It's remarkable that mainstream orthodox traditional Christian theology has been wrestling with the "problem" of explaining evil for the entirety of its recorded history*.
Officially the origin and presence of evil has long-since been explained, to the complete satisfaction of theologians; who cannot understand why people continue to harp-on about it.
Yet - somehow - it just won't go away!
It seems that everybody who accepts the definition of the Christian God as omnipotent and omniscient, and creator of everything from nothing - rapidly and unavoidably crashes-up against the problem of explaining how this-God is also supposed to be wholly Good and loving of each and every one of his children - all the time.
Again and again, later if not sooner, people find that - in this collision of principles included in the definition of "Omnipotent plus Good" something has-to give-way.
Again and again, people insist that to be "God" - God must be omnipotent and creator from nothing; and this primary and prior assumption inevitably makes people realize that therefore God cannot be "Good" in the same way that human beings understand Good...
For Omni-God to be Good either pushes us towards a redefinition of Good as it applies to God - so that our human evaluations become irrelevant, and we must just submit (preferably uncritically) to God's incomprehensible Goodness...
(Christianity tends towards Islam...)
Or else we are pushed towards a version of Oneness spirituality in which everything that has ever happened or could happen is actually Good - if only we could understand it; and again our own personal evaluations are declared worthless.
(Christianity tends towards Hinduism/ Buddhism...)
Again and again; thoughtful people are pushed away from Christianity, because they recognize that their own profoundest understanding of Good and evil is being declared irrelevant.
Of course there is the alternative of challenging the definition of God as omnipotent - but that has been declared not-Christian by nearly all the major Christian churches.
And since most people believe that Christianity is derived from (one or another) Church - and the individual person's understanding must be subordinated to (one or another) external authority; then redefinition of the nature of God is disallowed.
Something must give-way - and something does give-way - and what gives-way is (nearly always) the possible validity and human desirability of Christianity itself.
**
*It is not a problem to explain evil if one regards the Fourth Gospel (John) as the prime and unique overall-valid source of Jesus's life and teachings. Jesus's depicted relationship both with his Father and his disciples are personal and loving - human-like; but raised to an ideal and eternal degree. God is stated and assumed to be wholly Good; but in the IV Gospel's substance, there is nothing to insist upon God's omnipotence and omniscience. Consequently; Jesus and his followers do not seem troubled in the slightest about how to explain evil. The problem of evil apparently comes from post-Jesus theological and philosophical definitions of God, and is apparently related to the development of Christian churches - including the notion that to-be-a-Christian (to follow Jesus, to attain salvation) one must be a member of the true Church.
NOTE: Mormon theology does not posit the Omni-God, nor creation from nothing; and evil is easily explained by Mormonism's pluralist metaphysics. It should be noted, however, that the extremely radical and distinctive qualities of Mormon theology and metaphysics do not much impinge upon the CJCLDS - where the emphasis is very much on doctrines and practices.
15 comments:
When what is evil to our nature is hailed as good, and our submission to it is demanded, a loving relation to it becomes impossible, and to solve this, then love is redefined, like good and evil were, until only a hopeless darkness of spiritual emptiness and death remains.
This, too, is called a good thing, for "a crushed spirit" is a worthy offering to God (psalm 51)
@Hagel - I think it is long overdue that (most) Christians ceased to torture themselves and distort their discipleship with the Old Testament.
Firstly, I would like to thank you Dr. Charlton for your blog, which to me has been like a beacon of light in a time of great darkness.
I am a Christian going through a crisis of faith. Recently, I lived a period of much suffering, which forced me to reevaluate what I believed in, and to seek answers to fundamental questions. Questions which were not answered satisfactorily by my church, nor I dare say, by any of the mainstream religions.
I find it jarring that the religious mainstream, questioned upon the contradiction between the goodness of God and the omnipotence of God, will either provide elaborate non-answers, or insist on the omnipotence of God (and the necessity of submitting to his will) over the goodness of God. This, I think, may be the result of a superstitious fear of offending God by suggesting he may be anything less than omni.
Personally, I find that believing in an all-powerful God that is either cruel, or indifferent, or of such "incomprehensible goodness" that to us humans may be indistinguishable from evil, is not any less despair inducing than not believing in God at all.
However, in your blog you provide the most coherent, satisfying and intellectually honest answers to this and other fundamental questions that I have come across.
@S - Yes, we agree that this is a Very important matter, and affects almost all of us at some point. We need to consider both sides of the paradox, and that means really seriously examining the omni assumption - whether it really is what Jesus taught and lived-by.
The old Scholastics debated whether God could create a stone so heavy that He could not lift it.
This was not a serious topic, but was given to candidates as an exercise, to test their knowledge & skill.
The answer is that God can limit himself by His Word, because once He says something He cannot go back on it.
For example, I sin; I repent; He forgives me.
Now He has cast that sin into the sea of His forgetfulness & will remember it no more. So He can't remember it (at least as we understand these things).
He also limited what He can do by giving us agency, which He cannot / will not change, so evil gets to exist if we want it.
Ecclesiastes 7:29: Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.
I think the main thing that has to give is not so much omnipotence as the idea that God created everything from nothing. In a world of already-existing beings, an omnipotent God *could* annihilate everything and remake it as perfect (or transform it in the blink of an eye, which is the same thing), but if “love” means anything at all, it means being unwilling to do that.
@Phil - That is an instance of the first (i.e. Islam-tending) classical theological response: complexification and abstraction in "answering" what is experienced by most people as a perfectly straightforward question. A way of saying that God's Goodness is not like Man's Goodness - human morality does not apply to God - and we must just accept, obey - and do not presume to question that which is beyond our understanding.
@WmJas - I think that omnipotence and creation from nothing were both needed and presented together - if God (or "deity") was to the the philosophical job that was being asked of it.
" In a world of already-existing beings, an omnipotent God *could* annihilate everything and remake it as perfect (or transform it in the blink of an eye, which is the same thing), but if “love” means anything at all, it means being unwilling to do that."
That's something I have been thinking about a lot in recent years - because it seems that exactly such a remaking is envisaged by many esoteric Christians (like Steiner) but perhaps also implied by a lot of mainstream Christians - in the sense that this would need to be what happens at the second coming.
I personally am profoundly unconvinced by arguments about God limiting God, including " if “love” means anything at all, it means being unwilling to do that."
I think the point is that God cannot remake the world as entirety, because the world consists of "beings" - and (whatever God thinks about methods) beings cannot be annihilated, and just-are free agents.
Indeed, I think that if someone believes that beings can be annihilated and remade then they have assumed everything needed for creation from nothing.
As you know, I assume and believe that beings are primary reality; and they (we) are what God (also a being) has to work with .
There's nothing I could say on this topic that hasn't already been heard (a hundred times) by anyone reading, but I respectfully suggest that the Catholic Catechism does in fact respect the mysteriousness of this question:
"If God the Father almighty, the Creator of the ordered and good world, cares for all his creatures, why does evil exist? To this question, as pressing as it is unavoidable and as painful as it is mysterious, no quick answer will suffice. Only Christian faith as a whole constitutes the answer to this question: the goodness of creation, the drama of sin and the patient love of God who comes to meet man by his covenants, the redemptive Incarnation of his Son, his gift of the Spirit, his gathering of the Church, the power of the sacraments and his call to a blessed life to which free creatures are invited to consent in advance, but from which, by a terrible mystery, they can also turn away in advance. There is not a single aspect of the Christian message that is not in part an answer to the question of evil."
Personally, I think it's hard to even imagine a world that has possibility and freedom, but no evil.
@M - The problem of freedom is another aspect of the problem of pain - and I can see no possibility of freedom in a creation in which everything was made from nothing by God; because *ultimately* all possibilities are then God made. Whatever happens is because God made things that way, including made people that way. Because everything is wholly of-God, every being- is of-God (completely), everything that happens is of-God - there is nowhere for freedom to exist. God could not gift Men with free will, because any gift is just more of the inevitable 100% God.
I am sure that free will (agency) is real. Which I why I believe that free beings existed before God's creation.
Some of these pre-existent beings were evil (i.e. against God and divine creation either by nature and/or by free choice) - which is why there is evil.
Evil has a different origin from God. God and divine creation are wholly Good - but these do not encompass everything, but work with pre-existent beings.
There are many fictional man-made worlds and though their authors can make them problemless and ideal most of them has evil, struggles against evil, etc. Furthermore most of the evil in our current world comes from men, who presumably wants an ideal and perfect world. It makes you think that evil is some build-in ingredient of reality needed for some purpose, rather than just thing to get rid of
If free will alone explains evil, then why is the omni-god never evil? He has free will without evil, and could have made men with the same kind of will
@Ap - As I've often said, evil is *a side in the spiritual war* (the side of those against God and creation, the side of those who do not agree that love is and should be the reason for creation); evil is not an ingredient kind of thing.
Dear Dr. Charlton, thank you for your excellent blog; it's really got me thinking. I have a question: If I understand you correctly, the problem of evil in creation is solved if we assume that God is not omnipotent, i.e. it was not possible for him to fully exclude evil or evil beings from creation. That makes sense to me. How, then, can God exclude evil from heaven? And if he can exclude it from heaven, why could he not do so from the creation we exist in? I know this all sounds a bit like angels and heads of pins... Or have I misunderstood something completely? Thanks for your answer, Stefan Ferguson
@SF - It is not God's work, but that of God's son Jesus Christ; whose life, death and resurrection made it possible for each of those who choose to follow Jesus to Heaven to make the eternal commitment to live only by love; and consent to be remade/ resurrected so that this is eternally possible.
If you word search "second creation" you will see the way I think it works.
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