Why Is There Evil?
God and Evil, by Michael Galligan (Paulist, 1976, 80 pp., $1.65 pb), God, Power, and Evil, by David R. Griffin (Westminster, 1976, 336 pp., $17.50), Evil, Suffering and Religion, by Brian Hebblethwaite (Hawthorn, 1976, 115 pp., $3.50 pb), and How God Deals With Evil, by W. Sibley Towner (Westminster, 1976, 185 pp., $4.95 pb), are reviewed by Steve Siebert, graduate student, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
One often hears these days that modern man is faced, as never before, with a series of objections to Christian belief known as the “problem of evil.” Although it is acknowledged that Augustine and others in the Christian tradition struggled with the presence of massive evil in a world alleged to have been created by a good God, it is claimed that the wars, concentration camps, and gas chambers of modern times have focused the contrast between God and evil even more sharply. Indeed, for many people it has become the apologetic problem of our time. With such considerations, in mind, these four books have been written.
The shortest and in many ways the wisest is Michael Galligan’s God and Evil. In the space of forty-five pages he examines two traditional and two contemporary justifications of God (“theodicies”) in the face of an evil world. Traditionally the most popular, the theodicy of free will (associated with Augustine, but it was the consensus of the Western church until after the reformation, and is still espoused in conservative circles) locates the source of moral evil in man’s free rejection of a perfect created state, and explains natural evils with reference to testing by God or punishment for sin, or else traces it to the malicious intent of a fallen devil in control of the world. In contrast, the theodicy of development (associated with the Eastern Orthodox tradition and with much of modern theology from Schleiermacher to the present) puts created perfection, not in the past, but in the future as the goal toward which human history will evolve. Evil, both moral and natural, serves as a necessary stage along the way in the development of such higher moral virtues as compassion. A more modern alternative is the process theodicy (based on the work of Whitehead), which argues that the only way to relieve God of responsibility for evil is to rethink the nature of his power. Finally, the last view discussed by Galligan is the type of theodicy that attempts to solve the problem by redefining the goodness of God (compare C. G. Jung and American personal idealism).
None of these four solutions is acceptable to Galligan. He claims that the free will defense is based on an inadequate characterization of the nature of human freedom, and founders, furthermore, on the theory of evolution. The developmental theodicy, on the other hand, is overly optimistic about the future and overlooks the ability of evil to produce bitter, broken people, as well as saints. Less confident, but therefore incapable of doing justice to the Christian hope, is the process theodicy, which is unable to guarantee that even in the end good will prevail over evil, and which (in its more consistent forms, Galligan argues) even denies personal immortality. Finally, theodicies that redefine the goodness of God so as to include a dark evil side in him can hardly be considered acceptable by Christians.
Galligan’s book is lively, though not popular, and full of insight. Many readers, however, will find that his brief summaries of various positions, particularly process metaphysics, cannot be understood without having read some of the primary sources. Those people concerned with a more in-depth treatment of the two classical theodicies will need to turn to John Hick’s Evil and the God of Love, which develops the contrast between the two in its 400 pages. For the process theodicy, however, one need only turn to David Griffin’s God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy, the fullest treatment of the problem from that perspective. Griffin’s work is a moderately difficult attempt to engage the scholarly proponents of classical theism in a discussion of a whole range of problems (evil, providence, the nature of God) and cannot be ignored by anyone seriously interested in these issues. Indeed, I know of no better introduction to the contrast between traditional and process theism.
After spending fifty pages reviewing the biblical and Greek sources (the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus), Griffin proceeds to discuss eleven different traditional theodicies, devoting fifteen to twenty-five pages each to Augustine, Aquinas, Spinoza, Luther, Calvin, Leibniz, Barth, John Hick, James Ross (a contemporary analytic philosopher), Emils Fackenheim (a contemporary Jewish theologian), Brunner, and personal idealism. All these theodicies (except personal idealism, which has other weaknesses), Griffin argues, ultimately compromise the goodness of God by presupposing that God either is, or could be if he so desired, the cause of everything that happens, good as well as evil. Traditional theism, of course, escapes the conclusion that God is therefore responsible for evil by distinguishing between God’s primary and human secondary causation, or between God’s willing and his permitting. All such attempts, however, Griffin charges, are inadequate, and, indeed, contradictory. Only a radically new conception—yet one suggested by many biblical passages—of the power of God, one which breaks with the classical Greek categories alleged to be used by traditional theism, will help us develop an adequate, noncontradictory, theodicy. Such a conception will recognize that everything that exists has some power, and therefore God cannot have it all, though he still has enough power (in fact, the greatest amount of power it is possible for a God to have) to make him worthy of worship. Thus construed, however, God is no longer responsible for evil, for much of what happens is outside his control, though this is not to say that God is unconcerned with luring as much good out of the world as possible.
Hebblethwaite’s Evil, Suffering, and Religion, as the title indicates, covers slightly different ground. Broadening the scope of his study beyond the Christian tradition, Hebblethwaite attempts a systematic discussion of the attitude of all major world religions towards the problem of evil. He does a surprisingly good job, given limitations of space, of presenting generally accurate and relatively detailed treatments of the different traditions, even making the necessary distinctions between various types of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. This feature alone would justify the enthusiastic endorsements on the back cover, but the reader will be just as stimulated and provoked by Hebblethwaite’s comprehensive (though, again, brief) treatments of all the relevant issues clustered around the problem of evil. He begins with a discussion of how people cope with evil, isolating five different, often related, responses: the ways of renunciation, mystical knowledge, devotion, works, and sacrifice. Theistic religions demand, in addition to ways of coping, ways of explaining the presence of evil in the world. Hebblethwaite again gives us brief surveys of the options: dualism (he isolates three types); blaming the devil; evil as due to divine punishment, testing, and discipline; and human freedom. His own solution employs a modified (non-Augustinian) free-will defense within a generally developmental theodicy. Man is created at a distance from God in an “ordered yet flexible physical environment,” which cannot preclude the possibility of natural tragedies, and into which God acts “without suspending the natural order” of events (93). This, Hebblethwaite believes, is an acceptable mean between the more traditional notions of providence (in which God acts directly) and existential versions of the doctrine (which reduce the notion of providence to subjective perceptions). At the consummation, however, God will actively intervene; the Christian “must suppose some future recreative divine act of transformation or resurrection.” Thus Hebblethwaite, like Hick (whom he seems to have followed in certain important respects), argues for a kind of eschatological verification of Christian belief about the goodness of God in the face of evil. This procedure is questioned by Galligan, who suggests that the sub specie aeternitatis viewpoint required by it is unavailable to us humans, and rejected by Griffin, who cannot guarantee either that good ultimately will prevail or that personal immortality awaits mankind—though he does not deny the possibility of either, and indeed hopes for both.
Despite their divergent outlooks, all three works share a conviction: the traditional Augustinian solution is no longer creditable. Not only is its view of God and/or providence self-contradictory, and its theory of the nature of human freedom inadequate, it also cannot maintain its idea of an original state of goodness against criticisms advanced by evolutionary theory. One can understand and even share the motivation behind this rejection of Augustine, and yet be wary of such wholescale rejection of time-honored solutions.
But the major weakness of these books is not their attitude toward tradition so much as their failure to do justice to important aspects of Scripture. Along with their repudiation of Augustine’s interpretation of Edenic existence goes the rejection, in one or more of these writers, of the idea of original sin, the personal being of the devil, the possibility of angelic existence, and the reality of hell. That these ideas are unpopular today may be granted, but that does not relieve the theologian or philosopher within the Christian tradition from making serious attempts to come to grips with some of these issues in a more positive manner than our authors do. Perhaps in the end one might feel compelled to deny certain traditional interpretations of Satan—but certainly one must find better grounds than those adduced by Hebblethwaite to the effect that modern psychology can now explain many phenomena once attributed to demon possession. Or perhaps one might quarrel with certain aspects of the notion of free rebellion in a state of paradise—but certainly on grounds stronger than Galligan’s. He himself seems to understand that, for his last pages are haunted by the symbol (at least) of some primal, cosmic rebellion.
These objections notwithstanding, Galligan’s and particularly Hebblethwaite’s books are rich in insight and understanding, and should prove of help to the Christian apologist, though perhaps not so much to the person caught up in the moment of personal grief or suffering.
Griffin’s book, on the other hand, must receive a more qualified endorsement. There is no question that he makes the most substantial scholarly contribution to the subject, but this in turn rightly exposes him to more criticism about inaccuracy in detail and interpretation. To take just one example, the careful reader will find that Aquinas does not mean, by the doctrine of divine simplicity, “that God’s knowledge, will, and causation are identical.” Not only does Aquinas not make this claim when he explicitly treats this doctrine in Summa Theologica I, 3, he also constantly distinguishes between situations in which God both knows and causes and those in which he simply knows. Such forcing of the texts is unfortunately quite frequent.
The cumulative effect of this is to render suspect Griffin’s major thesis about the self-contradictory nature of traditional theism. One cannot, of course, claim against him that to abandon this particular theological expression, with its use of Greek categories, is to give up biblical faith. Yet on the other hand it is unlikely that the weaknesses of the traditional account are as obvious as Griffin supposes. Indeed, most readers will find the process account of the nature of God’s power, goodness, and providence even more deficient.
The basic difficulty with Griffin’s argument, however, is his formula of the problem of evil as an eight-point logical problem leading from the dual premises of the orthodox definition of God and the reality of evil to the conclusion that that God cannot exist. This way of setting up the issues implies that there is “the problem of evil” and that one must find “the solution” to it. But this claim is extravagant and misleading. In the first place, it is unlikely that everybody could agree enough about the meaning of the terms involved to get the problem off the ground. Certainly this is the difficulty that plagues Griffin’s various definitions of genuine evil. More importantly, however, as Galligan’s valuable last chapter points out, people believe in God in the face of evil for a variety of highly complex and often personal reasons; the logic of belief is not the logic of deductive arguments. Thus any attempt to suggest that the problem of evil troubles everybody in the same way, if at all, is to distort the phenomena. That Griffin can claim that an elaborate, complex theology—let alone one that flies in the face of the whole tradition—alone solves the problem indicates that something serious has gone wrong.
The issue, indeed, is elsewhere for most people, and for many readers it will lie in the question, “What really does the Bible teach about God and evil?” To this question, W. Sibley Towner’s How God Deals With Evil is directed. Towner includes a critical examination of the treatment of divine retribution by some historic confessional statements along with two giant sweeps through Scripture. He wants to show, by examining representative texts, the diversity and openendedness of the biblical teaching about divine retribution, and to argue that one can justifiably subordinate these retributional passages to the kerygmatic core of Scripture, God’s universal redemptive purpose in Christ.
Towner confronts difficult texts head-on, and is to be commended for his desire to show—in a rare departure from most theodicies—that God is no mere “nice guy.” It must furthermore be conceded that many accounts, including evangelical ones, of the present and final states of rebelling creatures do not, as Towner points out, do justice to the full and rich variety of biblical teaching on the matter; that many Christians have treated apocalyptic literature inappropriately; and that some principle of selection and subordination is involved in all biblical theology. Towner’s book should set us all searching again to see what the Bible really says about God and evil.
Towner uses higher criticism to accomplish this task. Not only will the average Christian for whom the book seems to be written be overwhelmed by his approach, but on the basis of the often one-sided and incomplete evidence given, he will be unable to judge which critical theory to accept. Many of Towner’s opinions, such as his late date for the idea of covenant in Israel, will be hotly contested. That Towner chooses to follow these “assured scholarly results” is unfortunate, for a large number of his conclusions, such as his discovery of the relative unimportance of the lex talionis (an eye for an eye), could have been made without conjecture, simply by appealing to the total scriptural teaching on the subject.
Basically, however, most readers will find the book deeply disturbing, not so much because stereotyped and caricatured fundamentalists (such as an eschatologically minded anti-Communist) occasionally bear the brunt of the attack, but also because Towner, in his own way, often does violence to the text, and thus arrives at a view of the world as already and entirely redeemed, with Satan and hell as mere personifications. Towner’s conclusions to this effect are even more insidious than either Galligan’s or Hebblethwaite’s, for Towner wants to claim that this is what Scripture really teaches.
Ultimately, however, on key issues such as providence and divine action Towner comes to a position no different from that of the rest of our authors. When he says that we must “keep the secular sphere of cause-and-effect and the sphere of religious faith and perceptivity carefully separated,” he only states more openly a tendency implicit in both Hebblethwaite and Griffin. Such a view has characteristics of modernity. It is also expressed, Galligan points out, by the refusal of modern theologians to interpret the Holocaust in the light of God’s providential control of history (in contrast to their willingness to do just that as recently as the American civil war). Now orthodoxy need not shrink from this conclusion; any theodicy, after Auschwitz, and indeed after the first act of human rebellion, must take seriously the idea of a runaway world, which God has given up to its own devices. Of course, the historic Christian position has always expected a recreation at the eschaton, but neither would our authors, with the exception of Griffin, be willing to give up this hope either. The crucial questions arise, however, about the course of the world until then. Is God completely hidden and silent, as all but Galligan suggest? Does God not act into the world in this age? Can we count on nothing until the end? With these questions we move to issues far broader than theodicy.
BRIEFY NOTED
Judson Press has recently published four books on Christian education. Written primarily for church school teachers, Evangelism in Your Church School (63 pp., $2.50 pb) by Vincie Alessi discusses the basic concepts of salvation and some of the factors necessary for evangelism. She also includes advice on how to incorporate a new believer into the church as well as a discussion of the central elements of our faith. It is refreshing to see a book that goes beyond the mechanics of conversion. If growth is your concern, read A Growing Church School (64 pp., $2.50 pb) by Kenneth Blazier. Again, a refreshing broadmindedness is seen as Blazier defines growth in terms of both quantity and quality of faith. He discusses seven factors necessary for this type of growth and then provides checklists to help a church evaluate its program. Doing Christian Education in New Ways (112 pp., $3.95 pb) by Evelyn Huber discusses such innovative teaching models as contract learning and learning centers. The book provides a useful overview of many models and offers first-person success stories to illustrate them; however, a solid discussion of the methods and underlying principles are lacking. Huber does provide a bibliography to fill that gap. Family Cluster Programs (75 pp., $2.95 pb) by R. Ted Nutting deals with a way to keep the family together to learn with other families. For this book to be helpful one would have to be familiar with his idea, since little explanation of the method is provided; the bulk of the book is devoted to program material for six sessions studying Jesus’ parables.
STRESS. Everyone faces tension in some form at every stage of life. The accelerated pace of modern life often leaves Christians wondering why they don’t have their promised joy and peace. Of several recent books, Gary Collins’s You Can Profit From Stress (Vision House, 249 pp., $6.95) is the most comprehensive and realistic. Collins treats such sources of stress as one’s family, sexuality, occupation, and crises. He is practical in his prescriptions for coping with the problem. Questions for group discussion are included. A shorter, more colloquial book, The Stress Mess (Master’s Press, 48 pp., $1.50 pb) by Ron Susek is similarly designed to help one cope with stress. It is especially suited for those who take their reading in small doses. Robert Schuller’s Turning Your Stress Into Strength (Harvest House, 144 pp., $2.95 pb) is filled with illustrations from the lives of those he has interviewed during his “Hour of Power” telecast. Tom Watson, Jr., approaches stress and peace through a study guide to Philippians, How to Be Happy No Matter What (Regal, 160 pp., $1.50 pb). Wally Metts’s The Brighter Side: Practical Help for Facing Life’s Problems (Moody, 96 pp., $2.25 pb) offers fourteen meditations based on the author’s search of Scripture during a crisis. Each meditation begins with a question or insight, followed by Scripture, a reflection on the subject, and a prayer. It is a good gift for a suffering Christian friend. For those going through difficult times who might be turned off by constant Scripture references, two recent books to consider are Being Up in a Down World (Harvest House, 149 pp., $2.95 pb) by James Kilgore and To Bend Without Breaking (Abingdon, 127 pp., $3.95 pb) by Ella Stuart. The biblical insights are implicit, not explicit.
