Why I Am a Christian: The Problem of Evil
Image from Wikimedia Commons: “‘Selection’ of Hungarian Jews on the ramp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau in German-occupied Poland, around May 1944. Jews were sent either to work or to the gas chamber. The photograph is part of the collection known as the Auschwitz Album. See Auschwitz Album, Yad Vashem: "The Auschwitz Album is the only surviving visual evidence of the process leading to mass murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau." The album was donated to Yad Vashem by Lili Jacob (later Lili Jacob-Zelmanovic Meier), a survivor, who found it in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in 1945.” For more images, see Category:Auschwitz Album at Wikimedia Commons.
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One of the objections that I heard and believed as a non-Christian was the objection from evil: A truly good and just God would not permit evil. The God of the Christians permits evil. Ergo, he is neither good nor just. The first (major) premise is to be doubted. The middle (minor) premise is to be qualified and the conclusion rejected.
Some Christians have tried and failed to satisfactorily explain the problem of evil.
There is evil in the world. It is a problem for Christians, and some Christian accounts of the problem are unsatisfactory. For example, the Christian neo-Platonic answer—evil is the privation of good; God is all good; therefore, evil has nothing to do with God—is unsatisfactory. It requires us to believe in a sort of scale of being between the creature and the Creator. There are two great problems with this approach.
First, Scripture does not present us a world in which God and creatures are on a continuum of being. Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning God.” Humans are nowhere to be found. As far as the Genesis narrative is concerned, we do not come into the story until later. God has not even yet spoken creation into existence. When he does create us, it is out of the dust of the earth (Gen. 2:7). When we were created it was not out of the divine being but out of created matter. We were animated, i.e., given life by the Spirit, but we were not created little deities. We were created as image bearers, analogues to God (Gen. 1:126-27). We were created as God’s “image” and “likeness” (these are parallel expressions, not two distinct things).
There are other unsatisfactory explanations of the relations between God and evil. One of them says that the world is “open” to God. He observes it, but he does not have particular influence over it. He would like to do something about evil, but he is unable to do anything. He is more or less helpless and dependent upon us. This picture of the Christian deity is virtually unrecognizable to the Christian tradition, which has confessed since about AD 170 (e.g., in Irenaeus’ “rule of faith,” which grew up to become the Apostles’ Creed): “I believe in God the Father almighty.” The God of so-called “Open Theism,” as Richard Muller observed 37 years ago, reduces the God of the Christians to an “incompetent Marcionite” deity. The god of Open Theism is much closer to the gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon than to the God of Scripture. The god of so-called “Process Theism” is no more useful for addressing the problem of evil. That god is swept up into the historical process. He is a victim of circumstances. In their attempt to save “God” from the problem of evil, the Open Theists and the Process theologians have made little more than an idol.
Perhaps the cleverest Christian attempt to save God from the problem of evil has been the doctrine of “Middle Knowledge.” This theory, which emerged in Jesuit circles in the late sixteenth century, theorized that instead of the traditional Christian doctrine of two kinds of divine knowledge, natural and free, there is a third kind of knowledge wherein God may be said to know exhaustively a set of hypotheticals, all the free choices made by humans and all the consequences of those choices, which he may be said to have limited, but he does not actually determine what those choices will be. Both Roman and Reformed critics savaged this theory as making God contingent upon his creatures. The God of middle knowledge is a very apt chess player with very good reflexes, but he is not the God who spoke into nothing, nor is he the God who raised Pharaoh up that he might show to and by him his glory (Exod. 9:16; Rom. 9:16).
The God of Scripture offends our sensibilities. He unleashes Satan briefly to sift Job, so much so that righteous Job is finally provoked to complain, to which Yahweh replies: pound sand (see Job, chapters 38 and following). The book of Job is meant to shock our sensibilities. That God is not taken up in the historical process nor is the future “open” to him. He is not contingent upon our free choices. He is sovereign, free, and beyond our judgment.
Pagans don’t have an answer for the problem of evil.
Thus, it is true that the pagans, however, have no answer for the problem of evil either. The Greco-Roman pantheon is, at times, evil itself. They are helpless against evil. The existentialists have essentially given up on transcendent meaning. They are more or less quitters. Existentialism does no more than remove the meaning of evil. The Enlightenment rationalists cannot explain evil, nor have they overcome it. Modern technology has made evil more efficient. Instead of one stupid, venal king killing a few hundred in some meaningless battle, in World War I Modernity gave us a brutally efficient warfare from which it was almost impossible to run. We were so “enlightened” we gassed each other and for what? If anything, Modernity has, in that way, intensified the problem of evil.
It is a great evil that one-third of the world population should die of the Black Plague in the 1340s, but it is a greater evil when Moderns killed the same number of people in World War II. No one set out to unleash rat fleas and disease on the world, but Stalin set out to murder millions of Kulaks (peasants who owned land, whom the Communists blamed for a famine instead of their own collectivist agricultural policies). Mao murdered millions of suspected counter-revolutionaries in China. The Nazis murdered millions of Jews and others, and all this after the “Enlightenment” under which we were supposed to be making progress every day in every way. Ghengis Khan (c. 1158–1227) killed a great number of people (perhaps a million or more), but he was a piker compared to Mao, Stalin, and Hitler. Empiricism cannot explain the problem of evil. It can merely count the bodies.
Only the Judeo-Christian tradition, however, has faced evil squarely and called it what it is.
In short, evil is a problem for everyone. Only the Judeo-Christian tradition, however, has faced evil squarely and called it what it is. The biblical account of evil places the blame squarely upon the free choices made by humans. We were created with the ability to make righteous choices, but, mysteriously, we chose to try to achieve deity, thus introducing sin and evil into the world. Scripture makes allusions to created figures—angelic beings—who had introduced evil into their realm before the humans fell, but it does not give us much detail and it does not dwell on it. As a literary matter, the Satan character is clearly corrupt before he came into contact with the righteous Adam character (Gen. 3:1–7). Scripture, however, places the blame for the fall on Adam. After the fall, God does not come looking for Satan but for Adam (Gen. 3:8–13). The Satan character is punished along with the humans, but it is the humans who get the blame.
The biblical story is that God is sovereign over all things. Nothing happens outside his purview or his providence, and yet he is not liable for the evil that happens in the world. In Scripture, whenever humans seek to blame God (e.g., Rom. 9:19), he rebukes them forcefully. The truth is that Scripture never offers a comprehensive answer to the problem of evil. It presents it. It describes it. It lays the blame at our feet and our choices, but unlike the other approaches to the problem of evil, the God of Scripture is not remote. He remains engaged in human history. He provides relief and even salvation to those who perpetrate evil. Scripture calls this grace. The God of Scripture restrains the consequences of the fall and limits the evil that occurs. As bad as things sometime seem, they could be worse. Despite the very real existence of evil, there is also beauty and goodness in the world. Despite the hatred and animosity, which makes up so much of what the media companies call “the news,” there is also real love in the world.
God is so committed to addressing the problem of evil that God the Son took on true human nature.
According to the Christian account of the problem of evil, God is so committed to addressing the problem that one of the three persons of the deity, God the Son, became incarnate, by the mysterious operation of the Holy Spirit, in the womb of a young Jewish virgin. He took on true human nature. The Greeks had theorized about humans becoming gods, but no one—not the Jews, nor the Greeks—imagined that the God who spoke creation into being would stoop to become one of us. According to the Scriptures, God the Son did not merely appear to be human. He really was and remains human. The book of Hebrews in the New Testament is at pains to make this point (Heb. 2:14–18; 4:15). The Apostle John strenuously asserted this point (1 John 4:2; 2 John 1:7). The early church vigorously defended the true humanity (and the essential goodness of creation despite the fall) against the Gnostics and the Marcionites.
So, we say that God the Son, Jesus Christ, entered human history, became intimately involved in it, coming into direct personal contact with the muck and evil that we had created. He did not contribute to it in any way. He ameliorated it for many people, and finally, after he revealed who he was and why he came, we humans beat him, mocked him, and murdered him in the most vicious possible way. Yet, he testified repeatedly that this is why he came: to be the substitute for sinners and to face the wrath of God that was due us (Luke 24:26). He came to be “the lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:36). The Christian explanation of things is that this death is a turning point in history. It is essential to the Christian understanding of the problem of evil because evil is not ultimate.
Evil will not ultimately triumph.
There is an end of the story. Evil will not ultimately triumph. The technical name for this category is “eschatology.” There is more to the story. There is a judgment coming. Jesus himself warned frequently of the coming judgment (e.g., Matt. 10:15; 11:22; 12:36; John 5:24; 16:8). The Christians say that Jesus suffered the judgment in place of all those who believe. For those who do not believe the judgment remains. When we speak of judgment it is theoretical. We have not experienced it, but according to the gospels it did not remain theoretical for him. He actually endured the judgment on the cross. After hours of torture, he finally cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46).
Yet, as I already described, another central Christian claim is that Jesus was righteous. Unlike us, he had done no evil and committed no sin. He was perfectly righteous all his life and even in his death. Thus, death had no hold on him, and he was raised from the dead as a vindication of his righteousness. He is reigning now, administering his kingdom, and graciously saving sinners until the end. Then he will sit as judge over all things. There will be a reckoning for all the evil in the world, and things shall be made right.
God does not explain himself, but neither does he abandon us to ourselves.
Jesus’ suffering was not meaningless. It was saving. Human suffering generally is not meaningless. It is part of a great, complicated, mysterious story. It is part of how God is ordering history and achieving his ends. He does not explain himself, but neither does he abandon us to ourselves. I am content to live with that. It makes more sense than evolutionary determinism (How did the process start? Why is life good in a blind, evolutionary scheme?) or Enlightenment rationalism or Stoicism or Epicureanism or any of the alternatives.
I am not a Christian because the Christian explanation of evil is superior. I am a Christian because, by the grace of God, I came to see what I am (a sinner), what God is (a righteous but gracious personal deity), that Jesus is God the Son incarnate, the God-Man, who obeyed in my place, died for me, was raised for me, is preserving me, and will come again finally to make all things right. Nevertheless, I believe in order that I might understand what we can know about the problem of evil. There is no comprehensive, exhaustive answer. But there is a righteous person worthy of trust who knows more about evil than I shall ever know, and he has earned my trust. It is reasonable to trust him and I do.
This article by R. Scott Clark is adapted from “Why I am a Christian” at heidelblog.net. Click here to read the entire post, which addresses common objections to the Christian faith.
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