Personal Creeds and the Problem of Evil part 6

My last post on this topic discussed the idea of God’s universal sovereignty, or governance of the world in relation to suffering. I summarized that God’s governance of the universe is necessary for the question of evil to be valid, for the question itself is really asking why God doesn't run things differently -specifically with less tolerance for evil and suffering.

The view I personally hold to is an unpopular one: that in some way God causes all events. A God that lets things run on their own is a much more amicable God. But he’s also a distant God, and the price for keeping God’s hands clean of the tragedies that happen in life is too much to pay.

Is God therefore evil? This is a silly question in a way, for God is himself the only absolute standard of all goodness. It’s from God’s being that goodness even exists. In the classic texts of Christian theology, evil is seen as simply a privation of good, not something that can even exist if goodness did not exist first. In another way, it’s not a silly question: for if God causes everything, and some of those things are evil, does it not follow that God is evil?

Classic Christian reasoning says no, for when I say “God in some way causes all events”, the phrase “in some way” is very important. God governs the universe in such a way that he never tells us exactly how he causes events. There is always secondary causes in Christian reasoning: immediately we see the cause and effect of plate tectonics, upsurges of magma, and evil human choices. God simply tells us that he’s intimately involved in superintending all of these events, directing them to his own ultimately good purposes. When we call into question his purposes, he simply tells us to trust him, and let him mind his own cosmic business. The gist of the reason why God is not responsible for evil is that we do not have enough information to accuse or excuse him. God never denies his involvement, but he challenges human autonomous reason for presuming to know the inner reasoning of God.

The bible is replete with examples of people throwing their cares, their anger, their questions, their deepest screams at God. It’s ugly, but so is life. Sometimes I think that we affluent westerners have lost touch with this element of Christian spirituality. Yelling at God seems impolite, perhaps even blasphemous. We do not empathize with the Haitian Christians, who in the aftermath of the earthquake were heard to be chanting “God forgive us/God, we forgive you.” Yet, it seems unmistakable to the sufferer that God is an appropriate wailing wall, a fitting target for our hurt and anger.

I wonder if part of the distaste for this teaching is a desire to present a more “pleasing to the eye” Christianity to an unbelieving culture? We have a nice, safe God that way, don’t we? But in silently condemning what the bible says is acceptable, we also misrepresent the appeal of an intimate walk with God through Christ, in all of its wonderful edgy aspects. Isn’t it the incarnate Son who takes the worst of our world’s abuses on his shoulders that we worship?

I suppose my overall point in this post is to Christians, myself included: beware of your personal creed, beware of building yourself a theological bomb-shelter that keeps God safe, but also keeps him out of your hurt and questions. Beware of denying God what he says about himself because it fits a tidier view of His ways. “The One forming light and darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity; I am the LORD who does all these.” (Isa 45:7) Beware of worshipping a G-rated deity in an R-rated world.