"For God So Loved the World…"

“I know of no other God except the one called Jesus Christ.” – Martin Luther

 

The question at the heart of the problem of evil is why, if God is good and all-powerful, doesn’t he do something about all the evil and suffering in the world? The usual responses (which I discussed here) often seem to answer this question by fudging one of the terms involved. Either God isn’t really good (or good in any way we can understand) or God isn’t really all-powerful, or what appears to be evil isn’t really evil – that is, it’s a necessary part of some greater good.

 

But if God isn’t good, then, while he might be the object of a certain feeling of awe, he wouldn’t be an object of love, or a being we could enter into a personal relationship with. On the other hand, if God isn’t all-powerful then it seems he is just another being alongside other beings, rather than the ground of being itself. God is reduced to merely one piece of the furniture of the universe, and worship of such a being would be tantamount to idolatry. Either of these solutions would seem to offend the religious impulse. Can we do better?

 

The reason we end up with this dilemma, I think, is that we start out with an essentially “deist” model of God. That is, a God who created the world, but doesn’t (or can’t) intervene in its workings. On these terms, the problem of evil will inevitably end up in a defeat for the theist. God can only end up looking like a distant and uncaring deity, a kind of cosmic constitutional monarch with no real power.

 

The startling claim of Christianity, however, is that God has done something about evil and suffering. Specifically, Christians proclaim that in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, God has dealt decisively with evil. The God of Christianity is not the detached God of deism or Aristotle’s prime mover. Rather, the Christian God is dynamically involved with his creation, going so far as to become incarnate in a human being in order to redeem a world corrupted by evil. 

 

I think that any satisfactory response to the problem of evil, at least for a Christian, demands that we take seriously this central claim about God’s redemptive action. When someone asks, “Why doesn’t God do something about evil?” the first answer has to be that he has.

 

But what does it really mean to say that God’s revelation in Christ is the answer to the problem of evil? Especially given the manifest fact that there’s still plenty of evil afoot in the world 2,000 years later? Stay tuned, true believers…