Or, why it's wicked to solve the problem of evil. Or, what to preach about doom, gloom and the cross.
Nowhere does apologetics get more off course than when theologians and philosophers attempt theodicy, trying to solve the "problem of evil".
Let me lay out today, as part of my continuing exploration of what unapologetic preaching looks like, why that's the case. My thesis is this: Any biblical theodicy (defence of God in the face of manifest evil and suffering) must at some point be eschatological, that is, it must refer to the future for which Christians hope. Let me clarify. I begin with three biblical characters who each acutely faced the problem of evil in their experience, not simply as an intellectual puzzle.
Joseph, for being an arrogant prat to his brothers, is sold into slavery. Twenty years later, he ends up being in the position to take revenge and humiliate, enslave or kill them. Apart from a little test to see whether they'd learnt anything from their years to reflect on their actions, he rescues them from their peril (and ends up enslaving their descendents in the long run -- poetic justice? or not...). As he reflects on his suffering caused by their overreaction to his youthful boasting, he says, "You intended it for evil, but God intended it for good". There was no mention of God's activity in the narrative during this account, but Joseph could see above or behind or through the seemingly random nastiness of his brothers (and others later in the narrative), that God was at work to create the conditions under which his family of promise would be rescued from famine. Paul says, "We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose". One of the most quoted (and misunderstood) verses in the Bible. This, though a response to suffering, is not a theodicy.
Job faces the question of suffering. He wants to take God to court and argue his case, to accuse God of injustice for the evil he experiences. God's response takes the form of a counter-offensive against Job, silencing his questions with more of his own. Job ends up placing his hand over his mouth. This, though a response to suffering, is not a theodicy.
Jesus' suffering and death pose the problem of evil in an acute form. Pilate's wife, a Roman centurion, and Judas all testify that he was innocent (Matthew 27.4, 19; Luke 23.47), yet he was betrayed, condemned on the testimony of "false witnesses" (Matthew 26.60), and brutally tortured and executed. If, as Christians claim, his identity was included in that of the one true God, then suffering is not unknown to God. He's been there and experienced it from the inside. As we groan about a world where things fall apart painfully, God's Spirit is groaning too (Romans 8.18-25). God is with the one who suffers. No one suffers alone: Even where we cry "my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?", Jesus is there too. This, though a response to suffering, is not a theodicy.
That God uses evil to bring about good, that God is bigger than us, that God knows the dark night of the soul, these may or may not be of comfort to the sufferer. But they are not directly attempts to "justify the ways of God to man" (Milton).
One such popular attempt at such a justification, the one I hear most from preachers who preach apologetically, is the free-will defense of suffering.
And it fails. Miserably.
This defense says (more or less, and with variations) that a world in which humans are free to make real decisions (including the real decision to cause suffering for themselves and others) is better than a world without free will. Thus, the possibility of evil is a necessary correlate of the best (or at least a better) kind of world. This is a theodicy.
And it's bad.
Because it makes evil necessary. It says that God weaves a tapestry, and to make it beautiful, he needs both light and dark threads. If that's so, then I think God is a nasty old piece of work. Is life -- or rather, death and suffering and injustice and pain -- to be justified aesthetically? While I don't think this is entirely off the mark (aesthetics goes deeper than our all-too-instrumental western mindset often allows), I do think that it's barking up the wrong tree. And it isn't biblical.
What's the biblical answer to the problem of evil? Well, for staters there are the various ones mentioned above as existential answers, that say what it's mlike to live in a suffering world, and give resources for coping. Think the Psalms here. But if you stop there, you've missed the point. The answer, as any good Sunday school student can tell you, is ... Jesus. His suffering brings God into the middle of suffering. And that not only leaves marks on God (Lady Macbeth thought she couldn't get her hands back to how they were before ...), but begins to do something to evil.
At this point, I've heard some preachers sanctify suffering. It becomes another path to Glory. It's God's discipline for sin. Sure, there's something biblical about these ideas, but are they the whole story? What happens next? Because that's God's answer to this worst of all possible worlds in which his Son would be ruthlessly murdered.
At this point, let me digress for a minute. The real issue to "the problem of evil" is that it's not just one problem. It's three.
1. Mortality and suffering are a problem for me, for every me. The futility and frustrations of a world in which my efforts don't last, in which my best achievements can still detract from the happiness of others, in which there is something wrong with everything, means that life is thwarted, or at least diminished. Capacities go unrealized, joys untasted. Life and possibility and freedom are cut tragically short. And not only are positives less than they could be, but the awareness of ubiquitous negative experiences speaks louder yet of evil as a problem for life. Ask any parent who's ever buried a child, if you're not sure what I'm talking about. Or: Ask God.
2. Such a world as we daily experience makes believing in a good and powerful god problematic. If God is there and he loves his creation, and has the authority to command and execute justice: Well, where is it? Can we trust him? The apparent rule of fear, failure and frustration makes believing difficult. Seeing in the sufferings of Christ the sufferings of God may help us think he is good. Seeing him soverignly bring good for Joseph out of fraternal evil may help us think he's powerful. But if God so sympathizes with us, if he can indeed bring his plans to pass despite, even though, opposition, this only magnifies the question: Why don't we see it? Why is life still so hard?
3. Where God is God, what possibility is there of fault, loss, grief, neglect or hurt? The extent of such things in human experience across the ages, or at any single point, is a problem for God. Who is the God reflected the cracked mirror of this suffering world? Not just the reputation but the very identity of God is tarnished by his tattered world.
We can call evil "good" (or at least the condition of good made possible), but lose our own souls. Pastorally, I've seen this in friends who've suffered miscarriages of children and attempted to cope by turning to pastors who've had so little to say.
We can call God "the devil", but lose our hope. Pastorally, I've seen this in folks who've lost loved ones (in literal death or in the death of relationships that we call "divorce") and attempted to turn to pastors who've had nothing to say.
Or, we can groan with a groaning world -- "How long, O Lord?" -- and lose our pat answers altogether. This is the place at which apologetics falls and fails. Because only an unapologetic Word will do.
Only an unapologetic Word is Christian.
Christianity has no philosophical response to evil. Because the Gospel -- as I've been trying to say in this series -- isn't just information. It's event -- eschaological event.
God doesn't explain why evil has a useful role in society, or how in his master sceme it makes a cameo appearance. He does something. His response is to limit it, to condemn it, to restrain it, to oppose it, to undo it. And this is what we are seeing in the cross and empty tomb.
Because on the cross, the full extent of evil doing its worst is manifest and exhausted. Though betrayed, scorned, violated, and ignored, Jesus never replied in kind. He was not overcome by evil, but overcame evil with good. He broke the vicious cycle or spiral, of blood for blood, curse for curse. Trusting in the justice of God, he gave up his breath in blessing. He never pretended his situation was less than blackness; his godforsaken cry must not be read as a pantomime. He died in agony, the absent Father his only hope. Despair? Yes. Because he knew God -- the God who hates evil. And he was located in the heart of darkness.
Holy Saturday is God's eschaological act in response to evil.
It is God's grief over the dead world. He died. He was buried. And an unapologetic theology is uttered in a single word: Yet ...
Easter is the theodicy of God, or at least its eschaological dawning. For here, the injustice is righted, the scorned one glorifed. Here is the firstfruits of the defeat of death, the tasting of life beyond the deadliness of decay: Death no longer has dominion over him.
But this over him is our hope, our grief. For it does over us. We still die: In shame, in pain, outside justice, without peace. God has not redeemed his creation. Or not enough of it. The achievement of the cross can be overstated. It is finished? Not yet. Started, begun, not ended.
See, what I'm saying is that the unapologetic preaching of cross and resurrection: That is the only apologetics we Christians have. The only words we can say to theodicy are the words of the Gospel. Which means a Christian theodicy is at once evangelical and eschatological. Evangelical: It must be focused on the good news of what God has done in Christ. And eschatological: It must leave room for more to come, for the ultimate solution to still be in the future.
Jesus on the cross defeats evil through refusing to fight fire with fire, and the cycle of violence is buried with him. The resurrection is a demonstration that God will not abandon his perishing creation. Easter is a promise, a first down payment, of God's intention to remove evil, root and branch, from his entire world, to hand it over to eternal destruction, to ultimate and irreversible exclusion. The Gospel, the story of Jesus' life, death and resurrection, is God's solution to the problem of evil. In short, the gospel is theodicy.
Yet we find ourselves in the midst of the gospel narrative, not yet at its ultimate conclusion. There's more to come. My contention from the start has been that only an eschatological theodicy will do. As long as evil continues to have the dominant hand, any attempt to account for its presence and influence is mere reinterpretation. As Marx famously said, philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world, the point is to change it. Or rather, the point is that God will change it. That change began with Jesus' death and resurrection; there is now one piece of the world that is an evil-free zone, namely, Jesus' resurrected body. Death no longer has dominion over him (Romans 6.16).
Yet it still does us. Jesus has been given all authority in heaven and on earth (Matthew 28.18), including authority over the evil forces and powers and multinational corporations and corrupt governments and globalization and the capitalist system and disease and decay and death. But we do not yet see all things in subjection to him (Hebrews 2.8).
Unapologetic preaching dares to say: There's still more to come. The final triumph over the enemy. I'm not adding something here to the message of God or the work of Jesus. I'm simply saying that our future is Jesus' present. Jesus' own future is what we Christians look forward to. There is more to come: We confess our faith in "the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come". The final triumph of God over the last enemy. Jesus' final victory over death -- that great "last enemy" of God and humanity (1 Corinthians 15.20-28) -- is not simply the unveiling of what is already the case. For Jesus' resurrection is only the first fruits (1 Corinthians 15.20), and while he is the firstborn (Revelation 1.5), the harvest, the great family, is not yet here. To quote Moltmann's Theology of Hope: "The Christ event cannot then itself be understood as fulfilling all promises, so that after this event there remains only the sequel of its being unveiled for all to see". Therefore, the believer's present experience of an unredeemed "groaning world" (Romans 8) isn't to be downplayed as mere appearance awaiting the exposure of its hidden redemption.
We yearn and wait and groan because (i) the cross and resurrection display God's settled opposition to all that opposes life in his good world (and not just display, but are the decisive step in turning the tide) and (ii) because we do not yet see the conclusion of these divine actions. Without (i) we would be without hope; without (ii) we would no longer need to hope: Who hopes for what is seen? We groan because we know something of Christ's future, but it remains future.
But ...
The Gospel is contained in that one simple affirmation: "But ..."
But in Jesus, in the Spirit, this future has begun. We who suffer and groan, don't suffer and groan alone. We groan "with God's Spirit" (Romans 8.26-27). The disciples weren't left orphaned, with simply the knowledge of God's decisive victory and the promise of its completion. For once Jesus departed, the Spirit arrived (John 14.16-18). Since Jesus pours out this Spirit, and it was this Spirit who raised him from the dead, this Spirit also connects us to the risen Jesus. In his Spirit, we are "in Christ". That bit of the world that has been raised and created anew, is now the location of our hidden identity (Colossians 3.1-4). Which is to say that baptism is God's in-breaking into the world, here-and-now, raising us to life in the Spirit, with Jesus (Romans 6).
We can trust, love, and hope in the face of evil. God may not yet ultimately have solved the problem of evil: We still pray and groan. But we do so in trust, love, and hope. In Christ by the Spirit we have the down payment, the pledge, the guarantee of God's promised future, but we do not yet have that future. Or at least not in its fullness: The Spirit as first fruits (Romans 8.23) is more like a kiss than an engagement ring. Both promise the future, but while a ring is a somewhat arbitrary sign, a kiss is an actual taste of what's coming.
Our faith "in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come" is in one sense a comfort. But, for me, it also intensifies the problem. Precisely because I have hope, it hurts to see the world as it is. It breaks my pastoral heart.
But ... because we know that God will rid the world of evil that we can live in the light of that future: Trusting, loving, hoping.
This is an intensely practical and personal problem for each and every human. Rather than seeing it as an apologetics "issue" that needs to be "solved" (or sidestepped) so that people will listen to the Gospel, I propose that it is itself the very problem to which the Gospel is such good news. The problem of evil is the primary reason I'm a Christian. Or rather, I'm a Christian due to the fact that in the death and resurrection of Jesus, in which I see the destiny of the world and my own destiny, I can hope that one day there will be a real, existential, moral, social, cosmological, theological more-than-intellectual solution. Come Lord Jesus. Amen.