Notes Along the Way: Durham 2.2 -- The Summer of Schindler's List

Continued from the previous post
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6. The summer of 1994 featured two movies that related to the problem of evil and suffering. I'm sure you know the drill. If God is all powerful, then he is able to stop evil and suffering. If God is all good, you'd think he'd want to stop evil and suffering. Then why does evil and suffering continue to exist?

This question had really begun to trouble me in my final years in Wilmore. It's not that I faced either great suffering or evil. I never have thus far. My mother and father both lived long lives and both passed as peacefully as I would want to. Have I had struggles and disappointments? Of course, but none beyond what is fairly normal for a mortal on this earth.

I have mentioned my struggle with the seeming silence of God. I've mentioned my decade of torture from about the age of 10 to the age of 20. I cried out to God repeatedly for a sense of peace and forgiveness, but most of the time did not sense any clear answer.

In my last couple years in Wilmore, my study of Scripture kept revealing how little my church circles really understood about the Bible. If you have been reading this series, you'll have a sense of that journey. And so, perhaps it is no surprise that I began to long for some sort of direct sign from God of his presence.

7. My final year in Kentucky, I was the facilitator for a small Sunday school class at Stonewall Wesleyan Church in Lexington, where I attended. The two daughters of Gary Cockerill of Wesley Biblical/Hebrews fame were in the small group. Because I had the subject on my mind, we read Philip Yancey's Where Is God When It Hurts. 

To be honest, it just didn't satisfy. Frankly, I have never heard an explanation that entirely satisfies. The two main explanations are the free will theodicy (God gives us freedom, which means some are going to freely do the wrong thing) and the soul making theodicy (suffering gives us the opportunity to grow). They both are helpful but still not entirely satisfying.

Over the years, I've engaged a few books on this topic (even took a shot at writing one). At IWU, our Monday reading group read Satan and the Problem of Evil by Greg Boyd. Steve Horst really likes this book. Its biggest move is to give substantial blame to Satan. In Boyd's view, Satan provides a bigger context for the evil and suffering of the world than just the two main explanations.

I actually found The Shack to be somewhat helpful. However, I've never been able to bring myself to be a universalist. I would say it is the free will theodicy on steroids.

This past year, a reading group I'm in with the Horsts and the Varadmans read Tim Keller's, Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering. Again, I didn't find any silver bullets in the book. There was a line that I resonated strongly with. He suggests that all the different explanations taken together help quite a bit, but there is no one explanation that seems to fully satisfy nor do they all add up to a comprehensive explanation.

That final year in Kentucky, I would shout out to God (silently) during prayer. During the pastoral prayers at Stonewall, I was silently screaming to God, begging for some sort of word that was definitively him. I even asked him to punish me somehow just so I would know he was there. I bought Hans Kung's huge book Does God Exist? As usual of course, it didn't hold my attention.

8. So the summer of 1994 seemed like a gut punch. First, there was Schindler's List. As Keller has pointed out, the real challenge is not your run of the mill suffering. Yes, that absolutely can keep us from becoming morally flabby--no pain no gain. It builds character. It shapes our moral muscles

But the Holocaust was "over the top" evil. It is "gratuitous suffering" that is the challenge. Six million Jews--how much character does that build? Yes, Hitler was defeated. But how many times in history were the Hitlers not defeated? How many times--so many times, maybe most of the time--did the "Hitler" in question win?

If that wasn't enough, Shadowlands came out later in the summer. This is the story of C. S. Lewis' struggle with the cancer and death of his wife. That story in itself wasn't so difficult to handle. It was that story as a follow up to Schindler's List that was forceful. It was a one-two punch.

Lewis looks foolish in the movie when he presents the problem of pain. The movie means to portray him that way. I love the look of complete puzzlement on one lady after he talks about suffering as God's chisel whose blows hurt so bad but make a fine sculpture out of us.

In the movie, Lewis is on a journey to knowledge. At the end of the movie, he still has faith, but he is much wiser than when he gave his lectures. He's sure God has his reasons, but he's still the vivisectionist. He shouts at a priest giving him the kinds of responses he himself has given in the past. The son, meanwhile, decides not to believe in God.

"Pain is the megaphone God uses to rouse a deaf world." I'm not sure I like that. Lewis, who accepted evolution most of the time and didn't necessarily see Adam as a literal human, mostly relied on the soul making argument to answer the problem of evil. Like most explanations, it helps a little but still leaves one wanting more.

9. I remember having some friends over to dinner in my flat that summer. One of the friends was an atheist, a PhD student in philosophy. "You know the best answer to the problem of evil and suffering is that God just doesn't exist to stop it." I told him I understood all his arguments. 

"Then why do you still believe," he asked.

"I don't know," I responded. "I just do."

10. To me, most of the core questions about God have fairly easy, rational answers. The cosmological argument, the fine tuning argument--these make a lot of rational sense to me. The resurrection of Christ can be argued for on the basis of historical evidence.

To me, the problem of evil and suffering require more faith. God gave us a choice, so some are going to make the wrong choice. Makes sense. Makes a whole lot more sense than hyper-Calvinism, which makes God responsible for every last evil thing that has ever happened in the world.

Suffering gives us an opportunity to grow and express moral character. Yes, makes sense.

But there is a point where the suffering and evil are so great, that these explanations do not seem satisfying. That's when I have to press the mystery button. We have to believe God is in control. We have to believe that God loves us and is good. As the priest in Shadowlands says, "We see so little here."

We don't see the whole picture. That's the best we can do to fill in the gap between the explanations that make sense and what is left to mystery.

11. After decades of reflection on the question, two insights seem likely to me, although I welcome the Lord or someone else to show me otherwise. One is that death and suffering in themselves don't have any moral significance. Death is not bad. Suffering is not bad. Pain is not bad. The agents that cause them are what can make those events evil.

One of the biggest realizations I've had in the last five years is that not only in Genesis but likely in Paul as well, death was part of God's creation. It wasn't meant to be the end game, but it was the beginning. Eternal life was always a modification, an addition, to our natural state. The tree of life adds eternal life. 

Death was not the intention for humanity, but it was our created state. That suggests that death is not bad in itself.

A second insight is that, while we can see God at work everywhere if we orient ourselves that way, it is highly unusual to receive direct and unambiguous words from him. Again, it is not that we cannot see and hear him continuously. It is that all of these moments could be taken differently. They are a matter of interpretation most of the time. 

If you believe that God is speaking, you will hear him. But rarely will you have a speaking that is direct in an indisputable way. Faith is always involved in hearing God.

I can see God constantly at work in my life. Am I absolutely certain in each case that it is God? No. And that's ok. I'm thankful all the same.

The Origins of Evil

I've been working in the "innards" of a micro-course for Kingswood Learn featuring Chris Bounds: "Basic Christian Beliefs." This site with free resources for the church is going to be spectacular, by the way! Look it up. Working on the course made me think of a book I published.

It's been a few years since I self-published The Problem of Evil and Suffering: Why Does God Allow It? in 2012. I don't know that my thoughts have particularly changed much in the last 11 years. My presentation has likely improved and sharpened.

Some of my thoughts are just the same old same old:

• Augustine, blah, blah, blah -- Free will is better than being robots. But if you give an Adam a free will, he might just use it. Bam. Evil.
• Irenaeus, blah, blah, blah -- Without suffering and resistance, we would get morally flabby. C. S. Lewis and the problem of pain (not sure if I mention Lewis much)

So the book didn't have "Wow, all my questions are finally answered!" dynamic. Frankly, I'm not sure if I've ever sold a single copy!

So none of that material is new. Where I am unusual is in what I might call a contextualist approach to evil. Augustine and Lewis are still Platonists. They tend to treat good as a thing.

For me, good is an adjective, not a noun. It describes certain intentions and the actions that follow. I thus disagree with Augustine both in his thinking that evil is a "privation" of the good or a twisting of the good. Both assume that good is a thing.

Here's the Table of Contents:

1. Where Was God?

2. Questionable Explanations

3. What Is Evil?

4. Pain Is Not Evil.

5. What Is Sin?

6. Does God Tempt?

7. God and Catastrophes

8. What Did God Create Evil?

9. Why Does God Allow It?

Back to work...

Chapter 7 Excerpt -- Good

Excerpts so far from God with Ten Words:

• Mystery
• Love
• Power (excerpt 1)
• Power (excerpt 2)
• Knowledge (excerpt 1)
• Knowledge (excerpt 2)
• Presence (excerpt 1)
• Presence (excerpt 2)
• Immanuel (excerpt 1)
• Immanuel (excerpt 2)

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... The classic answer is the second one. God is good. God could stop evil and suffering. But God has good reasons not always to do so, even though we often do not know what they are.

When I think of this question, I often think of the story of Abraham arguing with God over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18. God knows how the conversation is going to end. God knows how many righteous people are in Sodom and has since the creation of the world. But God walks through the conversation with Abraham for Abraham’s sake. Abraham is a creature in time. God is outside of time and knows exactly how it will turn out without forcing it to go a certain way.

“Will you save Sodom for fifty righteous people?”

“Sure,” God says.

“What about forty?” “What about thirty?” “Twenty?” “Ten?”

Again, God saw this conversation before the foundation of the world. God knew what Abraham would (freely) ask, and God knew what would be answered.

What I find particularly interesting about the conversation is one of Abraham’s questions. “Will not the Judge of all the land do justice?” (Gen. 18:25).

To me, this is an excellent picture of our situation. We know that God is good and will always do what is the best and what is right. The problem is that we do not always know what that is. God does, but we don’t.

Is COVID-19 God's Judgment?

1. Whenever there is a disaster, it is natural for us to ask why, especially when we believe in a God whose has a defining characteristic of love. We find the same question in the Bible in more than one place. In Luke 13, Jesus addresses some Galileans that Pilate had killed and some people who had a tower fall on them in Siloam (Luke 13:1-5). Was it a punishment for their sin? What about the young man who had been born blind? Had his parents sinned or had he sinned to bring it on (John 9:2)?

The Bible does indicate that events can be a consequence of sin. Israel loses a battle with Ai because of Achan's sin (Joshua 7). The northern and southern kingdoms both meet their demise as a consequence of their sin (2 Kings 17, 24:3). And it is not just the Old Testament. Ananias and Sapphira die in Acts 5 as a result of their sin, and need we merely mention the book of Revelation.

2. It is important to have a "whole Bible" theology of such questions. Once we begin to read the Bible in context, we realize that we get different angles on these questions from different books. I have hypothesized often that there is a growing precision on some subjects in the course of the Bible. The afterlife seems to be an example of this dynamic.

Another example is what we might call Deuteronomistic theology. Deuteronomistic theology gives us a basic principle--obedience to God leads to blessing, disobedience leads to disaster. However, Deuteronomy and the historical books that follow it (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings) only look at this question from the standpoint of this life. Those who teach a prosperity gospel tend to focus on these parts of the Bible while ignoring others.

However, it is clear that not all suffering is a consequence of sin and disobedience. Jesus denies it in John 9 mentioned above. Indeed, Isaiah 53 and Jesus himself illustrate that a righteous person can be persecuted unjustly. Ecclesiastes is rife with the sense that, from all appearances, it often looks like the wicked sometimes prosper and the "good die young."

Ironically, the most righteous king in 2 Kings, Josiah, dies prematurely in battle. The most evil king of Judah, Manasseh, has a long and prosperous reign and dies peacefully in bed. The situation deeply troubled many at the time. The generation that went into captivity felt like they were being punished for the sins of their parents' generation.

Psalm 44:17 captures this lament well: "All this came upon us although we had not forgotten you. We had not been false to your covenant." There was a saying that circulated around Israel: "Our fathers ate sour grapes, but it is our teeth that hurt" (Jer. 31:29; Ezek. 18:2). God says he is going to change the policy. From now on it will be the person who does the sin who will die, not their children or grandchildren (Ezek 18:4).

2. Here is a good illustration of growing precision within the pages of the Old Testament. "God has no grandchildren"--our eternal fate is a matter of our individual relationship to God, not that of our parents. It goes the other way as well--our eternal judgment is not a matter of our parents either.

There are still consequences to sin in this life, of course. If a mother takes drugs while pregnant, God may not intervene to protect the unborn child from the consequences. The child of an alcoholic parent may still have to deal with the psychological consequences of growing up in that environment.

The book of Job brings out the complexity of the situation. Job suffers even though he has not sinned. He never finds out why in the pages of the book. God comes to him at the end and basically tells him that understanding the situation is above his pay grade. Here is the final answer to the problem of suffering. God is in control. God is good and knows what is happening. We will never fully understand. We must simply have faith that "the judge of all the earth will do what is right" (Gen. 18:25).

Of course we know that Satan has made a wager with God from Job 1-2. Job never finds this out. In my Wesleyan theology, this is a good example of the fact that much of the suffering that happens in the world is a matter of God's permissive will rather than his directive will. That is to say, God does not directly order everything that happens.

God is sovereign. Nothing happens without God's permission. God is in control. God signs off on everything. But God gives some degree of freedom to the creation. God gives some degree of freedom to humanity and to the natural order. God knows what will happen, but he does not dictate everything that will happen.

There is of course a competing view, the idea that "everything happens for a reason." There is the Calvinist view that God specifically directs everything that happens. In my view, this makes God the author of evil. It makes the statement that God is love meaningless.

3. An important observation here is that the understanding of Satan is not present in the earliest parts of the Old Testament. Satan only appears in Job 1-2, 1 Chronicles 21, and Zechariah 3. It is common to think of Job as one of the earliest books of the Old Testament but in my view this is the common confusion of the subject matter of a book with the circumstances of its writing.

This is another example of growing precision in understanding as we move through the Bible. The earliest parts of the Bible simply ascribe all spiritual activity to God. This is not untrue, since God approves of everything that happens.

But it is not as precise as an awareness of Satan. Does God really directly send evil spirits on King Saul (1 Sam. 16:14)? Does God directly command that a person be born blind or deaf (Exod. 4:11)? These are true but imprecise statements. God signs off on everything that happens. But we now know that Satan is often the more direct instigator.

Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in comparing 2 Samuel 24:1 with 1 Chronicles 21:1 The first says that God tempted David to sin. The second says that Satan did it. If we have no sense of a developing precision in understanding, these two passages will certainly seem to contradict each other. In the end, James gives us the final word: "Let no one say when tempted that God is tempting me. For God is not tempted with evil nor does he tempt anyone" (Jas. 1:13).

4. All of that is background to the question at hand. Is COVID-19 God's judgment in some way?

We can say with certainty that God has allowed COVID-19 to happen. God is in control. But we cannot say with any certainty whether God is judging certain people. That is above our pay grade. We have an urge to speculate on such questions, but Job tells us we must trust that God is in control and resist matters that are beyond our understanding. We are not competent to fish for Leviathan with a fish hook (Job 41:1)!

We can say that Christians will die. Indeed, some American Christians have been very resistant to believe in the current crisis. What if they had died in higher numbers as a result? Even if that had happened, Job would implore us not to conclude that such an eventuality would have been God's judgment on us in some way.

We can conclude that God has and will likely allow people to experience the consequences of their choices. We do not know the intentions or detailed actions of the Chinese government. But God has allowed China and the world to experience the consequences. I do not know whether the United States has mishandled the lead up to the crisis here. But God may very well let the rest of us experience the consequences.

In all this I remember that death is not so powerful in the face of Christ. Death has no victory over us! In my own journey with the problem of evil and suffering, a key conclusion has been that I give too much credit to death and suffering, as if they are a big deal.

God is a big deal. I am only a big deal because God loves me. My death is only a big deal because I am one of the sparrows God watches over.

So I will take precautions. I will be vigilant. I will heed the advice of experts. I will pray for my leaders. I will pray for others.

But in the end, "The LORD is with me. I will not be afraid what a mortal [or a virus] might do to me."

England - Problem of Evil 8

previous post
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67. In the early 90s, the biggest challenge to my faith was not so much theology. I've already mentioned that the resurrection is historically likely if you accept that it is philosophically possible. And having gone through the fires of historical criticism, I believe you come out the other end with an outline of Jesus' earthly life that coheres with the Christ of faith.

The greatest boost and the greatest challenge to faith, in my opinion, is experience. If a person has benchmark experiences of God to which they can refer back, their faith has an asset more powerful than any argument. If a person experiences unfathomable suffering or deafening silence, that is when their faith will likely be most vulnerable.

My sense of apologetics has developed over the years. When I was in my teens, I was totally on board with the "evidence demands a verdict approach." In more recent days, I've integrated my theology of prevenient grace into the mix. Wesleyans technically believe it is only the prevenient grace of God that makes free will possible when it comes to justifying faith.

When you bring that into discussion of apologetics, it becomes clear that apologetics is only a tool. Our minds cannot bring us to faith; only our hearts can. Apologetics can thus remove obstacles to faith but it cannot produce faith. Only a heart of faith can produce an act of faith. Reason is just the messenger.

To quote Blaise Pascal, "God wishes to move the will rather than the mind. Perfect clarity would help the mind and harm the will." To put it in my words, "God has left the evidence for his existence and the truth of Christianity potentially ambiguous. If your heart is inclined to faith, you will see the positive evidence. If your heart is not, you will see the negative."

68. There were two powerful movies that reached Durham in the summer of 1994. It always took a few months for movies that had already shown in the States to get to England. Very annoying! This summer, the two movies of interest were Schindler's List and Shadowlands.

Schindler's List was of course a powerful movie relating to the Holocaust. Why did God allow the Nazis to wreak such havoc on Germany and the world? From 1933 to 1945, Hitler inflicted such great injustice and seemed to go unchecked. When I took my sabbatical in Munich in 2011, I became acquainted with the Munich students who called themselves the "White Rose." They tried to muster public opposition to the Nazis and were executed by guillotine in 1943.

Why didn't God stop their execution? Why didn't people listen to them? Even the assassination attempts on Hitler's life failed, when their success would have saved thousands, maybe even millions of lives.

I spent some time in the summer of 1995 in Tübingen, Germany. I stayed in the home of Frau Ilse Michel, wife of the great conservative German scholar Otto Michel. She lost three sons in World War II, all fighting on the German side. Her husband Otto spent the last half of his life as an ardent supporter of Jewish-Christian relations. He is remembered and honored as a pious man, which I believe he was.

However, it turns out that in the early 1930s, he signed up first for the NSDAP and then for the SA. [1] He resigned from the SA in 1936 because of his health. I strongly suspect that, in those days, he was not unlike many conservative American Christians today in his faith. He simply did not see the contradiction. I would like to think that, as Hitler's dictatorship progressed, Michel came to realize the error of his earlier ways.

But I was not surprised to find this backstory out today. I did a little digging today on a hunch. Michel fit the temperament of a certain kind of American Christian I know very well.

This raises a serious question for faith. Why doesn't God let the truth be known to Christians like this? Surely there were many ardent Christians in Germany who had a zeal for Germany but were deceived. Why didn't God correct them? Why did God let Otto Michel, of all good people, know that he was dead wrong about Hitler's movement? [2]

I suspect there were many conservative Christians in Germany who supported Hitler in his rise. They probably believed he was only punishing bad people and that the Jews were evil people who needed to be stopped. And they didn't believe reports about what Hitler's real intentions and ambitions were. Maybe even Hitler himself didn't fully know at first where his political maneuvering would end up.

In a particular phase of his rise, all it took was for him to say the right thing or do something that fit their values, and their subconscious doubts fled away. Those Christians who objected soon learned that if they continued to be vocal, they would face persecution or even death. For their own safety they watched the Nazis take away the non-German, the immigrant, the homosexual, the communist, the liberal.

69. The second movie of the summer of 1994 was Shadowlands. It was a movie about how C. S. Lewis came to grips with the suffering and death of his own wife. I was annoyed at the movie because I did not know enough about Lewis to know the degree to which the movie might be overly dramatizing the story.

In the movie, Lewis goes from giving glib answers to the problem of suffering to a real personal sense that those answers were inadequate. Lewis' early answer to the problem of suffering and evil, as I understand it, was largely limited to what we might call the "Irenaean theodicy." This is the idea that suffering helps us grow and become more mature moral individuals.

In the movie, the death of his wife makes him feel this answer inadequate. I believe there is truth to this portrayal. At the end of the movie, he does decide for faith, even though he recognizes he doesn't have all the answers. By contrast, his step-son chooses in the opposite direction. [3]

Many who choose the step-son's direction, I believe, don't really mean it. Their anger betrays them. You can't get angry with God if you truly don't believe he exists. While the problem of pain may present a challenge to our sense of God as love, pain would be completely meaningless if God did not exist. This is the desirability of Gods' existence based on our belief that evil is real and not meaningless.

70. Sometime that summer an atheist student asked me why I still believed in God in the face of such questions. I could not explain it. "I just do," was my answer. [4]

Faith is a mystery. I do not agree with Kierkegaard that it is blind or irrational. It is reasonable to have faith.

But it is something deeper than reason. "The heart has reasons that reason doesn't know." (Pascal). There are those who confess faith whose heart shows no sign of it. Is it possible that there are some who confess doubts but whose heart is full of faith?

[1] The NSDAP was the Nazi Party. The SA were the storm troopers, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.

[2] In a slightly different vein, Hannah Arendt wrote about the "banality of evil" as she observed the trial of Adolf Eichmann. He appeared "terribly and terrifyingly normal."

[3] A delightful student named Emma had on her door once at Durham, "If evolution is true, then animals are just as significant as humans. Discuss." I never responded, but my thought was, "If [atheistic] evolution is true, then humans are just as meaningless as animals."

[3] On an occasion at dinner my first term, I sat with another person who would become a friend. Quite innocently, I asked him if he was a Christian. After all, Johns had a Christian foundation. His response was a little strong. "No, I'm an atheist, the thinking kind." :-)

The Moral Value of Pain

I thought it might be helpful to set the various views of pain as I understand them next to each other. Where have I gone wrong in my analysis of the varying positions? Have I missed anything?

1. The Naturalist Perspective
This perspective does not believe in God or a human soul, so it would make us merely highly evolved animals with no eternal destiny. From this perspective, therefore, pain is simply painful. It has no real significance other than the fact that it hurts us and those who empathetically hurt with us. Pain thus presents no moral problem.

2. The Buddhist View
In this view, pain is part of the nature of things. We are nothing, so our pain is nothing. In fact, pain becomes good because it moves us toward nirvana. We experience it as our karma from our past actions, perhaps in past lives or existences. It is thus just. In this view, pain is good, part of the justice of the universe and something that moves us toward good.

3. The Hyper-Calvinist and Muslim View
Since in these views God directly dictates everything that happens in the universe, pain simply becomes God's will. It is good because God says so. God in fact has dictated it, or it is the will of Allah. Pain thus is good because God wills it.

4. The Augustinian/Arminian View
God did not create the world with pain. God created the world with the possibility of pain. Pain is a consequence of Adam's sin. But a world where we are free to choose good or evil is a better world than one in which there is no evil or pain. God sometimes intervenes to stop pain, but sometimes he does not intervene because there is a greater good in play. Pain thus not God's ideal for any specific situation, but it is good in the light of his overall design.

5. The Theistic Creationist View
Those who believe that God used an evolutionary process to create humanity must in some way assume that pain is part of God's plan for the creation. Pain therefore must not be intrinsically bad. Might they then assume that part of God's plan is/was to remove pain for homo sapiens forever? If they take Adam literally, might they blame him for messing up the removal of pain by keeping humanity from the tree of life? If they take him as symbolic, might Jesus' resurrection point to an as yet future human destiny without pain? Irenaeus' theodicy might fit in here as well--pain and suffering provides us with a context in which we can either grow or diminish in character. In any case, this view would not necessarily view pain as bad.

6. The Open View
Because God has created the world with freedom--or perhaps because of his nature--this view might assert that God cannot stop pain without ending human freedom. Or an extreme version might say that he simply cannot stop evil because his nature is love, and love can only persuade, not force. Maybe it makes us feel good to conclude that pain is always bad and that God is always against it, but this God is not all powerful. He's more like a very loving Zeus. This is the only view, it seems to me, where pain is actually bad.

7. Warning to the "Abandon the Faith" View
At this point, someone might be tempted to throw away faith. What kind of God allows pain? But once you throw away God, you're back at the naturalist view (or perhaps the Buddhist view, which requires just as much faith as the Christian view). If there is no God, then pain is completely meaningless, other than the fact that it hurts. We are back where we began. Pain is not bad and you can't blame God because you've thrown him away.

Conclusion
In conclusion, pain is not morally problematic unless you don't believe God is omnipotent. And in that case, you have bigger problems than the problem of pain.

Is this logic sound? Have I missed something? Thoughts?

The Question of Evil

1. I don't think the biggest question in relation to faith is science. Nor am I threatened by battles over the Bible. Christ has died; Christ has risen; Christ will come again. We're good. The evidence doesn't have to demand anything, but it is plausible. There is no body. Multiple people were strongly convinced they had seen Jesus alive in different places and at different times after he died. In the end, faith is not based in proof.

The biggest question in relation to faith is why a loving God allows evil and suffering to continue in the world. I find incredulous the hocus pocus of some who wave a magic wand and say, "Love is whatever God does by definition." God has already defined love just fine in Scripture numerous times. He has defined it in Christ, not least. It involves related words like "saving," "giving," "kind," "hopes."

2. By faith, we believe that God is love, defined in the normal ways. The world does not always look that way. But then again, I don't believe God directly wills every event that happens. In many cases, I believe God allows things to happen that would not be his preferred course. This is the question of how much freedom God has built into his creation and given to humanity.

Some believe God directly decides and causes every event that happens. The problem is that this view makes God into Satan, almost literally, for it would mean that God directs every action Satan takes. Then he would direct the action of every demon down to the last evil detail. God becomes the direct author of all evil. God would then direct every feeling of pleasure that the worst serial killer has.

No, that position more or less makes Christianity incoherent, a devilish religion much to be avoided.

3. Most of the time, we will not know why God allows specific events of evil and suffering. We only know that they fit in some way with God's love. We know that God is currently allowing evil to fight back against him, although its days are numbered. There are personal agents of evil in the world, ranging from Satan to lost human individuals needing to find their God.

We know that God's priorities are eternal rather than the temporary. We know that we do not always have a good sense of what is most important. We know that God can use suffering for good. There can also be times when the good weighs against the good, but we cannot discern the better because we do not know the big picture.

In the end, however, these answers are not likely to feel sufficient in the moment of pain. Ideas and head answers are always weak in the face of the heart. For our pains, God has given us each other as an answer. Brothers and sisters in Christ are God's immediate answers to the question of evil and suffering. And by faith we know that God is still in control.

4. What we know is that Christ cries with us. He remains fully human. In Christ, God embraced our suffering, and in Christ he embraces it still.

E3. Suffering in itself is not evil.

Now the third post in the third section of theology in bullet points.
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Suffering, in itself, is not evil. It is evil when a person wants to cause suffering for no good reason, but the suffering in itself is not evil.

For example, it can be painful to undergo certain types of medical treatments. A doctor might tell a patient, "This is going to hurt a little bit" before doing something that will ultimately help him or her. Good parents let their children struggle sometimes so that they can learn how to live on their own and learn the consequences of certain actions.

Suffering is thus not evil unless there is an evil intention behind it. Even in this case, it is the intention that is more precisely evil rather than the suffering itself.

Pleasure and pain thus do not align precisely with good and evil. [1] As with evil, it depends on the context and the object of desire. [1] From a Christian perspective, pleasure is often not good. So the pleasure of eating in itself is good, but the pleasure some get from gluttony is not. The pleasure of sex is good, but the pleasure some get from indiscriminate sex is not.

The problem of suffering is thus not the suffering itself. The question of suffering is the question of why God allows it to take place. Why does God allow people he loves to experience pain?

On one level, the answer to this question is similar to the situation of a parent and child. Children need to do things for themselves so that they can mature and eventually become adults. They need to learn from their mistakes and be redirected when their intentions are evil.

The "problem of evil" is the question of why a good God allows good people to suffer and evil people to prevail. One of the earliest Christian explanations of the problem of suffering and evil (called a "theodicy") was that of the early Christian Irenaeus (late 100s). It is thus called the "Irenaean theodicy." In his explanation, God allows suffering in the world so that we can grow morally. Choices for good make us more virtuous, and we make those choices when we are confronted with challenges. Are we going to take the easy way out? Are we going to harm others to help ourselves?

The muscles of a person who is bedridden for a prolonged period of time will atrophy. "Use it or lose it," the saying goes. In the same way, if we do not face challenges and moral choices in life, it will not be possible for us to mature in character and virtue. It is the way God has created us.

Some suffering also is a result of the choices of others. Augustine (354-430) suggested that the world God created, in which Adam can choose good or evil, is a good world. This is sometimes called the "Augustinian theodicy." A world in which we can freely choose the good is a good world. However, we can also freely choose to do evil in that world as well, and when one person chooses evil, it can lead to the suffering of others.

These theodicies go a long way toward explaining how a God who loves the universe might allow evil and suffering. They suggest that God allows us to make choices for evil because doing so also allows us to make choices for good. The downside is of course that others may experience suffering as a result of our bad choices.

They also suggest that suffering can be a tool of virtue. Indeed, we should probably try not to think of suffering as intrinsically bad. Often, although not always, those who question God in times of suffering were not grateful in those times when they were not suffering. Often, although not always, those who get angry at God in a time of trial are those who took him for granted in their time of blessing.

The alternative, of course, is not some other good being. If there is no God, then suffering has no meaning whatsoever. If there is no God, then we are just another self-interested animal, and our deaths are no more significant in the vast scheme of things than road kill on the side of the road. Those who get angry with God for suffering are getting angry at their only hope for suffering to matter to the universe. If there is no God, then there is no one to get angry at.

Augustine went further in his analysis of evil. It is he who coined the phrase, "the Fall." In his interpretation of the Genesis 3 story, Adam was free not to choose sin (posse non peccare). But after Adam sinned, we are no longer free to choose the good. The creation "fell" when Adam sinned. Now, human beings cannot do any good in their own power. Our "nature" is only to do evil.

But further, for him the world also became enslaved to sin at that time (cf. Rom. 8:20-21). For him, suffering entered the world primarily if not exclusively as a result of Adam's sin. To Augustine, things like disease, earthquakes, and tsunamis entered the world as a result of Adam's sin.

In some ways, this version of the "free will theodicy" makes the existence of evil in the world a little more difficult, because no one today is actually free not to choose evil. [2] John Wesley's sense of prevenient grace may provide a small antidote. Prevenient grace is the idea that God reaches out to each of us when we are not able to reach out to him. It is the idea that God empowers us to choose good even though we are not capable in our own power. This notion preserves the idea of evil as a choice and thus rehabilitates the potential power of the free will explanation for evil. [3]

In the end, we will never know the reasons behind every instance of suffering. We know that suffering can be a tool of the good and of virtue. We know that God can bring good out of suffering. We know that some suffering is a result of the evil choices of others, and a world in which we can make evil choices is a world in which we can make good choices, which is good. We know that God sometimes does intervene to stop evil and suffering, and Christians believe that God will return one day to do so in a final way.

But there will always be times when people suffer and we just don't now how it fits in the vast scheme of things. In such instances, we must trust that the Creator of the universe loves his universe and allows suffering for some greater purpose.

In the meantime, suffering in itself is not evil, and it can be a means for great good.

Next week: "The current bent of human nature is toward evil."

[1] A philosopher in the 1700s by the name of Jeremy Bentham tried to construct an ethic based purely on defining good and bad on the basis of pleasure and pain.

[2] Perhaps the greatest theological difficulty with evolution is the way in which it makes suffering a more intrinsic part of God's creation. See our discussion in the article on creation (C2).

[3] One of the philosophical problems with Augustine's version of the Fall is the way in which it assigns communal guilt, not on the basis of individual choice but on the basis of a single individual's choice, Adam's. Even parts of the Old Testament struggled with this notion of corporate guilt in relation to the captivity of Israel. More than one text in the Old Testament complains that "The parents eat sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge" (Jer. 31:29; Ezek. 18:2). Ezekiel points out the ideal situation: "The one who sins is the one who dies" (18:4).

Tough Philosophy Night

Tonight's philosophy class was on the problem of suffering and evil. Difficult because the bottom line to me is that we just have to trust God:

• We have to trust that God can stop evil and suffering, even if he doesn't.
• We have to trust that God is loving in a meaningful sense. A meaningful sense is one in which God actually would prefer for everyone to be saved and doesn't determine who will be saved or damned. 
• Within that context, we have to trust that, despite our suffering and the continuance of evil, there is some bigger picture that we do not see in which God still loves us in a meaningful sense.

Where I think I got into murky waters, I think, is in relation to what evil is. In my philosophy, evil always involves personal intentionality. If I made the class suffer tonight out of delight for them to suffer, I was evil. If it was unintentional torture, it was just suffering, not evil.

I function with two definitions of sin. The most important, the one by which I believe God judges us, is a matter of intention. To paraphrase Wesley, the meaningful sense of sinning is when a person intentionally does something they know they shouldn't do. This is the intransitive sense of sin, "I sinned."

Yet a person can also sin against another person without intending to do so. A person can lose control of the wheel through no fault of his or her own and swerve and kill someone. They have sinned against the other person although they have not sinned in intent. A person can also sin against God, not by violating some absolute law but by wronging God, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

Here's the most controversial thought. My Wesleyan theology would be incoherent, I think, if God judged anyone on the basis of the second definition of sin, although the second definition of sin is atoned for by Christ's blood, just as the first one is.

The first kind of sin is evil. The second kind of sin relates to suffering. Of course there is also much suffering that is not a matter of human action, but I'll stop here. I'm sure I unsuccessfully tried to tease this out here.

Why Does God Allow It?

Last year, I wrote about 46 pages on the problem of evil, pretty much all but the concluding section.

So I thought I would write the conclusion today:
____________
The problem of evil and suffering is the question of why God allows it.  Pain and suffering in themselves are not evil. God can actually use them to help us grow. Even death, from one perspective, is simply the beginning of a joyful eternity. It is those of us who remain who usually suffer the most.

Even then, some of our concern over the problem of evil comes from imagining our own suffering and death rather than from our own suffering per se.  We imagine ourselves in the shoes of those who may have suffered only for a moment. Sometimes our sense of the magnitude of the issue comes from fear as much as from actual suffering.

But if God loves us and is able to stop evil and suffering, then why doesn't he? Here again, we do not know the extent to which he does.  God may be intervening all the time, constantly, without us knowing it.  We are mostly aware of the times when he doesn't.  It is quite possible that they stand out to us in great disproportion to the number of times he does step in and change the course of history.

Why doesn't he step in every time?  We must ultimately trust that he has some larger reason not to step in.  We must believe that he doesn't step in because there is some greater good either for us or for humanity as a whole.

For example, one old explanation for the bigger picture has to do with moral freedom.  It is not a perfect answer, but it suggests that a world in which we can choose the good (and thus can choose evil) is a better world than one in which we are simply God's robots playing out a script he has written for us. But if some individuals will choose the good, then some will choose the evil, and suffering will result.

This answer to the problem of evil is the "free will" explanation.  In its classical form, it says that God gave Satan and Adam a choice between good and evil, and they made the wrong choice.  In Adam's case, the result was a world where people have a tendency to do wrong and where the created realm is enslaved to corruption and decay (cf. Rom. 8:19-21). St. Augustine in the 400s saw the evil and suffering in the world as a direct consequence of Adam's sin in Genesis 3.

As someone from the Wesleyan tradition, I believe that God still empowers us to make choices for good in this world.  We can of course go with the human default of selfishness, usually with a resulting detriment to ourselves and others around us.  But I believe God makes it possible also for us, both individually and collectively, to do good in the world as well, if we will.

A supplemental answer to that of free will is the "Irenaeus" answer, proposed some two hundred years before Augustine.  Irenaeus suggested that suffering can make us stronger.  Without hardship, our wills would not face the kinds of choices that enable us to grow and become morally great. We can understand natural laws as a mirror of the principle of freedom, where God allows the laws of nature to play themselves out without regularly intervening. Sometimes, those laws play out in a way that results in our suffering, and we face the choice to grow or become bitter.

But ultimately, it comes down to faith in the mystery of God's goodness.  By faith we believe that God is good.  I do not believe that God orchestrates evil or that he directly causes all suffering.  For reasons that are usually beyond our full understanding, he certainly allows it.  Sometimes he intervenes.  Sometimes he doesn't.

Ultimately, we must believe that there is a big picture that we often do not see.  We as Christians believe that, if God allows evil or suffering, he must do so because it is either beneficial for us in some way or that it benefits the big picture.  We do not see the big picture.  We cannot know how the alternative would play out.

We believe by faith that God is good and that the sovereign king of the universe will do right (Gen. 18:25).  Sometimes we can guess at why God might allow something, but we cannot be certain in this life.  We must have faith in the mystery of his goodness, that he is working everything for good in his ultimate game plan.

The Speakable and the Nameless

Twenty children are speakable this morning.  They are not in pain.  We don't fear of their eternal destinies.  We mourn their moments of terror yesterday.  Their families and the good who look on are the ones who now suffer.  The families of the dead are speakable.  The lives of these children are speakable, and we celebrate their lives.

Six, maybe seven adults are speakable. I don't know of their virtue. The martyred almost always become saints.  They are speakable for the injustice done them. They are not in any pain. We sympathize with their moments of terror and honor their lives. We celebrate their lives.

There is one nameless, once significant but now an insignificant loony, forever forgotten.

How do we move forward? Hire a policeman for every school? Use the opportunity to move forward with common sense gun control? Consider the culture of violence in movies and games we have allowed to overtake us?  Increase funding to deal with the mentally ill of society?  Probably.

What of God?  Was this part of his well-laid out plan, as some Christian pop-theology would say? I would rather say God allows such things to happen than orchestrates such things.

Faith in the mystery of God's permissive will at least gives hope. Those who abandon faith at this point are left with no hope of joy for the dead or sense of justice for the nameless.

We are reminded again of how little we are against the scope of all space and time, which of course also makes our death a relatively minor detail.  But today we celebrate the significance of twenty-six or seven lives.  We will celebrate them well.

Reflections on his daughter's death

Our hearts go out to Ben Witherington and his family, who unexpectedly lost their daughter earlier in the month.  His reflections are very valuable, especially for pastors.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Catastrophes and God's Judgment 3

Thus far in this segment:

God and Catastrophes 1
God and Disabilities 2

Now Catastrophes and God's Judgment 3
We have to reckon with similar ambiguity when it comes to events as God's judgment.  To be sure, a significant stream of biblical thought--especially in the Old Testament--sees a direct correlation between sin and event.  For example, the books of Joshua and Judges assume that defeat of Israel in battle or its enslavement to foreign powers must imply that someone, somewhere has sinned.  When Israel loses in battle to Ai, it must be because someone in Israel has sinned--a man named Achan, as it turns out.

This way of thinking is called "deuteronomistic theology."  In the light of all Scripture, however, it is clearly only a partial picture.  In the thinking of Deuteronomy 28, the righteous do not suffer in the service of God.  Certainly people like Jesus do not get crucified.  Those today who preach a prosperity gospel do so from Old Testament passages that make a  direct correlation between serving God and material blessing and ignore the New Testament sense that those who serve God should not be surprised if they suffer in this world.

The fuller revelation of Scripture thus points to some serious refinements to deuteronomistic theology.  For example, Ezekiel 18 and Jeremiah 31 give one: "In those days they shall no longer say: 'The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.' But all shall die for their own sins; the teeth of everyone who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge" (Jer. 31:29-30, NRSV).  Jeremiah goes on to give important verses on the new covenant God is going to make with his people, verses that Hebrews 8 quote extensively.

In deuteronomistic theology, the individual sinner may not be the one who gets punished--it could be his or her grandchildren. Jeremiah and Ezekiel point to individual punishment in the future, with whole groups not suffering for the sins of others.  In other words, Jeremiah and Ezekiel raise questions about the idea that an earthquake might kill a lot of people because of the sins someone else did somewhere else.

It is also important to remember that Deuteronomy and the other historical books of the Old Testament do not yet know of a significant life after death.  At this point in the flow of revelation, they understand that there is reward and punishment to come, but they think of it only taking place in the land of the living.  Thus sin must be punished in this world, either to the sinner or to the sinner's children.  These are instances where the New Testament significantly refines and clarifies matters.

The point is that the model of Christian thinking that connects catastrophic events with God's judgment faces serious questions in the light of all Scripture.  For example, those who see in the 9-11 tragedy God's judgment on America must face Jeremiah 31:30 above.  Such thinking, in effect, is saying that those people in the towers did not die for their own sins but for the sins of others.  Someone else ate sour grapes but their teeth were set on edge.

A better model is to see God's instructions to humanity as indications of lives that are more likely to prosper and involve fulfillment, while sin is a path more likely to bring pain and suffering.  It is not that God is a cowboy sheriff waiting to blow you away when you mess up, but God has given you ample warning of what happens when you follow a certain path.  Bad things happen.  And, yes, there usually is collateral damage for your sins.  Your children usually do pay for the bad choices you make and the sins of the fathers are passed down to the third and fourth generation (e.g., Deut. 5:9).

Certainly we cannot say that God never causes cataclysmic events in judgment on a group of people.  We are saying that great caution must be exercised with these verses from the Old Testament because they are not yet "fully cooked."  And the dynamics of thinking this way can hide a heart of hate toward others, when Christ has commanded us to love our enemies.  It is interesting that people were ready to attribute the 2011 tsunami in Japan to the fact that Japan is not a nation with many Christians.  But we did not hear this explanation later in the year when tornadoes ripped through the Bible belt of Missouri.

God does have a plan for the world, and God may have very specific plans for you.  His plan for the world is to see as many reconciled to him as will, although he forces no one.  And sometimes God does have a very specific plan for a Moses--a plan that God would have allowed Moses to nullify if he had so chosen.  God does not make us slaves to his will, however.  He walks with us and interacts with us.  If we fail to get into a relationship with someone, we have not missed "the one" he had planned for us to marry for life.

God does not micromanage the creation, but he has created it with freedom to choose wisely and to choose poorly.  He has created it with natural laws that run on their own.  Our pain and suffering is often a result of our own choices or the choices of others.  When he steps into the chain of self-running cause and effects is a mystery.  Surely he does.  But the question of pain and suffering is more about why he allows it, not why he directly causes it.

Next week: Why does God allow suffering?

God and Disabilites 2

The second part of "God and Catastrophes," which I have deceivingly labeled, "God and Disabilities."  It is in there... wait for it...


God and Catastrophes 1
_____________
God and Catastrophes 2
... We are suggesting here something in between these two extremes.  We are suggesting that God largely does let the natural world continue in its normal sequence of cause and effect.  Sometimes the pressure in the tectonic plates builds up to such an extent beneath the surface of the earth that the plates slip and the reverberation shakes the surface so much that buildings fall on thousands of people.  Or maybe this happens under the ocean and a tsunami kills 10,000 people.

Sometimes a body of matter going down fifth street at such and such a speed comes into contact with a body of matter going down second avenue at such and such a speed.  Neither driver had evil intent, but one of them ran a stoplight by accident.  And now both of them are in the hospital.  Maybe one of them is dead.

We have argued that the deaths and suffering of these individuals is not evil because no one caused them to happen as a matter of evil intent.  We are now arguing that while God allows such things to happen, he rarely if ever directs them to happen.  Catastrophes are not generally God's punishment of some group for their sin or God trying to teach us something.  They are God allowing the normal sequence of cause and effect play itself out, this feature that he created as part of the world.

Again, we are not saying that God never causes suffering or catastrophe.  We are not saying that God never causes events as punishment for sin.  We are not saying that God never orchestrates or micro-manages your life or the world.  We are saying that God mostly allows human will and natural law to play themselves out freely.

Underlying this entire discussion is again the old debate between freedom and determinism, of love and autocracy.  Is God more interested in a world where people choose him freely or is he more interested in everyone obeying him?  The picture we are painting is one in which God has, in his sovereignty and authority, created a world that is free to be less than the ideal if it so chooses, and that such a world can be a good world.  And we are saying he largely treats the natural world the same way.

What about the Bible?  What does it say?  Because the Bible is not a philosophy book, it says things that seem to endorse both perspectives!  We have debates such as these because the Bible does not work out a systematic theology of evil, pain, and suffering.  Read in context, the books of the Bible are individual and separate pieces of revelation to address individual and distinct situations over the course of a thousand years in diverse ancient contexts.  It speaks far more locally, contextually, and proverbially than universally. [1] When we read the Bible as one book whose every verse speaks directly to me, we simply are not reading the words anything like they were originally understood.

So we read a verse like Exodus 4:11: "Who gives speech to mortals? Who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?" (NRSV).  We hear what God is saying to Moses. I am both the one who made you have difficulty speaking and the one now calling you to preach to Israel.  Go do it.  So the case seems closed.  Any birth defect or disability you get is directly orchestrated by God.

But then we remember what we wrote in relation to God causing temptation.  The earlier parts of the Old Testament do see everything directly orchestrated by God... but the later parts and the New Testament often do not. [2] Remember how 2 Samuel 24 says God did something that 1 Chronicles says Satan did? There is a development in understanding in the Bible on God as the direct cause of evil, with the more developed parts seeing Satan and other evil forces more directly responsible for evil.

Whether we like it or not, we cannot settle theological debates such as these with a single verse or one strand of the Bible.  We have to take the whole Bible into account.  We have to recognize where God is going in Scripture on an issue, not just where he started working with humanity.  And to systematize such things, we inevitably get into the kinds of reasoning that both sides engage in.  This sort of philosophizing has to process these issues in ways that none of the biblical texts do because we are looking for an overall perspective that fits with an overall understanding of God's character.  We do this sort of reasoning whether we admit it to ourselves or not...

[1] Proverbs are pictures of general truths.  They are not absolute, and they are not promises.  If you train up a child in the way it should go, it will generally go that way (Prov. 22:6).  But it is not the nature of proverbs to say that a child will never go astray despite parents doing everything in their power to train up the child correctly.  Proverbs just don't work that way.

[2] Another important insight is that God reveals himself in categories we can understand (otherwise communication would not take place).  The fact that God says this to Moses does not change our conclusion, since God would speak to Moses on a level Moses would understand.  The Bible's language about God is "incarnated" in the thought of the times and places its documents were written just as much as its language about other things.

God and Catastrophes 1

I think I'm getting close to finishing this strangely evolving series relating to the problem of evil and suffering.  I put in some headings to give a sense of the organization.

Where is God?
Questionable Explanations

Definitions
What is evil?
Pain is not Evil
What is sin? 1
What is sin? 2

God doesn't directly cause evil and suffering.
Does God tempt? 1
Does God tempt? 2
God and Catastrophes 1 (today's)

Ultimate Questions
Why did God create evil?

Today, God and Catastrophes
So far, we have argued that evil has to do with intent to do wrong and to harm.  Pain thus is not evil in itself when it does not come in some way from someone's intent to do wrong.  We have argued that God allows evil to take place but does not generally cause it directly. In this section, we want to complete the circle and say that God allows pain, suffering, catastrophe and such, but does not generally cause it directly.

This notion flies in the face of a great deal of popular teaching about suffering, because many Christians comfort themselves in the middle of their problems with the idea that God is trying to teach them something.  Maybe God is disciplining them because they have not been paying attention to him.  Maybe he is getting them ready for something bigger that is coming.  Some Christians act as if God is behind the scenes orchestrating the minute details of their lives, down to which jello they picked for lunch.

Of course who is to say that God does not directly intervene in our lives?  Christians believe in miracles and God interjecting himself into the stream of human and natural cause and effect.  Christians are not deists, who think God created the world but is no longer involved with it.  In all that we are about to say, we are not denying that God can and may, from time to time, interject himself as a cause in the stream of otherwise "natural" causes and effects.

But there also seems something decidedly narcissistic and immature about the way popular Christianity thinks God is directing the minute details of their lives.  This view creates a world in which it's all about me and what God's doing in my life.  Sure, he's doing it for you as well--I'll let you share and be happy about it too.  But now it's my turn to share about what God is teaching me right now.

There is something curiously American about this approach to things, not to mention something curiously post-Freudian and post-Romanticism.  It is a symptom of modern introspection and psychology, atypical of other times and places in history.  It is a by-product of the world after Sigmund Freud, who taught us that who we are today is a product of key events that took place in our childhood, which has led the west to scour their individual past for significance.  It is a symptom of the hyper-individualism of the west.

Of course the Enlightenment of the 1700s went too far in the opposite direction.  Fascinated with the newly discovered laws of nature, some thinkers went so far as to say that God never intervenes in the world.  To them, the world was just one big machine that God created, wound up, and then gave a push to.  The rest is simply the pool balls bouncing off one another according to the laws of physics.  If we knew all the variables and the math, we could predict everything that would happen for the rest of the world.

We are suggesting here something in between these two extremes.  We are suggesting that God largely does let the natural world continue in its normal sequence of cause and effect...

Why did God create evil?

If you remember, I decided to continue my series on the problem of evil and pain on Sundays.  Here is the next installment:

Where is God?
Questionable Explanations
What is evil?
Pain is not Evil
What is sin? 1
What is sin? 2
Does God tempt? 1
Does God tempt? 2

Why did God create evil?
Thus far we have made two basic claims.  The first is that evil in its most meaningful sense is a matter of intention.  Evil involves the intent of a thinking agent to do harm or to do wrong.  Pain and suffering, in that sense, are not technically evil, no matter how devastating they may be.

The second claim is that God never has an evil intention.  Justice is not evil and primarily involves withholding mercy.  God's dominant characteristic however is love.  God does not generally (and may not ever) direct the evil intentions of others.  Because he is in control of everything, he certainly must allow everything that happens in the world.  But he does not directly cause evil.

This line of thought leads us to what is perhaps the key question behind the entire debate. Why did God create evil in the first place?  If God created everything that exists out of nothing, then every single thing that exists in this realm is also God's creation.

First, it is important to recognize that, as we have been saying, evil is not a thing.  Evil is an adjective we give to certain intentions of moral agents like humans.  The question technically is not, "Why did God create evil?" but "Why did God create a world where moral agents could have evil intentions?"

Notice the wording: "... where moral agents could have evil intentions."  We are saying that, since God created everything, he must have created the possibility of evil.  To be consistent, we have to be able to say that a world in which the possibility of evil exists can be a good world.

In our opinion, it does not have to be the best world.  The philosopher Leibniz once suggested that God could not create a world that was anything less than the best possible world.  We are not arguing that.  We are only arguing that a loving and just God could create a world in which the possibility of evil existed.

The most frequently given answer is that a world in which we are free to choose God and the good is a better world than one in which we are forced to.  It seems hard to evaluate this statement, since we are in no position to know what other kinds of universes God might create.  Nevertheless, this explanation does seem to make some sense in this universe, and this is the universe about which we are speaking.

It does imply a rather high value on allowing human moral choice.  We have a tendency as humans to want to intervene, to want to stop evil.  It is hard after following this line of thought not to see God as often or more often leaving moral agents to choose, despite the ensuing consequences.

In the end, it is not so important that we can explain how it could be loving to create a world with the possibility of evil.  We only need to find it plausible that God, in his knowing of all things, could create the world with good intentions.  We do not have to know completely what those intentions were, only that it is plausible that they were good, despite the fact that he created the possibility of evil.

A key question for many Christians at this point is Satan.  One way those who have believed in a good God in history have accounted for the existence of evil is to see an evil power co-existing with the good one.  The Zoroastrians had their evil Ahriman whose power paralleled the good being Ahura Mazda.  The Gnostics saw the origins of evil in the material world that God did not create but that has always been.

These systems are not properly Christian, but have less difficulty accounting for evil. Satan for Christians is not powerful in any meaningful sense when placed next to God.  We thus cannot account for evil in the world meaningfully by saying that Satan motivates the evil intentions of humans because God created Satan.  The question is still, how could a good and loving God create a world in which the possibility of Satan existed.

And the best answers remain the same.  Presumably God did not create Satan evil originally but with the possibility for Satan to make evil moral choices.  Presumably it is good for moral agents to be able to make moral choices despite the fact that they may make evil choices.

Next week: Implications for Suffering

What is sin? 2

I want to shift my blogging energies a little, so may finish this one more intermittently... maybe on Sundays.

Where is God?
Questionable Explanations
What is evil?
Pain is not Evil
What is sin? 1
What is sin? 2
Does God tempt? 1
Does God tempt? 2

What is sin continued...
It is also important for us to recognize the standard by which these intentions were measured.  The New Living Translation imposes later theological categories on Romans 3:23 when it translates it to say that all have fallen short of "God's glorious standard," as if the problem is the fact that we cannot be perfect.   More likely, Paul was saying that human lack the glory that God intended them to have in Psalm 8.

There are at least two respects in which the rhetoric many Christians use in relation to sin is out of focus.  First, we have a tendency to put more emphasis on one argument Paul makes than I am convinced he himself did.  This is the "no one can keep every law their entire life; therefore, we are entirely guilty" argument.  True, Paul does say all have sinned in Romans 3 and Galatians 3:19 does seem to make an argument something like this.

But Paul's purpose here is not to give a systematic theological statement.  He is backing up his claim that we all need Christ's atonement--little more.  He certainly is not saying that we are guilty of every law (a mistaken interpretation even of James 2:10).  He is not saying we are totally depraved (that there is no good in us whatsoever). He is simply stating something everyone would have agreed with at the time--all humanity needs atonement.

Those who say they do not are deceiving themselves, are making God a liar (1 John 1:8, 10).  That is what all these statements amount to.  Later theologians like Augustine and Calvin systematized and absolutized passing arguments in Paul.  However, we will inevitably get Paul out of focus if we use such passages as the starting point for understanding God's character in relation to justice.

A second difference to keep in mind is how introspective modern Westerners have become in our individualistic, post-Romantic context. We can self-analyze our motives and intentions in a way that neither Jesus or Paul came close to assuming.  Even the level of Christian perfection John Wesley had in mind went far too introspective for the standards of Jesus' day, causing not only many Wesleyans since but Wesley himself sometimes to torture themselves in an unhealthy inward focus.

The result is a lot of distraction with regard to what is important about the category of sin, which is one's intent to do wrong or to do things contrary to a heart devoted to God.  Sin and evil are most meaningful concepts when we are talking about our intentions toward others and the extent to which we filter our lives through true devotion to God.  Sin as any imperfection, as unintentional wrongdoing--these have a place in a systematic treatment but are not particularly helpful in sorting out how to live a righteous life.

This also leads us to a massive myth that is widely circulated these days--that all sin is sin.  This idea has absolutely no biblical basis at all in terms of the life of a believer.  True, when we first come to Christ, any sin we have in the past amounts to breaking our relationship with God. In that sense we might say that all sin is sin for our pre-Christian past.  But the New Testament nowhere treats all sin after justification as equal.  Not only does Paul dispense different consequences for different sins, but some sins can keep a person from inheriting the kingdom of God (e.g., 1 Cor. 6:9-11).

The key once again is intention, a fact usually missed by the pop notion that all sin is the same.  As in a relationship with other people, some wrongs can break a relationship while others only damage it a little.  There is a vast difference between forgetting an anniversary and having an affair.  It is this way in our relationship with God.  There is a vast difference between losing our temper with someone because we have not had enough sleep and murdering millions of Christians in the name of atheism.  To suggest these two sins would be the same in God's eyes is patently ludicrous.

By the same token, emotions are not, in themselves, sinful.  As someone once said, "Emotions are neither good nor bad; they just are."  True, you can choose to act in a sinful way because you are angry--"Be angry and do not sin" (Eph. 4:26).  And you can subtly err by setting yourself up for wrongdoing because of your emotions.  You can miss sleep or food.

The level of intention is again the measure of the degree of wrongdoing.  If you know certain courses of action make you more susceptible to do wrong and you do not change, then your intention is involved.  And if your intention is involved, then we get into the realm of morality and evil.

This discussion relates to the question of evil and suffering because it gets in front of us exactly what we are asking.  The questions of evil and pain are questions about God's intentions, not questions of how bad these things feel or how horrendous an effect they have.  When we consider evil and sin in terms of the consequence, measured against an absolute standard of perfection, we are not asking the right question.  These are questions of God's intentions.  Suffering and pain in themselves, the effect of moral evil, are not evil.  They are just rather unpleasant.

Next Sunday: Why does God allow evil?

What is sin? 1

I decided that the "Clean and Unclean" post was interesting, but probably distracting from a booklet.  I'll try to combine several things into one post called, "What is Sin?"  Below is where I'm thinking it would go, although I think this will take two posts.

Where is God?
Questionable Explanations
What is evil?
Pain is not Evil
What is sin?
Does God tempt? 1
Does God tempt? 2

Perhaps the most popular definition of sin amounts to anything short of perfection.  We say it is to "miss the mark" and the mark in question is often defined as any mistake or imperfection whatsoever.  The picture of God behind this definition is a God of justice who must and wants to punish the slightest infraction.  If we say we have no sin, 1 John 1:8 is quickly produced, we are deceiving ourselves.

There are immense problems with the preceding paragraph--and there would be troublesome implications for the problem of evil and suffering.  For one, while we do find the category of unintentional sin in Scripture, it certainly receives little attention in the New Testament.  To define sin as missing the mark is usually based on an atrocious word fallacy.  This is arguably a misinterpretation of 1 John 1:8 and the father who represents God in the Parable Son knows nothing of this understanding of God's attitudes.

Sin in its most meaningful sense involves intention.  We are defining evil as active intent against loving God or one's neighbor and the actions that follow.  So sin in its most meaningful sense is active intent or action that violates love of God or neighbor.  The two prove to be very closely related.  An evil intent is a sinful intent, and evil done is a sin done.

What then of unintentional sin?  To sin is to wrong another person or to do wrong defined as action or intent against God or one's neighbor.  You can of course wrong another person accidentally.  And you can do wrong out of ignorance.  We can certainly find places in the Bible where these things are called sin.

However, these categories apply much more to the Old Testament than the New.  It is the Levitical parts of the Old Testament that have the categories of clean and unclean.  One can become stained simply by touching the wrong thing.  In Numbers 15:22-31, clear instructions are given for a person who sins unintentionally, but there is no hope for the person who might sin defiantly and intentionally.  We know from the stories of the Old Testament that God often did forgive such individuals.  Our point here is that the function of sacrifice in Leviticus has to do with unintentional wrongs done and thus that the Bible does have a category relating to unintentional sins or wrongs done in ignorance.

But this is not the dominant category of the New Testament.  In fact, this category is only discussed in the past tense.  The Day of Atonement used to be about sins committed in ignorance (Heb. 9:7).  From Adam to Moses people died because of their wrongs done, even though those sins were not technically charged to their account (Rom. 5:14).  What is important for the New Testament is intentional wrong: "If someone knows the good to do and does not do it, it is sin" (Jas. 4:17).  In perhaps the most helpful statement about sin in the New Testament, Paul says that "Everything that is not from faith is sin" (Rom. 14:23).

This last statement is an excellent picture of what we are saying about sin and evil.  It has to do with one's attitude and intention.  Sin has do with why you do what you do and with what your intentions are toward God and others.  This sense of God's interests does not only come in the New Testament.  We find this same sense from 2 Samuel 16:7 where God tells Samuel not to focus on how the sons of Jesse look--God looks on the heart.  In Mark 7:15, Jesus similarly was not worried about what made a person clean or unclean externally, but about what was in their hearts.

It is also important for us to recognize the standard by which these intentions were measured.  The New Living Translation imposes later theological discussion on Romans 3:23 when it translated it to say that all have fallen short of "God's glorious standard," as if the problem is the fact that we cannot be perfect...

Clean and Unclean 5

I'm going to cheat and insert an old post here.  I actually wrote it back when I started dabbling with the idea of a book or booklet on suffering.  Here's where I now think it might go.

Where is God?
Questionable Explanations
What is evil?
Pain is not Evil
Clean and Unclean (here is where this post goes)
What is sin?
Does God tempt? 1
Does God tempt? 2

The unclean foods and purity laws of Leviticus might seem at first glance seem to contradict the idea that morality is always a matter of someone's intentions (Lev. 11-16).  After all, in Leviticus simply touching something makes you unclean.  There are other instances where a person's intentions seem to be good and their touch gets them in trouble.  In 2 Samuel 6, a man named Uzzah reaches out to steady the Ark of the Covenant and died immediately.  Similarly, at Mt. Sinai, any animal that might have touched the mountain was to be killed (Exod. 19:13).

But as with all issues, we cannot simply appropriate one passage without consulting the rest of the Bible.  Similarly, the books of the Bible are in everyday language and categories, which means that it does not express things with philosophical precision, just as it does not express things with scientific or what we would consider historical precision.  When we turn to the New Testament, we find the apostle Paul saying that "I am fully convinced that no food is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for him it is unclean" (Rom. 14:14).

Paul's claim--quite surprising in the light of Leviticus--is that food in itself is morally neutral.  It is the way a person thinks about the food--his or her moral intent--that makes the food clean or unclean.  The matter itself is morally neutral.  We can accommodate the Old Testament by saying that, during the period of the Old Testament, God considered certain foods and actions to be "unclean" in his dealings with Israel.  But in the New Testament, God "declared all foods clean" (Mark 7:19), now making them clean.

Why did God consider them unclean?  In itself this question potentially tells us a great deal about how God relates to the world.  The instructions on animals with certain hooves or not having fins and scales seem ridiculous to us today.  One explanation that has made sense to our modern mind is that these rules had to do with hygiene, and this explanation does go back at least to the time of Jesus.

However, explanations that make sense to us are as often as not anachronistic.  A much more likely explanation in light of the ancient world is that these laws mirrored the way the ancient Israelites viewed the world in their socio-cultural context. [1]  In other words, rather than God instituting arbitrary rules, these laws reflected God meeting the Israelites within the categories of their own day.

The food laws all imply a certain order to the Israelite world.  Things in the sea should have fins and scales.  Birds should fly.  Blood is a power that should stay inside the body.  Israelites are shepherds; other nations herd pigs.  The holiness codes of Leviticus thus reflect the lines Israel drew around their world, just as all cultures draw lines and boundaries around their worlds. [2]  These laws thus set Israel apart from the nations around them that served other gods.  When the gospel expanded to the whole world, these boundaries became more of a hindrance than a help, and so the New Testament in effect revokes them.

But of course, though Paul takes this position on food, he does not say that everything is either clean or unclean because of how we think about it.  For example, it is doubtful Paul would have talked about sexual immorality in this way.  But again, Paul's writings are letters, not philosophy books.  We can still extend the basic principle and account for what he says about sexual immorality in a more precise way.

The key is to bring God into the picture as we did with Leviticus.  There, it was not the food that was moral in  nature, but the fact that God at that time was declaring those foods unclean for Israel, meeting them within their categories, taking on their flesh, so to speak--incarnating the truth.  It is thus possible that certain sexual actions would remain "unclean" in the New Testament era because God considered them unclean, regardless of the intentions of those involved (e.g., sleeping with your step-mother; 1 Cor. 5).

But we are arguing, once again, that it is not the act itself or things themselves that are unclean or morally wrong.  Rather, it is either what God thinks about those acts and events or what we intend about those acts that makes them either morally good or evil.  And here the principle is once again love.  Can a person ever act in love toward his or her spouse and have an affair?  Highly doubtful.  Therefore, cheating on one's spouse is always a morally evil act--not because of the act itself, but because of the intention involved.

[1] See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger.

[2] See The Social Construction of Reality.

Does God tempt? 6

Previous posts in this series:

Where is God?
Questionable Explanations
What is evil?
Pain is not Evil
Does God tempt? 1

And now to continue:

... So what center point are we to choose?  The question it seems is the following.  Is God more or less directly responsible for moral evil?  Or is he more indirectly the cause?

On the one hand, since the third century or so, it has become a near universal Christian belief that God was the entire creator of everything in the universe.  In the 100s, Gnostic Christians attributed evil to the material world, something God did not create.  It was arguably in the context of this debate that most Christians came to believe that God created the world out of nothing, ex nihilo as they say.

But if God created the world and everything that exists in this universe out of nothing, then God must have also created moral evil--or at least the possibility of moral evil.  Here is where many Christians today part ways.  One side sees God more or less directing everything that happens in the world, including moral evil.  They may see God causing Satan to cause moral evil, but everything Satan does, he does under orders.  This what we might call the hyper-Calvinist option. [1]

The other side, the one for which I am arguing, gives God sovereignty (or absolute control) over the creation, like the other side.  But it distances God from directly causing moral evil.  Rather, in creation God created the possibility for moral creatures like Satan and humanity to sin and do evil.  He gave humanity the power to do evil or not to do evil.  But he does not actually do anything evil.

Notice the way I worded this.  God does not do anything evil.  According to our definition in the previous section, we mean to say that God never at any point has an evil intent.  By wording it in this way, we are not necessarily saying that God could never tempt or that God could not cause someone to act evilly, although these are hard things to imagine.  We are saying that anything God does, he does righteously.  He does nothing with an evil intent.

So if God were ever to cause pain or suffering--indeed, if we could ever imagine God causing someone to do evil--he would never do so with evil intent.  The Christian center points are surely the twin points of love and justice within God.  God never does anything that is unloving. Justice is not unloving.  Justice is when God does not show mercy and allows/administers the consequences of one's own choices.

In general, our approach is to say that God primarily allows evil and pain in the world rather than more or less orchestrating it.  The evil that happens in the world happens because of God's permissive will rather than his directive will.  I am unsure whether we can completely eliminate the possibility that God might at some point direct someone to do evil.  What we can say is that he would only do so with an intent for good.

We also prefer to see God's justice much more as his allowing the consequences of one's choices to play out.  This is the picture we get in Romans 1, where God "abandons" humanity to spiral into the consequences of its own sinful actions.  Whatever hell might be, the most coherent understanding is that it is not so much a place where God sends people as the playing out of the consequences of one's evil intentions, with God simply not intervening to stop the process.

So does God tempt us?  James 1 is basically saying that we are ultimately to blame for our own evil actions.  If we have to answer yes or no, the best answer is surely no.  But James is not writing philosophy.  It is wisdom literature, which is proverbial in nature.  Although it is hard to imagine, we probably cannot say that God would never tempt under any circumstances whatsoever.  We can say he himself would never do so with evil intent.

Therefore, in the light of the totality of Scripture and a more precise sense of God's nature, we should see the Old Testament passages about God directly tempting and causing people to do evil things as very imprecise presentations that we can refine.  Rather than God sending an evil spirit that caused Saul to try to kill David, we can say more accurately that God allowed the various powers both spiritual and individual to do these things.  God far more allows moral evil in the world rather than directing it.  And indeed, perhaps he never ever directs it.

[1] I say hyper-Calvinist option because Calvin himself seems to have believed that it was possible that Adam might not have sinned, but since he did, humans are evil.  This view would not make God the direct cause of evil because he would have given Adam a choice.