revelation of a quality that before had been hidden in God before the advent of human wickedness: divine evil. Adam and Eve had only ever known good until Eve took for herself the forbidden good and then Adam delivered the forbidden evil to all mankind. Creation before the Fall was only good. God called it all good. Only ever good. And that was God to us before the Fall, too—only ever good.
The only words Adam and Eve had ever heard from God’s lips were good and blessing. Never evil. Never wrath. Never curses. And if Adam and Eve had not sinned, they never would have known the darkness as well as the light of God. Without the sin that brought the evil, there would never have been a need for a higher law than nature—for a Judge to mediate. Consider this: if Adam and Eve had never sinned, they never would have known God as righteous! They would have known him only as good.
I think that modern Christians are far too concerned with God’s exclusive goodness, because, unlike Job, our faith is often mercenary. We want to revert to loving that pre-Fall God. We want to revert to a time when God was only ever good to us. We want him to be only good to us again. We’re willing to be chastised, perhaps, but only when it’s directly related to our own sins, and never as a way to get to know him more deeply in his passion and in his suffering. We’re always just trying to get through it to the better part.
God’s wrath embarrasses us. We just want his goodness. We think goodness can cover our sin, so we sit there with our fig leaves hovering over our nudity. We’re like Job’s friends. We want a simple dualistic God. We are basically just good people, right? If we do good, we’ll get good from God, right? And then it’ll all be good.
But God doesn’t want us to see him as simply good. Because he’s not simply good. He’s not satisfied that his most beloved creations would have only half the truth about him, no matter how good and pleasing that truth might be.
He wants us to put our fingers in his wounds. He wants our teeth to rattle in his thunder. He wants us to see him in his wrath as well as in his whisper. He wants us to scrutinize his atoms and range about in all the stars he’s numbered. He wants us to know all of him.
Only Jesus has ever fully known God that way—as the creator of both light and darkness whose mouth alone delivers both good and evil. Jesus is the only man who has ever been fully indwelled with both God’s infinite blessing and God’s infinite curse. And as we know Jesus more fully and become more like him, we too will learn how to call God righteous even when the weight of his passion burns and crushes us until we can’t take it anymore. Because that is who he is too. And we love him.
It’s sometimes hard to remember this when we’re suffering, but it is only in our pain that we can call God righteous. Don’t miss that opportunity waiting for the next time you can call him good.
*********
That was a really long article. If you got all the way to the end, you have my deepest gratitude. This was the fourth and final post on the sublime and the infinite. If you’d like to read the first three, they are here: Training Wheels for the Infinite and Reading to the End and Jesus is Dead, Long Live Jesus.
It is hard to change years of wrong thinking about good and evil. You said above, “And if Adam and Eve had not sinned, they never would have known the darkness as well as the light of God.” There seems to be a problem with saying there is darkness in God: how do you explain the verse that says that God is Light and in Him there is no darkness? It has been my experience in recent years that not only the pleasant but also the difficult, unpleasant providences from the hand of God turn out for good and blessing. This is the God who brought the greatest blessing from the most wicked evil, to the praise of His wisdom and glorious grace!
That’s definitely a verse that needs to be addressed. Part of the trouble is with the different uses of darkness in the Bible. Particularly in John, darkness is used very often metaphorically to refer to ignorance of the truth and walking in that ignorance. Since John focuses on the nature of the incarnation as a revelation (the Word made flesh), he would be particularly interested in focusing on the idea of God’s light—his perfect knowledge revealed in Jesus—as opposed to the darkness (as in stained, obscured, unclear knowledge and stubborn ignorance) of mere humans.
Also, there was light and darkness before the Fall, so God called the darkness good. Darkness also reflects God’s character (in his intimacy, his quietness, his unsearchableness, and his mystery) and was not a product of man’s wickedness.
Finally, forgive me for splitting hairs, but I did not say there was darkness _in_ him. I said there was darkness _of_ him. This may seem like an unimportant distinction, but I was trying to be careful. God often wraps himself in darkness (again, indicating his unsearchableness) in the Scriptures. And obviously he is the ultimate source of darkness, being its Creator. I will probably reword and/or further clarify this statement, but I stand by it fundamentally. Thank you for mentioning it!
Thank you, Michael, that’s helpful. The things revealed belong to man, but the secret things (the dark things) belong to God.
The in/of distinction is not unimportant at all. It was the first thing that came to my mind when I read Candace’s reply. And to your point, the darkness of God’s character is not HIS darkness but ours. He is unknowable, incommunicable, mystery to us, not to Himself, who he knows perfectly.
Once again, I’d like to preface with a disclaimer that I am firmly pro-choice. Crazily enough, I still have a pretty strong grip on morals and logic, and the difference between good and evil. Shocking, yes.
I’m not arguing that sometimes, bad things happen. If you try to kill me, chances are I will try to kill you first. I’m all for self-defense, provided it’s actual self-defense. But, that relies on a 1-1 situation: you try to kill me, so I kill you. Not: you try to kill me, so I kill your children. And that, the second, is the issue I have with the idea of God and the atrocities of in the Bible.
Sure, there’s plenty of the first in most books of the Bible, but there’s also plenty of the second. Be it the murdered and dismembered prostitute, the plagues of Egypt, the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, whatever else: innocent people were harmed (tortured/killed), sometimes (like in the case of the prostitute) singled out and harmed (tortured/killed). Elsewhere in the Bible, it’s stated that killing children is evil. Not “righteous evil” but evil. No qualifiers are mentioned.
You could honestly address the whole notion of Christian’s view of existence the same way: Adam and Eve sinned, so their children and their children’s children are punished. These children, and their children’s children, had no say in the situation, and yet they are still punished. Sure, they can become Christians, but they still have to deal with the punishment (pre-Heaven). Babies? Punished. The disabled? Punished. Etc.
My issue with the notion that bad things happen in this world is the sheer abusive mentality of it all. Operating under the assumption that the Christian God is omnipotent, omnipresent, and all-knowing, we really only have a few options: 1) God causes bad things to happen (all bad things, not just the “righteous” bad things) whether that be through commanding it or knowing something bad is about to happen/watching something bad happen and very specifically not intervening (still causation). There’s a saying: There are two kinds of evil people, the kind that do evil things, and the kind that see evil happening and don’t do anything about it. 2) God isn’t all-powerful, so he really can’t intervene when horrible things are happening.
God is supposed to be loving, yes? A god of love. This is where the abuse comes into play. Telling people who have gone through horrible things, sometimes in the name of God, that the reason something bad happened to them is because they deserved it (original sin), and/or that God chose not to do anything about it, and/or it’s part of God’s plan, but that they are still to worship God…that’s abusive. Or that God wants to help you heal…come to him with your sorrows…whatever else. Ask any psychologist worth their weight or hell, logical human being on the street, if that’s at all a healthy response, and they’ll laugh in your face.
I appreciate that you tried your best, but this, too, wholly oversimplified the issue (while taking jabs at the pro-choice, the anti-death penalty, and honestly, anyone who questions).
What all of this boils down to is: when you sit at a bible study and look around the room, and one person was raped by their pastor at their CMA boarding school and it was covered up (not priest, but good ol’ Protestant pastor, because Protestants have just as big an issue with that as Catholics but really like to pass the buck), and another person’s most “trying time” is having been single for a month at twenty-two…you can’t talk yourself into a good explanation for that. There is no explanation, because no matter how you look at it, it’s all crap. You can’t cite righteous evil. It just is what it is.
Thanks for this response. It’s obvious you read the entire piece and considered it honestly, and given its length and your stated perspective, that was very big of you. Many of my close friends didn’t even get through it. So thank you for that!
You also brought up some very good points, and I’m happy to have the opportunity to expand on them here. I have to say though, that none of my comments will answer your central contention with God, as it is as inherently unanswerable as a grievance between former friends. That said…
At the root, there is no evil that isn’t permitted to God. He is beyond good and evil. So all the evil that he declares is righteous (for him, even if not for us) by his very identity. This may seem unjust to you, but it is not illogical if the Christian God actually exists. The idea of permitted or non-permitted evils is quite sound, even from a human perspective. You have authority, for instance, over your car, being its owner, that I do not have. You may choose to bash in its windshield if you want. I, having no authority over your car, am not free to do it harm. That is an evil that is not permitted to me. It is also the case that a parent might designate for himself permitted evils that he does not designate for his children. His children might say, “Hey it’s a double standard that you get to drink alcohol when you say I’m not allowed to,” or “You get to demolish parts of your house with a sledgehammer and you won’t even allow me to paint on the walls.” This is only a valid complaint if the child and the parent are equal in authority. I think most people would agree that, though many parents are awful, a good parent has evils permitted to him that a child just should not have. If the Christian God exists, the same order would hold between him as Creator and his children as creatures.
So a moral order must have a concept of permitted and non-permitted evils, and it must have a final judge to determine when and if an evil that has been committed is permitted for the person who committed it (and when and how, etc.). When I talk about an unrighteous evil, that would only ever apply to human beings, for we do not have the authority to do as we please. The Christian God, if he exists, cannot commit unrighteous evil because he would be the final standard and authority for righteousness. There is no judge above Him to permit or restrict evil or even to question if an evil he permitted to himself was just. He, by his identity as Creator, can withhold or give goods and evils that we don’t have the right to withhold or give.
That seems very unfair, I understand. But the only other option would be for humans to be the final arbiters of permitted evils. A system without God has not removed evil, it has merely liquidated it of any purpose or meaning. If God is responsible for and sovereign over evil—even the evils that are generated by our wickedness—then evil, no matter how unfathomable its purposes may be, has the possibility for meaning. Again, removing God wouldn’t remove the evil or even lessen it. It would merely make it meaningless. And it would also remove any possibility for condemning an evil some other person permitted to himself.
For instance, I recognize that many people have committed evils in the name of God, evils that _God_ did not permit to them. But ultimately they committed those evils because they placed their own authority _over_ God to determine what goods and evils were permitted for themselves. They did nothing other than what you are generally recommending as a moral system: if God is not the standard of righteousness (permitting and withholding for us as he sees fit), then individual human beings must be the standard. It may very well be the case, I do not at all doubt it actually, that _you_ are a kind, thoughtful, reasonable, gentle person who does good as much as she can. Based on your thoughtful comments alone, I would say you are not the norm in the US these days. There are obviously millions of people who are not like you, however, and do not agree with the evils you permit them. It doesn’t seem like you have any authoritative reason to condemn their systems of permitted and non-permitted evils as any more or less arbitrary or sound than your own.
You and I may hate that a Protestant preacher takes a good that God has not permitted him and delivers an evil God has not permitted him by raping. But why should it matter that _we_ do not permit it to him? You may say that the State is the collective will for permitted and non-permitted evils in society, and the State condemns rape. And I think the State _should_ condemn rape. But what if the State didn’t? What if the State permitted to itself, in the name of God or no, the evil of killing millions of Jews or waging war on innocent civilians in the Middle East? In your system, power, even lethal power, becomes the only arbiter of righteousness. The only way for a State to enforce its system of righteousness (righteousness being permitted and non-permitted goods and evils) is through violence. And the one who has the capacity to commit the greatest evil then has the right to determine righteousness. That is no different than God. It’s just an alternate and lesser god.
In other words, a system of righteousness that removes God still has just as much if not more evil, it has no standard to judge or condemn alternate systems of righteousness, and it is doomed to always affirm that arbitrary might makes right. I don’t see how that is any better for society than Christian Theism. In fact, it seems like you have merely traded out one so-called arbitrary evil God for a bunch of equally or more evil and just as arbitrary gods.
And the hope of Christianity is that God is _not_ ultimately arbitrary or abusive in the evils he permits. The hope of Christianity is: though God does as he pleases, what he pleases is _actually_ good. I honestly don’t see how that could be true sometimes—some of the evils you mentioned are as disappointing and flummoxing to me as they are to you. But I know that having someone to talk to about my pain who takes _responsibility_ for my pain is of the utmost value for producing peace in my heart. It also strengthens me to do good in the world when only evil is done in return.
I would much rather believe that all the evils people attempt to do to me are in the hand and under the control of a God that ultimately loves and cares for me (and proved that at the Cross) than that I am completely at the mercy of a meaningless pain perpetrated by other evil gods who only ever care about themselves.
But again, none of this answers the central complaint you have with God: “Why?” Only God can answer that question. But for my part, I am truly sorry for all the pain and evil that has been done to you, especially that which has been done under the auspices of religion. I’ll continue to pray for your eternal good.
Michael
P.S. My eldest (by thirty minutes) daughter is named Selah.
I really liked this; had a couple of thoughts:
1. I’ve always imagined the forbidden fruit in the garden to be some impossibly fresh and seductive bit of floral perfection, and God’s forbiddance of it to be like telling the kids not to eat the cookies on the counter. I’m guessing that’s a common view, but now I’m wondering if a better analogy wouldn’t be forbidding your kids to drink the bleach under the sink.
2. I’m reminded of a thought I came across a while back re: the word “holy,” and how it’s only been in the last few centuries (?) that it’s come to stand for sunbeams and choirs and hallmark cards instead of the fire and blood and fear and so on that characterized so many of the actual encounters with God throughout history.
Thanks! Those are both thought-provoking points. It has been useful to me to consider sin in terms of taking an unpermitted good or delivering an unpermitted evil, and I think the fruit of the garden is both. In that case, it might have been both the impossibly fresh floral perfection and the bleach under the sink. And your thought concerning “holy” is quite indicative of contemporary Christianity’s attempts to neutralize what we see as unpleasant or unseemly qualities of God’s character.
I can’t find fault with your argument, it seems to be the best answer to the problem of evil I’ve encountered, save for presuppositional. I still think that the problem of evil is a greater problem for the atheist as their worldview does not allow for absolute moral statements, demonstrating the bankrupt nature of their position and showing them that they must rely on the biblical worldview to justify their condemnation of evil.
Thanks. I don’t think my argument and a presuppositional argument are mutually exclusive. I think my argument leads to and rests on a presuppositional argument. If evil is not intrinsically moral, how can it be condemned without a higher law of righteousness (which must of necessity transcend natural categories)? My argument exposes the fact that every person operates with a presuppositional “law” concerning good and evil (to whom, under what circumstances, and in what measure which evils and goods are permitted), even if such a higher law is not explicitly acknowledged (e.g., Star Wars). But an unbeliever does not need recourse to biblical law to condemn one kind of evil over another. My argument shows that atheists have not gotten rid of God(s) or evil, they have merely made themselves gods who mete out good and evil according to their own personal and ultimately arbitrary whim. The difference is that their personal law has no intrinsic authority over any one else’s personal law. So order in society comes to depend on force to conventionalize arbitrary personal standards. They have not gotten rid of the need for a god, they have merely attempted to replace him. They have not gotten rid of transcendent law, they have merely replaced it with the arbitrary caprice of whichever ruling class can enforce its will.
Thank you for reading and commenting. I appreciate it!
Thanks for the article, it was well-written. Still not sure I agree, and it seems a bit just like an exercise in semantics, but the spirit of the argument seems fair.
I agree that my argument rests on semantics to a degree. At the same time, I think semantics are at the heart of this argument. The problem of evil argument actually rests on semantics—attempting to define good and evil in a “non-moral” sense while simultaneously assuming an unacknowledged moral framework. But your point is well-taken. Thank you for reading and commenting. I really appreciate it.
That started out like most, making me wonder if you had even heard of CSL, and skeptical by the lack of Greek and Hebrew references in spite of the strongly held belief in the evil/wicked dichotomy, but by the end I was ecstatic to subscribe! I would still recommend you ease up on the “initial shock value” approach, simply because every treatise on the subject tends to go there, and your insight is far higher than clickbait level presentation. Tanks so much for posting that. I’m def gonna digest that over the next month or five.
Hi. Thanks for that. I actually don’t know what you mean by CSL. 🙂
When and if I write this into a longer treatise, it will probably be more academically/formally written and presented. I don’t know if that will be for the better in general, but it might be more what you’re looking for. Thanks for commenting!
CSLewiz 🙂
Ah, yes. I have heard of him a little. 🙂
I have read and struggled with this article for a few weeks, and I have a difficult time not rejecting most of it. Particularly your willfully superficial treatment of the term Good as it would have been understood by the Patristic Fathers — and I daresay by the Apostle Paul. Merely qualitative experiential Dionysian “good(s),” as per your example of “good” sex within the context of infidelity, have less than nothing to do with the classical theistic metaphysical description of God as the ultimate, eternal, and infinite Good, whose essence is Love (which necessarily defines the posture of all of His attributes, including His wrath), and from whom all of reality flows: the ground of being itself.
I find it of note that your argument, this semantic distinction between evil and wickedness, much less the bizarre assertion that God’s response to our wickedness is evil, rests almost entirely upon the Hebrew Scriptures, and, it would seem, a fundamentally literalist reading of those scriptures at that — an approach I would join the Patristics in wanting to rescue you from. If the Gospel means anything at all, surely it does not mean that God’s response to wickedness is evil: Or did God so hate the world that he killed his only begotten son, so that we might experience eternally righteous evil, as a result of our self induced slavery (in ignorance) to sin, and therefore death? Perhaps Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin would have you believe so — thankfully we are not called to follow them down this path. Even God’s wrath is for us but against His enemies (sin and death) and therefore it, like all of his attributes, are necessarily a posture of His essence, which is Love — which is The Good™.
As Christians, should we not look for our understanding of God (with the admittedly analogous but not meaningless language we are permitted) in the life and ministry of Jesus, who in all of history alone reflects and desires to be like the Father perfectly? Here I would again defer to the Patristics, who particularly held the Old Testament to only be viably read spiritually, due to its varying attempts (some of which are certainly more credible than others) to describe the Christian God, while the New Testament can be read historically, as it is primarily composed of personal discrete accounts of the person and work of Jesus Christ. For the Bible, to the degree that it does anything, bears witness about Jesus, the very Logos. Therefore the scriptures should be read through the lens of Jesus, not Jesus (nor by extension, The Father) read through the lens of the scriptures.
“Because you think to take hold of the life of the Age, you search through the scriptures; and those are what testify concerning me; Yet you do not wish to come to me in order to take hold of life.” John 5:39-40
Regarding your exegesis of Genesis, you comment that Adam and Eve had only every *known* good, but surely they had not truly known The Good, for as you admit at the end, only Jesus has truly known God —The Good — and if you know The Good how could you possibly grow bored or dissatisfied with it, to the degree that you would freely choose to fall or turn away from it? Or in our ultimate knowing, which is the very experience of heaven in the beatific vision, will we continually run the risk of no longer being eternally satiated by the experience and knowledge of The Good, whereby a cycle of willful fallenness and subsequent restoration continues its rehearsal in perpetuity?
Personally I do not take the description of the fall(s) as necessarily accurate word for word historical account(s) of actual temporal events, but rather a picture of what humanity is, and what humanity does — or what the Cosmos is and what the Cosmos does, for “all creation groans.” We do not participate in the fall merely because of Adam, but rather Adam is an example of what human beings consistently choose to do, that is until Jesus. For otherwise, Jesus, in the womb, as a human being, would himself join all of humanity in a supposed guilt, due to some inherited condition of criminal culpability — an error perpetuated by the Vulgate’s mistranslation of Romans 5:12. Rather, as a result of our choices, (and the nature of creatio ex nihilo), we have chosen death, or have contracted the contagion of sin and death, and that choice seems incumbent upon us, due to the nature of our slavery to ignorance — which is exemplified first in Adam, and constitutes the very slavery God intervenes to free us from through the work of Jesus.
Or is John 17:3 meaningless? Knowing is eternal life. As such it seems absurd to imagine that not knowing could continue for very longer after the beatific vision (“face to face). Which as God is not merely an additional, perhaps bigger and older, being amongst other beings, but literally the ground of being itself, there is nothing greater to know or choose. True rational freedom is contingent upon true rational knowledge, and as our knowledge grows so too our list of choices necessarily diminishes: for the chief end of the creature is to grow towards knowing and therefore communing with the Creator — namely God, who is Love, which is the ultimate Good, and therefore the natural end of all rational desire.
Finally, I would defer to Hart on the matter of theodicy. Surely he doesn’t say anything that hasn’t essentially been said by the greatest of the Patristics, but he certainly gives a modern voice to our immediate afflictions:
“There is, of course, some comfort to be derived from the thought that everything that occurs at the level of what Aquinas calls secondary causality — in nature or history — is governed not only by a transcendent providence, but by a universal teleology that makes every instance of pain and loss an indispensable moment in a grand scheme whose ultimate synthesis will justify all things. But consider the price at which that comfort is purchased: it requires us to believe in and love a God whose good ends will be realized not only in spite of — but entirely by way of — every cruelty, every fortuitous misery, every catastrophe, every betrayal, every sin the world has ever known; it requires us to believe in the eternal spiritual necessity of a child dying an agonizing death from diphtheria, of a young mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of millions murdered in death camps and gulags and forced famines. It seems a strange thing to find peace in a universe rendered morally intelligible at the cost of a God rendered morally loathsome.
I do not believe we Christians are obliged — or even allowed — to look upon the devastation visited upon the coasts of the Indian Ocean and to console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. For while Christ takes the suffering of his creatures up into his own, it is not because he or they had need of suffering, but because he would not abandon his creatures to the grave. And while we know that the victory over evil and death has been won, we know also that it is a victory yet to come, and that creation therefore, as Paul says, groans in expectation of the glory that will one day be revealed. Until then, the world remains a place of struggle between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, life and death; and, in such a world, our portion is charity.
As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy. It is not a faith that would necessarily satisfy Ivan Karamazov, but neither is it one that his arguments can defeat: for it has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes — and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, ‘Behold, I make all things new.’”
Source: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2008/05/tsunami-and-theodicy?fbclid=IwAR3fqh0B0oJEVy0OUSxi2XHehPsvl12nWYBk2EavXHwsnLinpCNaWSeZmn8
PS: As ever, we should only contribute our idiosyncratic vantages of the Truth if we are willing to engage in the ever expanding and varying scope of experiential knowledge, and so I hope we continue in our conversation of these things. From what I know of you we will, and I’m grateful both for that and for you.
Love you!
~Jonathan
Hey. Thanks for your comments and for engaging with the article. You are correct that my view draws very heavily from the Old Testament, and from Hebrew. But there is also the distinction in the New Testament of kakos (defective/evil) and ponēros (wicked), which I do not explore in the article, because these distinctions were in their infancy when I wrote this. I have been trying these distinctions on with the texts of both the Old and New Testaments for five years now, and I’m more convinced of the validity of these distinctions than ever.
I have noted that one of the failures of patristic theology is an undue reliance on the concept of evil as the absence of good, which concept also muddles moral/material categories. This concept was inherited from Platonism (Plotinus’ version and particularly the Great Chain of Being), and even Augustine falters in this (e.g., unable to account for the substance of sin re: the stealing of the pears).
I don’t really see why it would be impossible for a good God (who is the source of all life and blessing and good) to, for the sake of the freedom of His creation, permit wickedness, which by definition is cut off from His good nature (and is by nature therefore destined to and immersed in death). If God permits to anyone the freedom to sin, He has permitted evil, unless you think a person can experience good apart from God. I don’t see how you can escape that logically.
Certainly good (agathos or tov,) can have moral as well as material connotations in both the Old and New Testaments, because “goodness” is in accordance with the order of creation and creation’s God. And conversely, much wickedness is actually the doing of evil. To love evil is wicked and contrary to the character of God. The NT urges us to persevere in good. Persevering in good and overcoming evil with good is righteous. But the distinctions still hold in all this. I am not saying the ideas are separate, but distinct.
It is impossible to argue against my distinction by first assuming it to be invalid. Of course it will prove so if one of your premises is that it is so. You seem to think that _any_ legitimate and true knowledge of or communion with God is immutable and complete. Such a supposition seems silly on the face of it, but also even sinless beings can grow in wisdom and even in favor with God. And many people who have been said to have “tasted the heavenly gift” turned back from God. It’s possible. Otherwise you’re stuck with a No True Scotsman argument. Well, if they had had _actual_ knowledge of God, etc. I fail to see how such an argument is any better than the mundane Calvinism you reject. Your concept of goodness seems overly simplified and monistic.
I’m trying to account for evil while maintaining that God is of essence good. This challenge has actually occupied theologians and philosophers for quite some time, so it would not at all surprise me if I had missed the mark by any number of degrees. But your view of the fall and evil/wickedness has more in common with Pelagius than the patristics or Paul, and I don’t think this view fares well against Augustine. Say what you will about the man, but his dismantling of Pelagianism was quite compelling and thorough. I don’t think I need to revisit that dead horse to see if there’s any meat among the bones.
None of that matters a whole lot to me though. If you wouldn’t mind, I would ask a few questions:
What is the origin of evil (as I have defined it—calamity/destruction/death)?
Does God’s nature as “Good” prohibit Him from permitting sin in humankind?
How would you argue that the permitting of sin is not the permitting of evil (through sin came death, etc.)?
Many thanks for your lengthy reply and looking forward to your response,
Michael
In so far as you would paint me to be a Pelagian, I would point you to this article, as I don’t really see a point in regurgitating it, and Hart just represents it better than I could. Simply, to the degree that Augustine could read Latin, he made a compelling and thorough argument. Unfortunately he couldn’t and didn’t attempt to read Greek, and as a result it would seem credible that the entirety of his view, which has shaped much of western thought concerning “original sin,” is derived from the exegesis of a miserably incompetent translation: the Vulgate. You can disagree with my exegesis all you want, but the tragic state of the Vulgate is undeniable, and as a result Augustine’s theological interpretations require careful reconsideration.
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/05/traditio-deformis
I wanted to deal with that first, but I intend to respond to your other comments, though it may take me some time. Appreciate your questions!
I would be interested in an updated article that draws upon your observations of the NT, and I hope you find time to publish such a thing at some point. I suppose I take particular issue with this idea of state sponsored execution as righteous evil, (amongst a host of other things a literalist interpretation of the Old Testament necessarily delivers), because Jesus seems to contradict, and at the very least reinterpret much of the violence, and evil, that the OT would have us believe accurately reflects the character, essence, and nature of God.
Perhaps I am being too simple minded, but I also believe, to the degree that we are given analogous language to describe God, we ought to only be comfortable using those descriptors. Not because they adequately describe God, but rather because of how feebly they capture the infinitude they seek to describe. If God is said to be Good, and to be Love, He is necessarily infinitely more good and more loving than we can possibly imagine (within our own meager construction of what Goodness and Love means), not some expression of 16th century sovereignty in which God simultaneously embodies an endless horizon of possibility between Good and Evil, or Love and Hate, in his eternal rehearsal of omnipotent power before the witnesses of His elect and the damned, simply because He can — but the Emperor Domitian would like to know your location.
Of course classical theism is Neoplatonic, but that doesn’t inherently discredit it, and I happen to think Plato was correct about a lot. If all of philosophy is Plato and Aristotle, I’m more than willing to side with Plato… most of the time. Evil as the absence of good highlights the degree to which evil leads to and signifies ultimate nothingness — the antithesis of both being itself and the telos of creation. Privation also signifies the degree to which evil is ultimately meaningless, and if left unchecked, it would render the entirety of existence a cruel and absurd joke. Which is why, as Christians, when we look into the face of the most severe tragedies (natural and man-made) we do not see the face of God — for God is neither the author of sin nor of death. Rather, He transforms and rescues us precisely from the slavery, and heal us of the contagion. Or would you cast God as some child who constructs his toy enemies for the sake of his own entertainment?
You say, “‘Evil’ in the Bible always refers to calamity, ill, death, destruction, suffering, injury, displeasure, and related things. And those things actually have no intrinsic moral or ethical quantity.”
I would cast Evil as a contingency of human beings, but not necessarily intrinsically so — rather it is primarily extrinsic to us, which is why so much of the decalogue is concerned with governing how we interact with one another in community. I would state that evil has no ontological substance, and furthermore that God does not justify evil, He judges it. In judging and defeating sin and death (evil) he does not commit evil against sin, rather he commits what is good — for this is His essence. We are called not to commit or repay evil against evil. Or would your God hold us to a standard He Himself is beneath?
You state that cancer isn’t necessarily a wicked evil, but I suppose this is where I want to play Plato to your Aristotelian categories: Evil is wicked insofar as it is not life giving, not a reflection of love, and by extension not a reflection of God. Cancer is not life giving, not a reflection of love, and not a reflection of God. I believe cancer is named amongst the enemies of God — which is to say cancer will not be part of the new creation we join all of creation in groaning for. Even still I believe God can transform the evil of our fallen world into that which reflects His goodness, and I believe He suffers with us through the evil(s) of the world. God is not present in the cancer, but he is present with the child battling cancer.
To my point, and rather poignantly so, my wife’s mother was diagnosed with cancer at the beginning of 2020. It was shocking, and scary, and horrible, and many of the things I remember it being when my father was diagnosed, but it was also an opportunity for incredible transformations to take place. My wife’s father, who had previously been employed overseas, returned home, and he has stayed home ever since; we have been able to visit with her family almost every weekend since; My wife’s mother is now in remission; our relationships, which had previously been strained and unenjoyable, are now a source of joy, and at times even peace. I see this as a moment in which evil descended upon the family, and yet God transformed us despite it — but not because of or through it. I do not see cancer as one of God’s instruments, primarily because it is evil. Cancer didn’t reunite and strengthen my new extended family, God did.
In his righteous judgement does God perform evil for the good? No, because true evil is destruction for the sake of destruction (like it is in the world), whereas God is necessarily Good and purposeful. He does not merely punish, He corrects — at least George Mcdonald thought so. You make the interesting but repulsive point that “evil is the cure for wickedness,” and then you “biblically” defend that point with a reading of how God’s act of clothing Adam and Eve represents righteous evil in Genesis. Surely your understanding of the word cure is deeper than the act of clothing — though perhaps I should not underestimate the evil inherent to certain degrees of eye pollution.
Regardless, we should not search for the cure of wickedness through literalistic interpretations of Genesis. Let’s examine the true cure that we confess to be objective reality: Is Jesus’ ministry and death evil, or even righteous evil? Surely the murder is evil, and wicked at that, but the murder is not what cures us (indeed that is what the scapegoatism of human history would have us believe) rather, and primarily even prior to the cross, in His ministry, Jesus forgives sins, heals sickness, casts out evil, and finally overcomes death. None of these things are evil, but they are certainly righteous, and they are certainly a greater cure than clothing.
You have touched upon the degree to which the world is indeed fallen, and the manner in which God ministers to us even despite the fallenness we continually embrace, but by no means is that ministry evil, even if you want to distinguish it as righteous — which seems an obvious and unnecessary contradiction.
You ask: “Does God’s nature as “Good” prohibit Him from permitting sin in humankind?”
The law gives occasion to sin. Here I would state that God creates freely, and as an extension or reflection of God’s freedom, creatures are imbued with a certain kind of freedom — otherwise we would merely be God’s puppets. He also imbues us with rationality, and therefore true freedom can only be expressed rationally. However, true rational freedom is not synonymous with some libertarian expression of the spontaneous ability to enact myriad and random choices, (similar to the behavior of tornados and hurricanes), rather it is the function by which mankind necessarily makes what appears to be the best possible choice(s) to approach what is good for the individual — barring mental illness, or delusions, we do not ever choose evil because it appears to be evil. I believe this expression of true rational freedom comes from God, because it is precisely the same thing that makes God free. God is not the emperor Domitian, regardless of whether Calvin wants Him to be, because to display an expanse of sovereign power that contains the extremes of both good and evil, simply because one can, 1) renders God evil, and 2) does not align with Love (even in it most inadequate definitions), and we are told that God is Love, and that God is Good, and therefore he must only seek that which is infinitely good and infinitely loving — we are told that He does not desire that even one should perish. This is where I want to double down on my assertion that ignorance plays a role in our de-evolution (and knowledge in our progression) towards eternal life: which is knowing God.
“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will drag everyone to me.” John 12:32
By no means do I wish to put forward this notion (you have assigned to me) that any legitimate or true knowledge is synonymous with complete or immutable knowledge. The process of a created thing growing towards the Creator is dependent upon the creature coming to know Him, but by no means does this mean that a person who has come to know something, knows everything — and I wish you would quote where I even suggested such an absurdity. Knowing is a process. It is inherently experimental, and experiential — even Locke knew that.
I do not read Genesis literally, but what I do read in it is that we are the authors of our fallenness. Quite honestly, if Jesus’ death on the cross means anything, sin and death have been conquered — so what is being permitted? If that is so, not only does God not permit sin, He has overcome it. We labor, in our sin, under a delusion, and when we sin we follow the Accuser, (colloquially, Satan) who says and would have us believe that Jesus has not conquered death and hell — this is Evil. For there is nothing in this lie that is true. I suppose one could say this lie is an utter privation of the truth (bet you love that).
Of course, I believe, or at the very least place my convictions in the ultimate redemption of all mankind and the restoration of the cosmos, and as a result, do not view the sufferings that we inflict upon ourselves, nor those we cast upon others, nor those randomly visited upon us and others, as representative of who God is, but rather of who we are apart from God. If the law gives occasion for sin, suffering gives occasion to approach the cross where Christ suffers with us — against Evil, not against God.
You ask: “How would you argue that the permitting of sin is not the permitting of evil (through sin came death, etc.)?”
Quite frankly, to say that God permits sin, or evil, seems to negate the value or weight of what Jesus has done. Regardless, to whatever degree it seems to be permitted within the bounds of time and space, God’s judgement of sin, and by extension triumph over evil (death) seems quite the opposite to anything being ultimately permitted.
When Cain murders Abel, (which is the first time sin is actually referred to in the OT, unless I’m very much mistaken), does God strike the sinner (who has committed evil) down? Does God engage in immediate, violent, “righteous” evil, (vengeance), in the face of our own apparent need and application of violence and wickedness? He does not. He does not impose this so-called righteous evil of state sponsored execution, despite the fact that God has every justification, and requires no jury for His verdict. Yet there is no shadow of turning; yet He is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Perhaps here you would want to suggest that I am picking and choosing pieces of the OT, and that is certainly accurate, but I think there’s a difference between a story that I think (both literally and metaphorically) describes mankind’s use and creation of sin and God’s incredible response to that sin, versus what appears to me (and some noteworthy scholars) to be atrocities that the cultural structures piecing together their blood-soaked histories would prefer to justify by playing the proverbial role of Adam, but this time in response to Eve’s query, “God told me to do the genocide.” I can remember hearing Bush say that he prayed before invading Iraq — perhaps the American Exodus wouldn’t be so dissimilar were it canonized.
I tend to view passages in the OT that would suggest that God is a “blood-drenched, cruel, war-making, genocidal, irascible, murderous, jealous storm-god” as representative of who mankind has always wanted God to be. Which is why when Jesus appears to us, we are confused, and the righteous amongst us are disappointed, if not altogether joining Nietzsche in their palpable disgust, “why does He hang out with the weak sinners — or rather those whom evil most frequently visits?” and even we join Thomas in asking Jesus to “show us the Father” — as we flip through our OT to try and prove to Jesus who the Father really is. If we take the OT literally, Jesus seems to have an agenda diametrically opposed to the god(s) represented over the course of much of the OT. Of course, this is nonsense, the Father and the Son do not have different agendas. Rather:
“It is through Jesus that we learn the true nature of God toward evil: Sin He forgives, sickness He heals, evil He casts out, and death He overcomes.” ~DBH
I particularly enjoy René Girard’s reading of civilization as humanity’s cyclical need and application of violence for the sake of attempting to find something that could perhaps be misconstrued as peace. We love and cling to violence as though the death of each miserable scapegoat we elect to sacrifice, for the sake of some semblance of immediate but short-lived stability, will also bring about our ultimate salvation: it does not.
In your questions you seem to use mere permission as if it’s synonymous with direct action. I want to differentiate between the appearance of God permitting something, and God actively doing something — God is what He does. Evil seems permitted by God, but it’s never what God does. We do evil. Jesus dying on the cross is what God does and who God is, and the only evil in that equation comes from those who enacted capital punishment against an innocent victim — spoiler: that was us.
I could go on, but this seems to be where I want to stop. I would ask how you account for natural disasters and the violence committed against children all over the world? Do those things come from God? Are those righteous evils? Or is your article simply seeking to rescue God from what certain authors of the OT want us to believe about God? If that’s your point, the Patristics already did that. One thing I particularly like about Hart’s approach to theodicy is that he seeks to respond to actual, tangible, current events — something I don’t see you doing here, but perhaps that’s a separate issue for you. Anyway, I look forward to your thoughts, and I’ll end with this:
“If one does not read scripture in a philosophical fashion one is reading only myths with contradictory narratives.” ~Gregory of Nyssa
I appreciate the light you just shared. I have never understood any of this.
Thank you for the encouragement. I’m grateful the article was of use to you!