Contending with a Tragic World

But What About Evil?

The persistence of evil is an inescapable fact of human history. In the experience of evil and reflection upon it, mankind reaches the extreme limit — the decisive question of the meaning of life, of the sense and nonsense of reality. Therefore, the Christian view of human existence faces its most serious test when applied to the presence of evil in the world.

MICHAEL PETERSON, Evil and the Christian God

A carjacker steals a woman's car while her six-year-old son is still in the backseat. The terrified mother flings open the back door and frantically attempts to rescue her son. But her little boy's foot becomes tangled in his seatbelt, and the carjacker speeds off, dragging the boy to his death.

   Early one morning a youth group from a small church sets out, full of excitement, for a day at an amusement park. Just before arriving, their van collides with a semi-trailer. The twenty-nine-year-old youth pastor and five of the kids are killed instantly.

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   A little girl is born into the home of an abusive alcoholic father. Not long after birth the doctors discover she has a rare skin disease that makes her hands and feet blister painfully. Her father tells her she is ugly and no one will ever love her. But she overcomes all this and grows up to marry a wonderful man. They begin a home together and are just starting to talk about having a child when she suddenly begins to lose her eyesight and the strength of her limbs. At twenty-six she is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis of the most aggressive kind and is told by the time she is thirty she may be blind and confined to a wheelchair.

   Some Christians may claim that such tragedies do not shake their faith in the least, but I cannot say this. Sometimes it feels as if my faith evaporates in an instant, like a drop of water in a burst of heat, when I encounter such things. Of all the questions I have had about my faith, this is among those I struggle with most. Why do such senseless things happen? Where is God in these situations?

   Have you encountered tragedies that have shaken your faith? Explain.

The Inescapable Question

People throughout recorded history have struggled with the existence of evil and suffering. Wherever humans can be found an almost universal cry of protest against the cold facts of reality arises. Why do babies die? Why do innocent people suffer? Why are we able to hurt one another so badly? Why do some starve while others have plenty of food? Even the coldest heart cries out in pain when tragedy strikes near enough. Something deep inside us demands that any religion that claims to be true would surely have to give a satisfying answer to such questions.

   Some maintain that the very existence of such evils as holocausts, wars, rapes, murders, disease, earthquakes, plane crashes and even the more common heartbreaks and injustices we suffer every day should be enough to silence any argument for the truth of Christianity. For these people not only does Christianity with its all-powerful, all-loving, all-just God lack satisfying answers, but it makes the problem even more difficult. Somehow it

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is easier to accept that there is no God than that God would exist and allow such atrocities.

   In the past when my heart has been torn with doubt, I have had similar thoughts. But at other times, when I have been able to get past the pat answers many Christians throw around in times of suffering, I have caught a glimpse of a solid reality that finally begins to make real sense of the seemingly senseless question of the existence of evil. And the key to beginning to see this reality seems to lie in beginning to understand the nature of love.

   Have you heard people denounce Christianity because of the existence of evil in the world? If so, in what circumstances?

The Choice in Love

"What is Love?" I sat in a restaurant with Erik on a chilly day a few months before we became engaged, discussing this very question. We were considering the possibility of getting married but were both struggling with the enormity of such a decision. How could we know that we were the right ones for each other? It kept circling back around to our love for each other, but when we tried to say exactly what that meant, the concept seemed surprisingly out of reach.

   Love is one of the most real things I have ever experienced, yet it seems to be one of the hardest concepts to pin down. The joy of laying my head on Erik's shoulder, of receiving a card with heartfelt words from my mother, of seeing my dad's eyes tear up when I give him a kiss, of hearing my little boy giggle when I hold him close — these things seem to lie beyond the scope of analysis. But despite its incomprehensibility, most would agree love is incomparably priceless. In fact, most of us would never want to live in a world where love is not possible.

   When you think about it, though, love is meaningful only when it is freely given. If someone had been holding a gun to Erik's head forcing him to marry me, his wedding vows would have been less romantic. And the only thing that makes a kind action kind is that the person performing the action was not required to do it. It is not particularly kind of me to pay my taxes, since if I didn't IRS would confiscate my house and throw me in

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jail. It would be kind of me, however, if I decided to give a homeless person the same amount of money I pay in taxes each year.

   True love or kindness always involves some sort of choice. The less someone is required or expected to do an action, the more loving or kind the action is considered. And for a person to really have a choice, it must be truly possible for that person to choose something else. That means for true love to be possible, individuals have to have the capability to choose the opposite.

   This brings us to a strange paradox. The very choice that makes such wonderful experiences as love, kindness, courage and self-sacrifice possible is also the very choice that makes hate, selfishness, cowardliness and cruelty possible.

   What is your response to the claim that love always involves a choice?

But If God Can Do All Things...

One of the essential beliefs of Christianity is that God can do all things. Luke 1:37 clearly states that "nothing is impossible with God." So, many ask, if God is all-powerful, why couldn't he have created a world in which love and kindness were not dependent on also being able to choose the opposite.

It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk about God. C.S. LEWIS1

   I think the answer to this question can be found by examining what it means to say God is all-powerful. When we say this, we are stating a belief that nothing that exists poses any threat or obstacle to God. We are not saying that he can do something that is self-contradictory. A self-contradictory statement is nonsense. It is like trying to say God could have made a world where one equals two. The very definition of one excludes the possibility of its being two.

   In the same way, in the very essence of love is the concept of choice. It might be possible for there to be something that looks like love that does not involve a choice, but it would not be love in the sense that we know it. A

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sophisticated robot could theoretically mimic every loving action and word available to humans, but it would not be love.

   Do you agree that God's omnipotence wouldn't allow him to do two contradictory things? Why or why not?

   What do you think about the idea that creating love without a choice would be self-contradictory?

But Why So Much Evil?

When I began to understand the necessity of choice in love, it helped me see the existence of evil and suffering in a new light. But the question why so much evil exists still remained. Why is it that good and evil don't seem to have a level playing field? Why does it take so much effort to be truly good and loving while selfishness comes without trying? Why would God have created a world like that?

   Of course the Bible teaches that God did not create a world like that. When God created the world, everything in his creation, including humanity, was completely good. However, one of the good things he created was our ability to love him and each other, but by the very nature of love this also included the possibility of choosing not to love.

   The Bible says God created us in his image to have a relationship with him. On every page of the Bible is the awe-inspiring message of God's love for us and desire for us to return this love. But because of the nature of true love, if we are to be capable of really loving God, we have to be left free to make the choice. And if we are truly free to make the choice, the possibility must exist that we will chose not to love God.

God seems like delicate china: precious but fragile. Evil seems like a bull in a china shop: strong and triumphantly destructive. PETER KREEFT AND RONALD K. TACELLI2

   Nearly everyone in the Western world knows the story of Adam and Eve's disobedience, perhaps almost too well. We have heard it both preached and ridiculed as the subject of high-minded sermons and low-minded jokes. But perhaps the Genesis account deserves a closer look.

   When I am considering the account of the Fall, it helps to remember that there is more to the story than is written. The story clearly does not include the kind of detail we expect from modern journalism, and this is understandable

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when we consider that this bare-bones account was passed down from prehistoric times to speak to humans in every stage of civilization.

   C.S. Lewis pictures one scenario of the way things may have been at the time of the Fall. He envisions that the perfect consciousness given to the first humans "ruled and illuminated" their whole being, "flooding every part of it with light."

Man was then all consciousness.... His organic processes obeyed the law of his own will, not the law of nature. His organs sent up appetites to the judgment seat of will not because they had to, but because he chose. Sleep meant to him not the stupor which we undergo, but willed and conscious repose.... Wholly commanding himself, he commanded all lower lives with which he came into contact.... However rich and varied man's experience of his fellows (or fellow) in charity and friendship and sexual love, or of the beasts, or of the surrounding world... God came first in his love and in his thought, and that without painful effort. In perfect cyclic movement, being, power and joy descended from God to man in the form of gift and returned from man to God in the form of obedient love and ecstatic adoration.³

The simple fact is that in wanting to be what man as a creature could not be, man lost what he could be. In every area and relationship men have lost what finite man could be in his proper place. FRANCIS SCHAEFFER4

   Whether or not this is exactly the way things were before the Fall, the Bible teaches that the first humans were in close communion with God and living peacefully in an essentially good world. Then they chose to disobey God. This act had dire consequences, separating humanity from God and plunging the world into its current fallen state. In this act Adam and Eve chose selfishness over love for God. They turned away from God and made themselves their own idols, fixing their natural inclinations on themselves rather than on God.

   What is your response to the account of the Fall?

The Consequences of the Fall

The Bible is clear that the consequences of Adam and Eve's sin were widespread. Somehow that one decision cast the whole course of humanity

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and the world in a new direction. This can be seen in the pronouncements God makes when he confronts Adam and Eve with their sin in Genesis 3, and it is echoed throughout Scripture. The choice of sin introduced death into the world (1 Cor 15:22), and humanity's relationship with God was changed for all time. Our natural inclinations became selfish, as Romans 5:19 says: "Through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners."

Thus all day long, and all the days of our life, we are sliding, slipping, falling away — as if God were, to our present consciousness, a smooth inclined plane on which there is no resting. C. S. LEWIS5

   But this is not all. In the Genesis account and throughout Scripture we see that the natural order of the world changed as a consequence of humanity's sin. Without giving more detail, Genesis speaks of the introduction of a cursed earth, painful toil and thorns and thistles, and Romans 8:20-23 says that "creation was subjected to frustration" and that it is "groaning" as it waits to be "liberated from its bondage to decay" through the redemption of humankind. This seems to indicate that the Fall brought not only the prevalence of moral evil — those evils that are direct results of selfish human choices — but also the existence of natural evil — evils like diseases, earthquakes and accidents.

   I have asked myself if it was fair to God to attach such heavy consequences to one choice. But then I began to see that this wasn't some small, incidental choice. It was a choice about whether humanity would serve God or serve self, and human beings chose self. We do not know but that consequences were just the natural outpouring of that choice. Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli in Handbook of Christian Apologetics explain it in this way:

To help understand Creation and the Fall, the image of three iron rings suspended from a magnet is helpful. The magnet symbolizes God; the first ring, the soul; the middle ring, the body; and the bottom ring, nature. As long as the soul stays in touch with God, the magnetic life keeps flowing through the whole chain, from divine life to soul life, body life and nature life. The three rings stay harmonized, united, magnetized. But when the soul freely declares its independence from God, when the first iron ring separates from the magnet, the inevitable consequence is that the whole chain of rings is demagnetized and falls apart. When the soul is separated from God, the body is separated from the soul — that is, it dies — and also from nature — that is, it suffers.⁶

   We also might ask why God didn't just reverse these enormous consequences

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of the Fall by some sort of miracle. However, if God had stepped in and erased the consequences of Adam and Eve's choice, it would not have been a real choice. "It would, no doubt, have been possible," Lewis writes, "for God to remove by miracle the results of the first sin committed by a human being; but this would not have been much good unless He was prepared to remove the results of the second sin, and of the third, and so on forever."⁷ A world in which humanity knew by experience that God would always erase the consequences of any bad choice would be a world in which true choice was not possible.

   Read Genesis 3:14-24, and list the consequences mentioned there of Adam and Eve's sin.

   What do you think about the fact that God attached such enormous consequences to this choice?

   What is your response to the idea that God could have miraculously reversed these consequences?

So Why Create At All?

Sometimes I have wished for oblivion. Sometimes the world seems so oppressive and difficult and humanity so capable of suffering that it's easy to wonder if it would not have been better if God had not created at all. At such times I have asked why, if God is all-wise, he chose to create the world knowing the hatred, terror, starvation, slaughter and agonizing grief that would result.

   But I suspect this is an entirely emotional question, not a rational one. It is more of an expression of my temporary loss of hope than a true assessment of reality. For what does it mean to say it would be better for nothing to have existed? Better for whom? How can anyone gain anything by not existing? And who can put a value on one happy heart, the joy of falling in love, the wonder in experiencing a sunset, or the possibility of true communion with God?

   Have you ever wondered why God would create at all? If so, in what circumstances?

   What are your thoughts about this question?

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Redeeming Evil

No discussion of the Fall, though, is complete without a discussion of redemption. Though God might have been perfectly justified in leaving things as they were after the Fall, he chose not to do that. God, through Jesus, became human and subjected himself to the effects of evil in order to restore our relationship with him. As Philippians 2:6-8 says, Christ, "being in very nature God, ... made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedience to death — even death on a cross!"

   Somehow, in the same way that Adam and Eve's sin gave us death, Jesus' death gave us life. The Bible says that all evil will ultimately be defeated through what Jesus did on the cross. Ironically, the evil choices of people played a key role in the events that led up to Jesus' crucifixion. God used the very existence of evil to bring about its destruction.

For just as through disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous. ROMANS 5:19

   Amazing, when we reflect on it, we can see other ways that God uses evil to defeat itself and bring about good. As Joseph said to his brothers, "You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good" (Gen 50:20). This doesn't diminish the abhorrence we should have for evil. The Bible says God hates evil, and God's use of evil for good in our lives usually depends on our own hatred of it. But realizing this does deepen our appreciation of God. Consider the ways God uses evil for good.

It is in times of pain that we most often turn to God. As Lewis writes, "God whispers to us in our pleasure, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."⁸

Tragedy is often what binds hearts together, forces people to overcome differences and causes individuals to truly appreciate each other.

The existence of evil in our world gives us the greatest opportunity to build moral character and develop such things as compassion, courage and self-sacrifice. Without evil in the world we would never have such people as Harriet Tubman, Mother Teresa and Gandhi.

   God uses the challenges evil brings to draw us to himself and shape us into the kind of people he wants us to be. As Ronald Nash points out, "Most

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of what we consider significant with regard to human spiritual and moral development arises as a result of interaction with challenge."⁹ Through such things as danger, disappointment and loss we have the opportunity to choose to become better or worse people.

   When I first began to understand this, I accepted it only grudgingly. If I have to undergo pain to produce character, so be it, I thought, but I secretly suspected God could have found a better way. But then I began to wonder if perhaps our participation with God in producing godliness in ourselves actually increases the glory of attainment — the glory for God and our potential for sharing in this glory.

It's odd to express appreciation to a wheelchair, but I do. Almost thirty years of quadriplegia, and almost as many studying God's Word, have deepened my gratitude to God for these bolts and bars. JONI EARECKSON TADA ( writer, artist and paralysis victim)10

   To help explain this, Nash uses the analogy of someone who wants to climb to the top of Mt. Rainier. But as the person begins arduous training, he decides it is too difficult and instead rents a helicopter to take him to the top. Would reaching the summit without any real effort be even a fraction as meaningful as climbing it would have been?¹¹ Now consider how this might translate to the spiritual process of soul making. Perhaps if soul making could be accomplished without struggle, it would be far less valuable in the end.

   What difficult situations can you think of that have helped you to grow as a person or draw closer to God?

   What is your response to the idea that the effort we are required to invest in our own growth could increase the value in the end?

A Long Road Home

Although the prevalence of evil in the world has been one of the issues I have struggled with most, wrestling with this question has also stretched my understanding of God and myself. The question has led me on a long and winding path, with many switchbacks and confusing loops, but somewhere in the journey my perspective has begun to change. I have gone from suspecting that evil is an indication of the absence of God to realizing that the Christian answer possesses an uncanny ability to fit the pieces of the puzzle of evil together in the only way I can find that begins to make sense.

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   The Christian answer explains why we sometimes come into contact with a depth of evil that evades all natural explanation — gruesome murders, shocking child molestations and bizarre accounts of apparent demon possession. It explains the strange fact that we simultaneously abhor evil and contribute to it — at the minimum through the occasional cruel word or selfish action. It explains why evil persists despite all advancements in society and efforts to eradicate it. It explains and legitimizes the fact that even though most of us no longer have any idealistic dreams of ridding the world of all evil, we still feel compelled to eliminate as much evil as possible. And it explains the peculiar reality that true fulfillment seems to come only from self-sacrifice, and yet we find self-sacrifice one of the hardest things to do.

It is precisely because the Christian faith solves the problem of evil with amazing adequacy that I have become so convinced a Christian. It solves evil in thought; it solves evil in life. NELS F.S. FERRE12

   I have gone from secretly resenting God for allowing this fallen world and all the pain it entails to harboring a reluctant but increasing appreciation for the grandness and ingenuity of his plan to redeem the world from evil — allowing us to be part of the process. I used to struggle with how the Fall fit into God's plan. I viewed Adam and Eve's world as God's original plan for us and the world we live in now as a less-than-optimal plan B. But how could an omniscient God have a plan B? Finally, it struck me that perhaps this is plan A. God knew what we would do, he knew what his response would be, and he knew that somehow what is to come would be worth it all. This way raises the stakes, intensifies the conflict, but also exponentially compounds the reward.

   My faith still quivers when I come in contact with suffering. I have encountered little true hardship in my life, but what little I have seen reveals how faint-hearted I am. And when I am in the middle of it all, sometimes I find it hard to accept these answers — but perhaps grappling with this at these times is also part of the process of being shaped into who God wants me to be.

   Do you agree that Christianity begins fitting pieces of the puzzle of evil together in a way that makes sense? Why or why not?

   Can you think of some evils in the world that point to the

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existence of the supernatural? Explain.

   Do you think it is impossible for an omniscient God to have a plan B? Explain your thoughts on this subject?

   Do you believe that the existence of evil in the world disproves Christianity? Why or why not?

Digging Deeper

   The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis (New York: Macmillan, 1962). This is a mind-and faith-stretching book I highly recommend for those struggling with the question of evil in the world.

   Evil and the Christian God by Michael Peterson (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1982). Peterson comprehensively explores the philosophical arguments for and against Christianity involved in the issue of evil.

   Where is God When it Hurts? by Philip Yancey, rev.ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.; Zondervan, 1990). This revised version of Yancey's classic book explores the often heart-rending questions raised by the existence of pain and offers sensitive advice on how to cope with our own pain and the pain of others.

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