The Atonement and the Problem of Evil Part V: God’s "Yes"

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts toanswering the fundamental question of philosophy. – Albert Camus

Camus may not have had theodicy in mind when he wrote those words, but it’s not hard to see their application to the problem of evil. At root, the question we face is whether an all-good God is justified in creating a world such as ours with its manifest suffering and evil. Is life as we know it, with its sorrows, disappointments, betrayals, and pain worth living?

My reason for writing this series of posts has been my hunch that the best answer available to this question lies not in philosophical theories about God’s nature in the abstract (however necessary those might be), but in the concrete, historical narrative of God’s activity in history. Christians believe that God has acted in history to deal with the problem of evil. That human life if worth living is confirmed by the fact that God has gone to such great lengths to redeem it.

According to Christian belief, God has, in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, revealed his love for us, provided a means of reconciliation, and won the decisive victory over the powers of sin, evil and death in this world, beginning the process of the redemption of all creation.

But in addition to this, God, in becoming incarnate in a human being, has entered into our human predicament. He is “Immanuel,” “God with us.” As the creeds teach, he became “fully human.” That means that God shared in human life with all its joys and its trials. Indeed, the life God chose to live was one of suffering at the hands of his enemies, betrayal and desertion by his closest friends, and finally dying the excruciating death of a criminal and blasphemer.

This means that in all our sufferings, God is with us. He has entered into and identified with us. As philosopher Richard Swinburne argues in his book The Resurrection of God Incarnate, this would be a good thing for God to do even if the world’s evils are ultimately balanced out by its goods. This is because we often can’t see how certain evils will be taken up into or balanced by some greater good, and so we are tempted to despair. But by living a fully human life in solidarity with us, God reassures us that it is somehow worth it. He is like the general who vows never to ask his troops to do anything he wouldn’t be willing to do himself.

So, whatever else we say about God’s atoning work, we can affirm that he found human life worth living. Obviously, he also found it in need of serious repair; that’s what the work of Incarnation and Atonement is all about. But he continues to affirm the pronouncement made in Genesis that creation is “very good” and that the lost sheep is worth saving. If God himself makes this judgment, can we do any less?