Christian Reflections on the Problem of Evil
06/29/15 
Isaac Kim
and will begin his Ph.D. in theology and ethics in the fall, both at Princeton Theological
Seminary. His interests include the problem of evil, the theological ethics of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, the just war tradition, and intergenerational issues of the Korean-American church.
The Bible begins with God's good and orderly creation, formed from His Word and Spirit. It ends with the promise of a new heaven and a new earth, one in which all our tears will be wiped away in the present of our Lord.
In between, suffering abounds.
The world in which we find ourselves is gripped with the problem of evil. Indeed, much of Scripture concerns itself with wrestling with this problem, and with the God who seems absent in our darkest hours. From the despair of Elijah, the complaints of Job, the Pslams of Lament, the wails of Jeremiah, all the way to the passion of Jesus Christ, the Bible talks about suffering just as consistently as it does redemption, love, and holiness.
Evil presents dilemmas to faithful Christians, dilemmas to which we are called to respond. What are we to do when suffering invades our lives, when our tears drown out our laughter, when the groans of creation deafen the psalms of joy? What are we to say? To believe? How are we to remain faithful to the God who set all these things in motion? This article will give preliminary reflections on the problem of suffering, showing both Christian accounts of evil's origins, responses to atheists, and ways we Christians are called to respond to an aching world.
To understand evil's origins, we begin--not with evil -- but with our hearts. With Saint Augustine, I take it to be true that the greatest desires of our hearts are simply to love and to be loved[i]. Ask a person why he did what he did enough times, and eventually, you will find this to be the case. Consider the typical person who goes on a diet. As far as I know, we humans are the only creatures that intentinoally starve themselves. Why? So that we can be healthier. Why? So that we can be more attractive. Why? So that others will love us, and so that we, in turn, can return that love. Repeat this series of "why" questions with virtually any other human action, and we will find confirmation of Augustine's hunch.
For Augustine, and for us Christians, our heart's deepest desires to love and to be loved are met in Christ alone. In Christ, we are loved unconditionally; likewise, through His redemption, we are able to love God and our neighbors as ourselves. In Christ's love, then, we find rest; we Christians share Augustine's prayer: "our hearts are restless until they rest in you."[ii] That is, in Christ, our heart's desires are met in a way that increases the glory of God. This was the way things were supposed to be, the way God intended, the reason why God looked at His creation and called it "very good" (Gen. 1.31).
When sin enters the picutre, things get complicated. Sin is pride. Jesus commands us to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves(Lk. 10.25-28). Sin reverses this order, it places the self above neighbor, and the neighbor above God. It results in disordered loves: we love the wrong things in the wrong ways, the right things in the wrong ways. Sin not only affects our souls, it affects all of creation- recall that even the ground was cursed beneath Adam's feet when he fell from God's grace (Gen. 3.17). So begins the narrative of Scripture Calvin, in summarizing Augustine, notes that we humans proceeded spotlessly from God's hand, corrupted ourselves and the created order through the misuse of our will, and in so doing, alienated ourselves from God and from one another[iv]
With sin entered evil. With evil enters a problem: how could God let bad thing happen to His beloved creation? This is a question that philosophers, theologians, and believers have grappled with since we began to worship. Recently, with the rise of atheism, the problem of evil has become one of the strongest arguments against the existence of God. Here, we now turn to how to respond to the atheist.
The atheistic argument from evil runs as follows:
[P1] An all-powerful, all-loving God exists
[P2] Evil exists
[P3] An all-powerful, all-loving God would never allow evil to befall His beloved
[P3a] Either, He is loving enough, but not powerful enough, to stop evil.
[P3b] Or, He is powerful enough, but not loving enough, to stop evil
[P4] If evil exists, then all all-powerful, all-loving God cannot exist
[P5] If an all-powerful, all-loving God exists, evil cannot exist
[P6] Evil exists
[Therefore] Therefore, an all-powerful, all-loving God cannot exist[v]
In essense, what the atheist is saying here is, if you believe evil exists, you cannot also believe that God exists. If this argument is true, then the existence of evil means that we cannot possibly believe in an all-powerful, all-loving God. It is a powerful argument, perhaps the most powerful one in the ahteist's war chest.
Of course, we Christians deny this argument's conclusion. The way to determine whether something is true or false is by using premises and conclusions. Every argument has a set of premises, statements that claim to be true. Premises then lead to conclusions. Premises can either be true or false. If any of the premises are false, then the whole conclusion is false.
Looking at the argument above, which premise would we say is false? Christians would say[P3], that God would never allow evil to befall His beloved, is false. Note, if [P3] is false, then the conclusion -- God cannot exist -- is also false, thereby showing that the problem of evil does not disprove the existence of God. Simply put, if we show what's wrong with [P3], we can show why God and evil both exist.
For the atheist to say that an all-powerful, all-loving God would never allow evil to befall His beloved is to say, more succinctly, God has no morally significant reason to allow evil. For the atheistic argument from evil to work, that's the claim s/he will have to defend.
Here's why the atheist is wrong:
To make [P3] work, the atheist is essentially saying from what I can see, there are no reasons for God to allow evil. The problem with this claim is that there really is no way we can know every single reason for every single act of God. It's far too large a claim to make.[vi] Why?
When I talk to my youth students about the problem of evil, I always tell them about noseeums. Noseeums are little gnat-like bugs that live out in places like Minnesota. They're tiny, too small to be seen with the naked eye. But they bite. And since they bite, if one were to go camping in those areas, he would need special nets.
Suppose I go camping with a friend, a friend who knows nothing about noseeums. Suppose then I tell my friend, "cover your tent with these nets, or else a noseeum might bite you." Suppose my friend is skeptical, not unlike our imagined atheist interlocutor. My friend then replies, "what noseeums? I ain't-see-um, so they're not there!" Yet, should my friend ignore my advice, he would be covered in noseuum bites the next day.[vii]
The point of that example is to present what we would call the "Noseeum-Fallacy." The Noseeum Fallacy states: just because you cannot see a thing X does not mean X does not exist. Suppose you were standing in your kitchen sink and looking out of the garden. From your kitchen, you cannot see any earthworms in your garden. Does it then follow that there are no earthworms in your garden? Of course not.
Apply the same logic to our atheist friend, and we see why [P3] is false. Just because we see no morally justified reason for God to allow evil does not mean such reasons are not there. To claim [P3] is to make the "Noseeum Fallacy." Therefore, [P3] is false. Since [P3] is false, the atheistic argument from evil is invalid. Therefore, God and evil can both exist.
In a sense, what I have presented thus far "solves" the problem of evil, at least logically. I have given a negative reason for why [P3] is false; that is, I have shown reasons to doubt the truth of [P3]. There are, of course, plenty of positive responses to refute [P3], that is, there are various accounts of why God might allow evil to befall to His creatures. Perhaps God desires union with fully-formed creatures, creatures who would have make morally difficult decisions in a "religious ambiguous" world to cultivate virtues and achieve the highest good, namely union with God.[viii] Or, perhaps God, in God's goodness, created the "best of all possible worlds," a world in which free will -- and the possibility for sin and its evil destructive effects -- exists.[ix] The most promising positive refutation of [P3] is found in Eleonore Stump's 690-page magnum opus, Wandering in Darkness; here, Stump defends the notion that evil can reformulate our objective and subjective desires, reordering them towards the love of God and in so doing, lead us to maximal human flourishing[x]
Regardless of which positive account one subscribes to, what should be clear, by now, is this: the atheistic argument from evil collapses under the weight of logical scrutiny. Simply put, we Christians can worship a God while acknowledging that evil abounds.
Yet, to stop here leaves much to be desired. After all, Christian life is more than winning arguments with atheists. Ours is not a God of logical propositions; ours is a God of love. When we suffer, we are not always asking for precise philosophical jargon. Many times, when we suffer, we are crying out to God for deliverance. The Bible knows of these songs of pain; one third of the Psalms are Psalms of lament. When your beloved ask you why is there suffering in this world, more often than not, they are asking, why am I suffering, and why is God so silent?
Against this backdrop, we Christians confess what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls a "strange witness," -- that God, in the person of Jesus Chris, has reconciled the world to Godself and in so doing defeated evil once and for all in the cross and in so doing defeated evil once and for all in the cross and resurrection.[xi] We would not say God is silent. Rather, we would say that God has roared victoriously in the triumph of the Lamb.
To respond to our fellow sufferers, and to make sense of Bonhoeffer's strange claim, we start at the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth through His Word and Spirit (Gen. 1.1-2). Christians proclaim that God created ex nihilo, that is, out of nothing. In the opening lines of Scripture, God proclaims that the earth was "formless and void," -- in Hewbrew, this phrase is pronounced "tohu vabohu," which itself sounds chaotic and formless. Genesis 1-2 is about God through Word and Spirit, calling us out from nothingness. From the nothingness, Scripture reveals that there was tohu vabohu. Through Word and Spirit, God ordered the tohu vabohu; we came ex nihilo, passed through tohu vabohu, and through God, became tov m'od -- very good(Gen. 1.31).
We are created things, and created things slide back to that from which we were formed. In God, we find very good order. Conversely, outside God and are back in tohu vobohu; sin abounds, suffering multiplies, evil draws near. All have sinned(Rom 3.23), and all are marching towards the nothingness Christ has called hell. If God's Word and Spirit takes the tohu vabohu and turns it good in Genesis, and we are in the tohu vabohu because of sin, it follows that we need a new act of creation. That is, God's Word and Spirit must make us into a new creation(2Cor.5.17). This, of course, is the grand narrative of salvation.
Christian proclamation speaks of what God has done in light of this seperation, this alienation, caused by sin. We proclaim that God has closed this sepration in the person of Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh. When Jesus became Man, He assumed flesh, assumed a condition prone to the tohu vabohu, prone to the nothingness from which we were formed. Not only that, Jesus redeemed flesh in His life, death, and resurrection, Jesus Christ so loved this borken creation that He took in its brokeness within Himself. Jesus took in our sins, and took in the wrath of God towards sin, on the cross. On Calvary, Christ mediates our fall with God's holiness. Jesus Christ, through His blood, performs an act of atonement -- that is, at-onement-- to reunite the otherwise alienated parties of God and Man. For while we were God's enemies, Christ died for us (Rom 5.8-10)
When the wrath of God met the curse of sin in Jesus' body, the wrath of God prevailed. And on the cross, Jesus Christ was crushed by the full weight of the wrath of God. That is, God defeats evil on the cross of Jesus Chris. Not only that, we see that the Holy Spirit raises Christ again from the dead. Jesus is not a victim of evil; Jesus is Lord over it, and its conqueror. In Christ, evil has been defeated once and for all. In Christ, God has shown Himself to be the God who saves. Evil is on its last gasps of life. When Christ returns, all of the evils we face now will be brought to judgment; every tear will be wiped from our eyes, death and pain will be no more(Rev. 21.4) This is what Scripture proclaims.
So we, in accordance with Scripture, proclaim that in Christ, evil has been conquered, and He is coming soon(Rev. 22.7) Through the Word of God, by the power of Holy Spirit, we Christians are called to hold out in hope, to use our wills properly toward the right ends, and to endure trials by fire so that we might have faith purer than refine gold (1Pet.1.7). This is the theological response, the response of the Church, the account of evil we tell to the sons and daughters of the living God.
To summarize so far: we have seen the origins of evil in sin, philosophical responses to the atheistic problem of evil, and a theological account for how God, in the person of Jesus Christ, has dealt with evil. Now, we might ask a further question: how are we to live in a world filled with suffering?
To answer our final question, we start by asking the question, what is it we want in this life? As stated earlier, what we want, more than anything else, is to love and to be loved. So, we might ask, how do we get what we want? Again, we can fulfill these desires only in Jesus Christ. Not only does Jesus love us unconditionally, the redemption Jesus brings to us by His blood allows us to be the kind of people that can love properly. Without Christ's redemption, we cannot love, because love is a virtue perfected only by the power of the Holy Spirit,[xii] the same Spirit who rose Christ from the dead(Rom.8.11)
If the deepest desires of our hearts are to love and to be loved, and only Jesus Christ can meet these desires full stop, then the way we ought to live and the way we ought to love come together in the worship and glorification of God in Jesus Christ. Christ reveals how to worship Him when He lays down the greatest love commandment: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. In obeying Christ's commandment, we would say that Christians can obtain flourishing. By obtaining flourishing, abundant life in a suffering world becomes possible.
What is flourishing? Revisit the dieting example:
Suppose you've been put on a diet; your doctor told you that you've been eating too many salty foods, and your cholesterol's through the roof, and you've got to cut back. But then, let's say you walk by your kitchen, and there, right in the middle of the kitchen table, you find some ramen. You notice it, it elicits a passion within your soul-- you're passive to ramen's effect on you. So your soul leans towards it. Then you judge that ramen to be good in some way. You judge the ramen to be lovable; and now this ramen is your beloved. So you move towards the ramen, and then you pursue union with the ramen. Such is our common experience of love, noticing, leaning, judging to be lovable/beautiful, moving towards the beloved. pursuing union with the beloved. We follow this pattern of love, ramen and people alike[xiii]
Suppose you eat the ramen, and then immediately regret it. You wanted the ramen, but you wanted to not want it. When you saw the ramen, we would say your soul was divided. You wanted it. But you wanted to want to not want it. What you want, and what you want to want, were at odds with one another. You're unhappy. Or we, might say, you're not flourishing. Conversely, then flourishing happends when what you want, and what you want to want, line up with the will of God.
A further question arises: how does one secure flourishing in this life?
Christian say that flourishing requires the cultivation of the virtues. That is, intentional acts of holiness, habituated over time, contribute to flourishing. Consider self-control. By the grace of God, through prayer and cross-bearing discipleship, you might cultivate self-control to become the kind of person that can look at that ramen, and not want it at all. Then what you want, and what you want to want, can be a harmony with one another. You then have a well-ordered soul. There, you are most happy; you are flourishing.
Now, replace ramen with sinful things. We know what happens when women obsess over their bodies to the point where dieting becomes a form of idolatry. We know how sin corrupts men to the point that they go through the same of process of love with things like pornography. In either case, we find the wrong things lovable, we judge things to be beautiful when they're not, we move towards these things in harmful ways, and our union with these wrongly-loved objects are acts of perversion, rather than acts of love. Sin corrupts our flourishing and causes us to be at war with ourselves; Augustine rightly notes that sin is its own punishment[xiv]
In life, we become only one of two types of people: flourishing lovers of God, or disordered lovers of the self. It is only lovers of God who can achieve flourishing. Again, only God in Jesus Chris can fulfill our hearts desire to love and to be loved, and only Christ's redenmption allows us to love the right things in the right ways. So, when we allow ourselves to be arrested by the power of Jesus Christ, then what we want, and what we want to want, fall in line with what God wants. When that happens, we are no longer passive victims of suffering and sin-- but rather, we are flourishing co-heirs of God's kingdom(Rom.8.17). Jesus told us that He came to give us an abundant life(Jn.10.10); this is what He meant.
Only in this Christ-centered way can we live in this harsh, suffering-filled world, a broken world that we ourselves broke. What I have presented is an account concerned not with survival, but rather, with flourishing, and joy, and love. It requires habituation; virtues take time and prayer to build up. It also requires deep familiarity with the Bible. In the end our pastors were onto something when they encouraged daily prayer and Bible reading; they had hoped all along that we might cultivate our souls to become rightly ordered towards God, so that we may flourish in a suffering world already but not yet redeemed.
While we can offer philosophical responses to our nonbelieving friends, Scripture calls us to respond to the problem of evil in a radically different way, namely, the way of the Lamb. In Christ, one finds the true answer to the problem of evil, an answer not given by human words, but by God's Word made flesh. In Christ, and in Christ alone, we find a way for our heart's desires, human flourishing, and the solution for evil come together to glorify the God who saves. As with anything else, this is a matter of faith, hope, and love. But we, of course, believe that love came first to us in Jesus Christ. In Him alone may we find our rest.
[i]Saint Augustine, Confessions, ll.ii.2(translation by Henry Chadwick)
[ii] Confesson, l.i.1
[iii] Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q1
[iv] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, l.xv., and ll.i.
[v] This is a slightly modified version of Marilyn McCord Adams' presentation of the problem of evil in her book. Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithca: Cornell University Press, 1999)
[vi] In reply, the atheist might claim, I don't believe in God! In response, we might ask, why not? The atheist would then say, because of the problem of evil! -- and quickly, we're back to the beginning.
[vii]For a more detailed account of the Noseeum inference, cf. Daniel Howard-Snyder, "Good, Evil, and Suffering" In reasons for the Hopo Within ed. Michael J Murray(Grand Rapids: Wm. BN Eerdmans, 1999). I am indebted to Howard-Snyder for providing the conceptual tool of Noseeum-inferences.
[viii]This is John Hick's argument; cf. John Hick, "An Irenaean Theodicy." in Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, ed Stephen T. Davis(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1981). pp 38-72
[ix] Alvin Platinga makes this claim. Cf Alvin Plantinga, "Self-Profile." in Alvin Plantinga, ed. James E Tomberlin and Peter van Inwagen(Dordrecht: d Reidel Publishing Company, 1985)
[x] Eleonore Strump, Wandering in Darkness(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010)
[xi] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Ethics," in DBWE vol 6. ed. Clifford J Green(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005).
[xii] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologicae, ll-ll.Q.24.Art.3.
[xiii] cf. John Bowlin, Fortune and Contigency in Aquinas's Ethics, in which Bowlin discusses what, for Aquinas, constitues the act of love(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1999)
[xiv] Augustine, Confessions l.12.