What's the matter here?

Overview of Christian Theology, Assignment 6

The problem of evil is — it seems to me — the pre-eminent theological problem for Christians. I would submit that the existence and persistence of evil is probably the main obstacle for those who question or deny the existence of God. Actually, it’s not any God for whom the reality of evil is problematic. It’s especially the God to whom the following adjectives are ascribed: omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal, parental, and especially protective and loving.

Recently, my beloved seven-month-old kitten became fatally ill with an incurable disease. As you can imagine, this was a source of great distress to me; she was a wonderfully affectionate, beautiful, and charming companion creature—innocent, harmless, and delightful. In short, I loved her, and wanted the very best for her, but (and here we encounter the “shadow side” of creation) I was powerless to save her life. I prayed for her, I tried to encourage her to eat nutritious food, I petted her and showed her how much she was loved, I made her as comfortable as I could.

Being human, I couldn’t cure her. (If there had been some personal sacrifice that would have saved her, I surely would have made it.) But in most other ways, I stood in a relationship to my cat analogous to that which we say God stands to us. Her well-being was in my hands. And I intervened, out of love and concern for my kitten, when I took her to the vet and made sure at last that she had a good death with a minimum of suffering. I wept as I did it, and it grieves me still, but I did it nonetheless.

Her suffering and death were not evil (although for me they were very, very sad and seemed pointless and unfair). What would have been evil, in my mind, would have been to allow her suffering to be prolonged unnecessarily, when I could do something about it. There was nothing to be learned from her agony; there was no contribution to the ‘greater good’ to be had. In my ‘godlike’ relationship to her, the loving and compassionate choice was to deliver her from suffering before it became her entire and only reality.

The Hebrew Bible describes an interventionist God, who acts in history to save God’s people. The Gospels proclaim a God who comes among us, who heals and reconciles, one who suffers and dies, but then lives again and is with us still, moving and acting. Where, in our modern experience of ongoing, deliberate evil on both intimately personal and national or global scales, is that God who protects and saves? How can we experience God as loving and parental under these circumstances?

Was there any sense in which the suffering of the victims of the Holocaust could be said to be necessary or beneficial? Where was the God of Exodus for them as they were worked to death and thrown into ovens? Or for the little girl whose entire life is lived in a closet, chained to a pipe, starved, degraded, and tortured for the entertainment of her keepers, who dies alone and with no experience of goodness and love at all... what use is an all-powerful God who knows and shares that experience but does nothing about it? Can anyone in good conscience tell her that this is somehow Good News? How would you ask her to pray to and worship a God who has consigned her, without respite or consolation of any kind, to the hands of evil? Is it really an adequate response to this victim of evil to say that all will be set right in the hereafter?

Almighty, all-knowing, loving: pick two.

It seems to me that we must let go of the paradigm of the parental, interventionist God. From now on, we can see God at work in the world only in the way that the Gospels showed us Jesus at work in the world. And even then, it will only be in a diluted and non-supernatural fashion. The Gospel work of healing and reconciliation can now only be carried out by limited and flawed human beings inspired and sustained by the Holy Spirit. And therefore there will continue to be millions who, untouched by any experience of love and mercy, will suffer and die in thrall to evil. It is not a pretty picture, and I have yet to hear anything like a good reason for it.