Christian Understandings of Evil: The Historical Trajectory

By Charlene P. E. Burns

Throughout the two-thousand-year span of Christian history, believers in Jesus have sought to articulate their faith and their understanding of how God works in the world. How do we, as we examine the vast and varied output of those who came before us, understand the unity and the diversity of their thinking? How do we make sense of our own thought in light of theirs? The Christian Understandings series offers to help. In this exciting volume, Charlene Burns offers a brief but thorough tour through more than two millennia of thought on the nature of evil. Starting with the contexts of the Hebrew Bible and moving forward, Burns outlines the many ways that Christian thought has attempted to deal with the reality of evil and suffering. From a personal Satan and demonic activity, to questions of free will and autonomy, to the nature of God and God’s role in suffering, Burns offers a clear and compelling overview.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781506418919

Book preview

Bibliography

Preface

The struggle to understand why evil and suffering happen in a world created by the good and loving God of Christianity led me to leave a successful career in health care for graduate studies in theology. I was fortunate to have been introduced to the intellectual complexity of the issue by Professor Stephen J. Duffy (1931–2007) in his challenging and enlightening graduate course at Loyola University New Orleans on the problem of evil. Duffy was a brilliant theologian, teacher, mentor, and friend. His life ended prematurely as a result of cancer, a disease I find it very hard not to call evil. I wish he were here to comment on this work, but since he is not, the book is dedicated to him as, in a sense, all my academic work has been. Duffy’s response to a paper I wrote for his seminar on evil planted the idea that I just might be able to make a career in the world of academic theology, and a revision of that paper became my first publication. Without Duffy’s guidance it is not likely that I would have even considered applying, much less have been accepted, for study in the PhD in Religion program at Vanderbilt. Thanks to Duffy, I have had the privilege, for more than fifteen years, of living my life-long dream of teaching and doing theology.

Although theodicies often seem like dispassionate intellectualization, biographies show that theologians who engage in extended reflection on the problem most often do so because of their personal experiences with suffering. My mother unexpectedly passed away in July 2015 as I was nearing completion of the first draft of this work. As my family and I grieve her absence, and I see my father facing the challenge of making sense of life without his companion of more than sixty-six years, I am reminded of the deeply personal nature of theological reflection on the problem of evil and suffering. In the time I’ve spent writing this book, I’ve seen friends and family face everything from life with debilitating chronic diseases to the loss of loved ones through murder. I hope this work does not strike the reader as a merely intellectual exercise as it has become a profoundly personal contemplation on the most difficult of all theological questions.

I owe a debt of gratitude to those people in my life who remind me of the inherent goodness of creation. After many long days of thinking about evil and suffering, it is such a gift to hear the voices and see the smiling faces of loved ones. Thanks most especially to my son, Tom Burns, and his partner, Amie Johnson, for all their love and support. Special thanks go to my dearest friend, Linda Corson, for being there for me through all the joys and sorrows of life. Her patience, understanding, and compassion are my anchor.

Many, many thanks to all of the students who have grappled with these issues in my seminars dedicated to the problem of evil. Their trust and willingness to learn is second only to their humor—thanks to them, my nickname is Dr. Evil. I wish I could list every one of them by name, but there have been too many. As promised, though, I must mention in particular the awesome group of Religious Studies majors and minors who took the journey with me during fall semester of the 2013–14 and the spring semester of the 2015–16 academic years. Their honesty, humor, openness to challenge, and eagerness to engage in real debate helped clarify my own thinking as I researched and wrote this book. Thanks, guys!

Thanks also to Hailey Huizenga for her help in proofreading and preparing the manuscript for publication, and to UWEC’s Office of Research and Special Projects for the grant funding to hire her. Her assistance sped up the process of getting these pages in shape to send off to Denis R. Janz, general editor of the Fortress Historical Trajectory series. His invitation to write this book came at just the right moment in my academic and personal life. Denis is a masterful editor whose careful reading and expert suggestions have resulted in major improvements to the text. Finally, of course, profuse thanks go to all the editorial staff at Fortress who have worked hard to make this book the best it can be.

Christian understandings of the problem of evil have been the subject of so much theological work for more than two thousand years now that to imagine I might have an original thought on the topic is fantasy. I have studied the works of so many brilliant scholars over the years of my personal and academic interest in theodicy that there is a real risk I might have unconsciously adopted ideas of others and not given credit. I have done my best to make sure this has not happened, but if it has, I apologize profusely for having unknowingly made this mistake.

1

Setting the Stage

Evil is the thorniest of theological problems for a Christian theologian and may well be, as some have claimed, the number one cause of lost faith. The problem, says philosopher J. L. Mackie, is that

God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; and yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so that if any two of them were true the third would be false. But at the same time all three are essential parts of most theological positions: the theologian, it seems, at once must adhere, and cannot consistently adhere to all three.[1]

Evil poses a problem for many religions and philosophical systems, but it is especially acute for Christianity’s God who so loved the world that he gave his only Son (John 3:16) for the salvation of creation. How can it be that the omnipotent, omniscient, loving God allows so much evil, so much suffering?

The problem is, for the Christian, inextricably tied to claims about the nature of God, human nature, the meaning of the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ, salvation, and eschatology—the entire theological system, in other words. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to explore the problem of evil without reference to these issues. The foundational claim for Christians is, after all, that God’s love for creation led to salvation from evil, sin, and death through the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Christianity faces the paradox that evil challenges belief in God, and yet the experience of evil is a necessary condition of any religion of redemption.[2] The theological situation is complicated further when we fail to recall that doctrines of atonement proclaim that God has power over and conquered evil, whereas theodicy approaches evil as a direct challenge to divine power and/or goodness.

Broadly speaking, there have been two general categories of theological response to this enigma. The first is that God is in some sense responsible at least for the possibility of evil. Theologies of this sort seek to preserve the classical view of God as omnipotent and claim either that evil serves divine purposes like justice and redemption or that what we perceive as evil only seems evil because of our limited understanding. On the other hand, perhaps things that seem to be evil to us are actually necessary for some greater good we do not yet understand. Alternatively, perhaps evil has no reality—because existence is good, its opposite, non-existence, must be evil. Others have seen evil as a teaching tool used by God to help us become spiritually mature.

The second general tendency is to say that God is in no way responsible for evil. These theologies tend to focus more on divine benevolence and say that God chooses self-limitation to allow free will. Some say evil is a necessary possibility so that we can have free will; it is the result of sinful choices, and suffering is punishment for those sins. Some recent versions of the free will argument, like process theology, have gone further and claim that the structure of reality means that it is impossible for God to control everything—God cannot prevent evil because the possibility for it is woven into the very nature of existence. Theologies of evil can be puzzling because theologians over the centuries have often made claims that seem to try to make both assertions at once: that God could prevent but allows evil and also that God is not in any sense responsible for evil’s presence. Satan and the demonic often play a part in these theologies, adding another layer of complexity. Traditionally Satan is portrayed as an angel who opted to devote his existence to the enticement of humanity away from God. Sometimes he is said to be doing the work of God, as in Martin Luther’s theology, and sometimes he is portrayed as so independent of God and powerful that he almost seems to be another god.

Another source of confusion is that it is sometimes difficult to know whether the theologian is offering a defense or a justification. Some have focused on writing an apologetic for God, defending the existence of God against philosophical arguments that say evil undermines belief. Early Christians like Justin Martyr (c. 100–165 ce) wrote apologetic works in which they attempted to show that the Christian God is not invalidated by the reality of evil. This form of argument became common during the Enlightenment and continues into the present day. Arguments of this sort tend to take place in the arena of philosophy, often set forth in response to challenges from atheists or agnostics, and focus on determining whether and to what extent the existence of evil undermines claims that God exists. Since our primary focus here is on understanding the other side of this coin—how theologians have explained the existence of evil in a world created by the omnipotent and benevolent God—we will not address the challenges to God’s existence posed by it.

Other theologians have written for the believer and focused more on justifying evil and the good God. Gottfried Leibnitz (1646–1716) coined the term theodicy (Greek theos, God dike, justice) for the kind of argument that attempts to explain why God allows suffering and evil. These theologies claim that although we do not always understand, there is no such thing as gratuitous suffering, defined as evils that are not tied to any permutation of goods that outweigh the suffering. According to these claims, even the Holocaust and World War II, with the systematic torture and murder of millions of men, women, and children in Nazi death camps and loss of more than 48,000,000 civilian and military lives in a few short years,[3] are balanced by goods that came out of all that evil. We will examine this issue in more detail later but for now note that the problem for the theologian is countering claims that the suffering caused by the Holocaust is far too great to imagine any outweighing good or combination of goods.

Finally, it is sometimes difficult to discern what writers actually mean by evil. The term is used to describe everything from people like Hitler and serial killer Jeffery Dahmer (known as the Milwaukee Cannibal) to destructive human actions like murder, rape, theft, and the suffering caused by earth-quakes, typhoons, epidemics, and birth defects. Although I suspect most would agree that these are all terrible things, it is not clear that they are terrible in the same way as, or that they ought to be grouped together with, equivalent cases. In the theological context, it is important to distinguish between evils done by humans and sufferings caused by uncontrollable natural events. Perhaps a look at definitions of the word can help clarify things.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives the following meanings for evil as a noun or adjective: Antithesis of the good; Morally depraved, bad, wicked, vicious; Doing or tending to do harm; hurtful, mischievous, prejudicial; Causing discomfort, pain, or trouble; unpleasant, offensive, disagreeable; troublesome, painful.[4] This covers a lot of territory, encompassing everything from moral depravity to physical pain, mental suffering, injustices, and pretty much anything interfering with our own plans or complicating our lives. Obviously, this is far too broad a range of meanings to be very helpful. Theologians have usually dealt with this by focusing on the OED’s first meaning, antithesis of the good, with the good conceptualized in terms of God’s own nature and plan for creation. That which is evil, then, is anything that opposes God’s intentions within the created order. It is common also to make a distinction between what we call moral evils and natural evils. Moral evil is evil done by conscious moral agents through misuse of free will. It covers intentional wrongdoing like murder and deception. Natural evil results from the operation of nature and covers cases where no human being can be held morally accountable for the evil. Natural disasters that result in enormous suffering and loss of life such as tornadoes, earthquakes, and typhoons; the suffering of non-human animals; illnesses like cancer and birth defects; and disabilities like blindness are all examples of natural evils. It is important to note that sometimes suffering that appears to have been caused by natural evil is actually a result of human choices and so would better be classified as moral evil.

Most agree today that moral evil—the evil done by humans through choices made—may (theoretically at least) be a different problem from that of natural evil, as examples like hurricanes Katrina and Sandy illustrate. In the early history of Christianity, it was common to conflate moral and natural evil, attributing natural evils to the rupture of creation resulting from Adam and Eve’s first sin. Interestingly, some conservative Christians today have gone further than early Christianity in linking the two. Jerry Falwell, Charles Colson, and Pat Robertson, for example, publicly proclaimed the loss of life and property from Katrina to be divine judgment or vengeance for everything from U.S. support of the removal of Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip, to punishment for failure to prepare adequately for terrorists before 9/11, and even for gay pride parades and Mardi Gras celebrations. This recent very anthropocentric and, as many would say, offensive worldview has never been part of mainstream Christian thought, but the idea that natural evil is due to the rupture of creation resulting from Adam and Eve’s first sin has been. The idea that natural events occur due to human moral failings has become increasingly unsupportable over the last century because of historical-critical study of the Scriptures, scientific theories like evolution, and increased awareness of the capacity for suffering in many forms of non-human life. How can we possibly justify the suffering and violence that has happened and continues to happen to trillions of non-human forms of life since the dawn of creation by appealing to human moral choices? What kind of God would punish not just all humanity for the sins of two but every living thing over millions of years of evolution? Today new theologies of evil that attempt to take science and non-human suffering seriously are being offered in the ongoing effort to make sense of evil and suffering in a universe created by the good and loving God of Christian belief.

Each of the chapters in this book addresses an aspect of these claims as they have developed over the two thousand year history of Christian thought but does not give much attention to philosophical arguments that use evil as evidence for doubting the existence of God. The philosopher usually starts from the premise that the existence of God must first be demonstrated through rational argument. The theologian starts with different premises; the theologian does not need to prove God’s existence and so theorizes about evil in light of this belief. Chapter 2 looks at the role Satan and ideas about the demonic have played over the centuries. There has sometimes been a real difference between popular cultural ideas and formal theological reflection on Satan and the problem of evil. I have worked to maintain the focus on theology rather than philosophy or on popular attitudes as much as possible, noting, where appropriate of the differences in emphasis. In chapter 3, we explore the development of theological explanations for evil in the first few centuries of Christianity. During the early centuries, brilliant theologians like Origen of Alexandria, Augustine of Hippo, Gregory of Nyssa, and John Scotus Eriugena laid the foundations for all subsequent theodicies. Chapter 4 takes us from the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment. There we see how Aquinas developed a synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Augustinian theology that became the dominant system of thought for the Roman Catholic Church. Satan makes a comeback during this period, shaping Martin Luther’s theodicy and having a major impact on everyday piety, only to be sidelined during the Enlightenment, when human reason reigned over theological reflection. In chapter 5 we see how the optimism of Protestant liberalism, the Social Gospel movement, and Darwin’s theory of evolution impact Christian understandings of evil. Chapter 6 brings us to the present day in addressing theodicies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, exploring how ideas have been shaped by the horrors of world wars, the Holocaust, and the challenges of science. Chapter 7 concludes our journey along this trajectory of Christian history with an examination of recent challenges to theodicy, which say the entire endeavor is an intellectual distraction from the work of addressing the realities of evil and suffering in human life.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Frances, Bryan. Gratuitous Suffering and the Problem of Evil: A Comprehensive Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Larrimore, Mark, ed. The Problem of Evil: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

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J. L. Mackie, Evil and Omnipotence, Mind 64, n.s., no. 254 (Apr. 1955): 200–212 (200). ↵

Frances M. Young, Insight or Incoherence? The Greek Fathers on God and Evil, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 24, no. 2 (April 1973): 113–26 (118). ↵

http://warchronicle.com/numbers/WWII/deaths.htm. ↵

OED Online, s.v. evil (Oxford University Press, 2014), http:// http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/65386. ↵

2

Personified Evil in Ancient Israel and Early Christianity

 . . . and rescue us from the evil one (Matthew 6:13)

In this chapter, we will examine the role personifications of evil have played in theological attempts to explain why God allows evil and suffering. The first step of our journey toward understanding the history of Christian ideas about evil begins with Jesus and the Judaism of his day. The New Testament world is filled with unseen powers, and evil is a palpable reality, appearing in material form as demons and Satan. Satan and his minions were prominent in Christian thought for many centuries until they faded into the background during the Enlightenment through the twentieth century, but they are undergoing something of a revival in some segments of the faith today. It is common in Christianity today to interpret Satan and the demonic in metaphorical terms, but for most of