Christians believe that God is effectively dealing with the problem of evil through the cross—primarily the cross of Christ and secondarily their own. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus follows the prediction of his own martyrdom (Luke 9:22) with a charge to his disciples: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?” (Luke 9:23-25). Yet these points are rarely mentioned in discussions of the problem of evil among analytic philosophers, no doubt because of their paradoxical nature, noted by St. Paul himself. How can the suffering of the innocent and loyal at the hands of the guilty and hard-hearted solve the problem of evil? Why is it not simply another witness against the goodness of God who commends it?
My purpose in this paper is to reintroduce reflection on the meaning of the cross into discussion (at least among Christian philosophers) of the problem of evil, in the hope that, as faith seeks understanding, our deepest contribution will become more articulate for us and less scandalous to others. My bold contention will be that the Christian approach to evil through redemptive suffering affords a distinctive solution to the problem of evil, for believers and unbelievers as well.
SOME METHODOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS
Discussions of the problem of evil among analytic philosophers of religion focused on God’s responsibility for evils and have concentrated on the theoretical, or so-called logical, problem of evil. It is asked how the propositions
(T1) There is an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good God
and
(T2) There is evil in the world
can be logically consistent in view of the assumption that
(T3) A perfectly good being would want to eliminate all of the evil that he could.
Proposed solutions involve arguing that even secular ethics admits exceptions to (T3), where the evils in question are prerequisite to or necessary consequences of greater goods. Nevertheless, it is conceded that
(T4) The fact that an evil was necessary for a greater good would provide an omniscient and omnipotent being with an excuse, only if the evil were a logically necessary prerequisite to or consequence of the good.
Defenses are then fleshed out by citing purported logically possible, morally legitimate excuses—either that the evils are logically necessary to the best of all possible worlds, or that each evil is logically connected with some great enough good, or that the risk of evil is logically implied by the good of free creatures. Philosophers usually dismiss the “factual” problem—that of whether (T1) and (T2) are both true—as philosophically intractable. After all, how could one establish that this is the best of all possible worlds or prove that each piece of evil was logically connected with some great enough good? Again, is it not overwhelmingly plausible—pace Plantinga—that
(T5) God could do more than he does to prevent or eliminate evils,
even on the assumption that rational creatures have free will? When all is said and done, most Christians settle for “incomplete” as the most benign possible verdict on any attempted philosophical solution, and the rest is left to “pastoral care.”
I believe that Christianity does provide a distinctive resolution of the “logical” problem of evil and for believers an answer to the “factual” problem as well. To extract these results, however, it is necessary to approach the matter indirectly and to keep the following observations in mind.
First, it is necessary to remember that Christianity is primarily a religion, concerned to teach people how to live and serve God in the here and now. The problem of evil for Christians is posed by the question
(Q1) How can I trust (or continue to trust) God in a world like this (in distressing circumstances such as these)?
A Christian is committed to obey Christ in everything and to count on him to see to his good and preserve his life in any and every circumstance. Sometimes things happen in his life or in those of others close to him or in the world at large that radically shake his convictions. The Christian believer will not be reassured by the observation that it is logically possible for an omnipotent and omniscient being to prove trustworthy in and through these circumstances. For it is his actual commitments that are at issue; he needs to restore his confidence that God is actually trustworthy in the present situation. This problem is indeed a pastoral one, but it has a philosophical dimension in that it might be partially alleviated by some sort of explanations of how God is being good to created persons, even when he permits and/or causes evils such as these.
Second, evil is a problem for the Christian only insofar as it challenges his faith in God’s goodness; yet, for the Christian, God’s goodness remains at bottom a mystery. (a) For one thing, the typical Christian does not arrive at the conclusion that God is good by taking a Cliffordian survey of all the available data, tallying the evidence on both sides, and finding that the “scientific” case for God’s goodness is stronger. Usually he is moved by personal and/or corporate experiences of deliverance from some concrete difficulty—”They cried to the Lord in their trouble; and He delivered them from their distress” (Ps. 107:6, 13, 19, 28)—or big or little theophanies in which the believer is permitted to “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps. 34:8). The Christian may come away deeply convinced of God’s goodness and saving power without being able to articulate any clear recipe for predicting his behavior in future situations. (b) Further, it is fundamental to biblical religion that God’s goodness cannot be comprehended by us in terms of a simple formula in this life. This is in part because the divine nature is eternally beyond the creature’s conceptual grasp. But it is also part of God’s deliberate design, since it is necessary to make possible the relationships He wants with us and for which we were created. For what God wants most from us is wholehearted trust and obedience. Yet it is conceptually impossible to trust someone if you know in advance every move that he will make. Again, even if such knowledge were possible, it would be a source of great temptation. For example, if God were known to have a fixed policy of rendering temporal goods for well-doing and temporal evils for wickedness, then the observant might even try to manipulate the equation to use God as a means to their ends.
These latter points are well illustrated by the story of Job, who apparently thought that divine goodness could be captured in the simple act-consequence principle. Job paid his social and religious dues, and God blessed him. When Satan was allowed to take away the temporal benefits and to afflict Job with a loss of material goods, family, health, and moral approval, however, Job was pressed to his limits and eventually demanded a hearing. Job had kept his side of the contract, but God was reneging on his; Job wanted a day in court. God answers Job with a theophany: Job is reprimanded for his insolence in presuming to grasp divine goodness in such a simplistic way; he is allowed to see and experience God’s goodness but told he will have to trust God to save him in his own way, without advance billing of his plans. Job had loved God too much for his effects and benefits; now he has seen God and must love him for himself.
Third, while we cannot get a simple, clear analysis of divine goodness that will enable us to trace the hand of God in every situation the way the simple act-consequence principle promised to do, we can get a general idea of God’s character, purposes, and policies from the collective experience of God’s people over the centuries. The principal sourcebook for this general description is the Bible; a secondary source is the history of the Church. Nevertheless, the Christian story does not bridge the above-mentioned “incompleteness” gap by providing answers to such questions as
(Q2) Why does God not do more than he does to prevent or eliminate evils?
(Q3) Why did God make a world in which there are evils of the amounts and kinds found in this world, instead of one with fewer or less severe kinds?
(Q4) Why did God make a world such as this instead of one entirely free from evils?
To the extent that Christians do not know the answers to these questions, evil must remain a mystery from the Christian point of view. The Bible and church history do shed light on this question
(Q5) How does God fit evils, of the amounts and kinds we find in this world, into his redemptive purposes?
and thereby suggest an answer to
(Q1) How can I trust (or continue to trust) God in a world like this (in distressing circumstances such as these)?
as well as a resolution of the philosopher’s (logical and factual) problem of evil.
Finally, although the Christian religion does not hold that evil is an illusion or deny the grim fact that many have to struggle for survival and meaning in a world plagued by pain, disease, death, and wickedness, it teaches that the place to begin in grappling with the problem of evil is not the evils without but the evils within, not the evils that just happen or that are charged to others but one’s own contributions to the problem. Christians believe that unless a person is willing to confront God’s way of dealing with his own sin, he may not be able to appreciate God’s approach to other evils or to discover the most fruitful way of living with them. To see how this works and how from this starting point it is possible to arrive at a Christian approach to the problem of evil through redemptive suffering, it is necessary to review briefly the doctrinal presuppositions of such a conclusion.
SIN AS THE PRIMARY EVIL FOR CHRISTIANS
Freedom and the actuality of sin. According to biblical religion,
(T6) God’s primary interest in creation is the rational creatures, particularly the human beings, whom he has made.
Further, as Psalm 8 eloquently reflects, God did not make us because human beings were just the touch he needed to make this the best of all possible worlds; rather
(T7) God made human beings to enter into nonmanipulative relationships of self-surrendering love with himself and relationships of self-giving love with others.
So far from altering the characters to improve the plot, God is represented in the Old Testament as directing the course of history with the end of bringing his people into the relationship with himself that he desires. Nevertheless,
(T8) God cannot get the relationships he wants with human beings unless he makes them with incompatibilist free wills.
For if human beings are free in the compatibilist sense only, then their free and voluntary actions are the sorts of things that either have causes outside the agent himself or occur in part by chance. Surely, if God’s primary purpose in creation is to enter into such loving relationships with human beings, he would not leave it simply to chance whether they cooperate with or reject him. On the other hand, if each free human choice or action is completely determined by a causal chain or chains whose first member is God, then God’s relationships with human beings will be manipulative in the highest degree, like those of a computer expert with the robot he designs, builds, and completely programs. Again, how could God hold human beings accountable for their responses to his offers of friendship, if it were at his discretion whether they occurred by chance or were completely determined by him? Yet, these relationships are bought with a price, for
(T9) Not even an omnipotent God can introduce incompatibilist free creatures into the world without accepting the possibility, which he is powerless to exclude, that they will sin.
Although human beings are thus free to cooperate with God or not, it was his purpose in creation that we should, and
(T10) As creator, God has the right that we should submit to him in complete and voluntary obedience and offer ourselves in service to others.
We sin when we show contempt for God by willfully refusing to render what we owe. And as Christ taught in the Sermon on the Mount, sin is not only, or even primarily, a matter of misdeeds but of inner attitudes and emotions.
Second, God’s response to the problem of human sin begins with divine judgment. Biblical religion conceives of divine goodness as righteous love. God’s righteousness expresses itself in the desire for honest and open relationships with created persons, ones in which role expectations are clear and conflicts explicit and dealt with rather than glossed over or suppressed. Thus, God’s judgment of sin is an expression of his righteousness, because
(T11) As righteous, God has a right to make us face the truth about who we are, who he is, who Christ is, and his rightful claims over us,
and
(T12) God will not forgo this right of judgment.
He would not be wrong to judge us, even if no benefit accrued to us therefrom. Nevertheless, divine judgment is also an expression of his love, because
(T13) God’s interest in judgment is not condemnation and punishment but forgiveness and reconciliation.
As our creator, he knows that
(T14) A human being’s deepest longing is to be known and loved just as he is;
and he also realizes that
(T15) Human beings, whether by nature or as a consequence of the fall, cannot really forget sin, whether their own or someone else’s.
God therefore shows his love when in judgment he brings everything out on the table between him and the sinner, so that everyone knows that the love that follows is not based on false pretenses. We see this clearly in Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well: he tells her everything that she ever did, not to join the citizenry in condemning her scandal but to show that his offer to exchange drinks of water with her was made with full knowledge of what sort of sinner she was (John 4:7-30, 39-42).
The Christian’s experience of divine judgment and the forgiveness of sins, his continued experience of the restored and ever-deepening relationship, convinces him of God’s love at such a level that he is able to affirm in times of trial that
(T16) God would not allow us to suffer evils that could not have, with our cooperation, a redemptive aspect,
and to keep trusting, his lack of answers for (Q2)-(Q4) notwithstanding.
GOD’S STRATEGY IN JUDGMENT
The direct approach. From a biblical point of view, God’s right of judgment is in no way conditioned on any therapeutic effects it may have for us. And the book of Revelation implies that he has the means and will eventually force the unwilling to face the facts: “Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, every one who pierced him; and all the tribes of the earth will wail on account of him” (Rev. 1:7). There is the picture of Judgment Day on which all the secrets of our hearts will be made known, not only to us but in front of everyone else.
Yet God knows that this sort of judgment would not usually be redemptive for fallen human beings. And the author of Revelation represents it as a method of last resort, to be used by God when time has run out on his offer of salvation. When someone judges us, looking down from a position of superior power or righteousness (the way the Pharisee regarded the tax collector in the temple, Luke 18:11-12), our reaction is apt to be hostile. We search wildly for countercharges and slander our accuser; we blame someone else and/or rationalize our behavior as no worse than others in our inferior position. No matter how much our judge insists that he is telling us for our own good, we are apt not to believe him but to hate him for adding guilt and shame to the burden of our implicitly recognized sin.
Indirect pedagogy. Since by—(T13)—God is interested in judgment as an occasion for repentance and reconciliation, he confronts a pedagogical problem; how to face us with our sin in such a way that we will accept the verdict and repent. The best way is an indirect approach that does not ram the truth down our throats but entices us to participate in arriving at the verdict.
In the Old Testament, the prophets sometimes resort to stories or speak in figures. Consider God’s judgment of David for his affair with Bathsheba and contrivance of Uriah’s death. Nathan tells David the story of a rich man who eats a poor man’s pet lamb instead of taking an animal from his own large flocks, and he elicits from David a verdict of guilty and a sentence of death. Then Nathan proclaims, “You are the man,” and because David really loves God, he repents and God forgives him. The first child dies, but another son, Solomon, becomes a great king and builds the temple of the Lord (2 Sam. 11-12).
Jesus tells parables for a similar reason. For example, the Good Samaritan story is told to a self-righteous man who wants a definition of “neighbor” so that he will not have to waste his efforts at being good on people who do not fall into that category. Jesus does not use the confrontational approach: “You do not really love God or care about other people, or else you would not be asking that question” or “You think you have your ‘religious act’ together, but in God’s eyes you are further from the kingdom than the people you despise and exclude.” Rather than provoke hostility in his questioner, Jesus tells him a story about how to be neighborly and commends the Good Samaritan’s help of the needy man. The young man can go away and ponder Jesus’ answer and reflect on the difference between Jesus’ starting point and his own. Dealt with in this gentler way, he may perhaps have a change of heart.
Sometimes such indirect approaches do not work, however. If the person is especially reluctant to see and if the sins in question are inner attitudes that are apparently easier to hide, he may successfully resist the conclusion that Jesus wants him to draw. The Pharisees and Sadducees were like this. Their outward acts were correct and legal, so that it was easy for them to defend themselves and to argue that they were better than most people. They repeatedly refused the insight that they were self-righteous and contemptuous of others and that they had lost faith in the redemptive power of God. In cases of this sort, God is left with a more expensive, non-coercive strategy: redemptive suffering as epitomized in martyrdom and the cross.
GOD’S COSTLY APPROACH TO THE PROBLEM OF EVIL: MARTYRDOM AND THE CROSS
What is a martyr? A martyr is simply a witness, in the sense relevant here, someone who gives testimony about a person, some events, or an ideal and who is made to pay a price for doing it. Usually the cost involves the loss of some temporal goods, for example, the experience of social disapproval or exclusion, the deprivation of educational and professional opportunities, economic losses, moral disapproval, imprisonment, exile, and death. The price a martyr is willing to pay is a measure of his love for and loyalty to what he believes to be the truth and/or that to which he bears witness. Martyrdom in the good sense is not a subtle manipulative maneuver to get one’s way in the long run by making people feel guilty about one’s short-term sufferings. On the contrary, the martyr usually does not actively seek martyrdom, both because he is diffident about his being able to pay the price and because he does not wish to provoke others to evil. Given this characterization, I want to suggest that martyrdom is an expression of God’s righteous love toward the onlooker, the persecutor, and even the martyr himself.
Martyrdom as a vehicle of God’s goodness to the onlooker. For onlookers, the event of martyrdom may function as a prophetic story, the more powerful for being brought to life. The martyr who perseveres to the end presents an inspiring example. Onlookers are invited to see in the martyr the person they ought to be and to be brought to a deeper level of commitment. Alternately, onlookers may see themselves in the persecutor and be moved to repentance. If the onlooker has ears to hear the martyr’s testimony, he may receive God’s redemption through it.
Martyrdom as potentially redemptive for the persecutor. In martyrdom, God shows his goodness—both his righteous judgment and his redemptive mercy—not only in relation to the onlooker but also in relation to the persecutors. First of all, the martyr’s sacrifice can be used as an instrument of divine judgment, because it draws the persecutor an external picture of what he is really like—the more innocent the victim, the clearer the focus. Consider the case of a businessman who commutes to New York City from the suburbs every day; he loves his family and works hard to provide them with a nice home, his children with an Ivy League education, his wife with an attractive social circle, and so on. As the pressures of his business increase, he falls increasingly silent and follows his 8:30 p.m. dinner with more and more drinks. His patient and loving wife tries to get him to talk, but he insists that nothing is wrong. One night after he has drunk even more than usual, his wife says quietly but firmly, “I think you’ve had enough.” He protests that everything is fine, but she repeats, “I think you’ve had enough,” whereupon he hits her and knocks her out. At first he thinks he has killed her, but she recovers and no charges are pressed. In this incident, the man’s anger and hostility, which he had been so carefully hiding (more from himself than from everyone else) by drowning in drink, is externalized on a comparatively innocent victim. He cannot rationalize away his behavior in terms of any commensurate attack from her. It is an occasion of judgment, in which the man is brought face to face with who he really is and with the choice of seeking help or pursuing ruin.
In attempting to bring reconciliation out of judgment (T13), God may find no more promising vehicle than martyrdom for dealing with the hard-hearted. What Pharisee would give the “holier than thou posture a hearing? When indirect approaches fail, Jesus repeatedly confronts the Pharisees in the Gospels, but they will not listen. Finally, he bears the cost of divine judgment upon them by accepting martyrdom at their hands. In allowing himself to be crucified, he permits their sinful attitudes to be carried into action and externalized in his own flesh. Because he is a truly innocent victim, his body is the canvas on which the portrait of their sins can be most clearly drawn. In their great jealousy and mistrustfulness toward God, they had subjected his Messiah to a ritually accursed death. Unable to hear divine judgment through other media, there was at least a chance that they would be moved by the love of such a martyr and accept the painful revelation.
Nevertheless, the strategy is noncoercive, as it must be to accord with divine purposes (T7 and T8), and it does not always work. Our commuter chose to admit his need, seek help, and change his lifestyle; by contrast, the Pharisees and Sadducees who handed Jesus over to be crucified used their superior knowledge of the law and the prophets to assure themselves against the ambiguous evidence that Jesus could not be the Messiah: he was born at the wrong address and was following the wrong script, associating himself too closely with God on the one hand and with sinners on the other. They rationalized their action—”it was expedient that one man should die for the people” (John 18:14)—and then took his death by crucifixion as clinching evidence that Jesus was not the one. Surely it would be some kind of pragmatic contradiction for God’s Messiah to be ritually unclean and hence unfit to enter God’s presence!
The cross of Christ is the primary expression of God’s goodness in a fallen world. First, it is the principal means of divine judgment, because Christ is the only truly innocent victim, the clearest picture of who his persecutors are. The Christian disciple is called to share his Master’s redemptive work by taking up his cross daily (Luke 9:23-25). But the disciple’s sins give his persecutors many handles for explaining away their behavior. Christians can be martyrs and fill up the sufferings of Christ (Col. 1:24) only to the extent that he cleanses them first. That is why continual repentance is not only necessary for the Christian’s own reconciliation with Christ but also the best contribution he can make toward solving the problem of evil.
Second, the cross of Christ is the chief expression of God’s love for the persecutor. If the persecutor is moved to repentance by the love of the martyr, it is the martyr whom he will thank and love. According to Christian belief, God was so eager to win our love that he became incarnate and volunteered for martyrdom himself (John 3:16-18).
Martyrdom as a vehicle of God’s goodness to the martyr. For the potential religious martyr, the threat of martyrdom is a time of testing and judgment. It makes urgent the previously abstract dilemma of whether he loves God more than the temporal goods that are being extracted as a price. Especially if the price is high (but surprisingly even when the price is low), he will have to struggle with his own divided loyalties. Whatever the outcome, the martyr will have had to face a deeper truth about himself and his relations to God and temporal goods than ever he could in fair weather.
Nevertheless, the time of trial is also an opportunity for building a relationship of trust between the martyr and that to which he testifies. Whether because we are fallen or by the nature of the case, trusting relationships have to be built up by a history of interactions. If the martyr’s loyalty to God is tested, but after a struggle he holds onto his allegiance to God and God delivers him (in his own time and way), the relationship is strengthened and deepened. The Bible is full of such stories. God calls Abraham and makes him a promise to multiply his descendants. But accepting the promise involves trials: “Do you trust me enough to leave your homeland? (Gen. 12). Abraham grows old: “Do you trust me enough to do this in your old age?” (Gen. 15, 18). When God provides Isaac, Abraham feels called by God to sacrifice him: “Do you trust me to keep my promise to you even though I am asking you to do something that would seem to make that impossible?” (Gen. 22). Abraham trusted God, and their relationship is celebrated as a hallmark by Jews and Christians to this day. Again, with the children of Israel God repeatedly asks: “Do you trust me enough to get you out of Egypt?… to give you food and water in the desert?… to bring you victorious into the land I have promised you?” The story records the tests they failed (see Ps. 106). Nevertheless, they looked back on the exodus experience as central to building their relationship with God. Despite their disobedience and his punishment of them, they were his and he was theirs in a way that would have been impossible had they stayed in Egypt with its fleshpots, leeks, and cucumbers.
Further, through his pioneering redemptive act (Heb. 2: 10), God in Christ turns martyrdom into an opportunity for intimacy and identification with him. If one person loves another, he not only wants to know what it is like for that person, he wants to know what it is like to be that person. If the cross of Christ does not unveil the mystery of why God permits so much suffering in the first place (that is, the mystery of why [T5] is true), it does reveal his love in becoming incarnate to suffer with us. He is not content to be immutable and impassible, to watch his writhing creation with the eye of cool reason. He unites himself to a human consciousness and takes the suffering to himself. Thus, he knows from experience what it is like for pain to drive everything else from a finite consciousness and to press it to the limits of its endurance. When the martyr regains his wits enough to notice, he can recognize Christ crucified as providing the company that misery loves. Beyond that, the more the believer loves his Lord, the more he wants to know what it was like for him, what it is like to be him. The cross of Christ permits the martyr to find in his deepest agonies and future death a sure access to Christ’s experience. No doubt it was this perspective that made the early church rejoice in being counted worthy to suffer for the Name (Acts 5:41). Moreover, as the believer enters into the love of Christ and shares his love for the world, he will also be able to appreciate his own suffering as a welcome key into the lives of others.
Thus God uses the harassments of his people by sinners both as instruments of divine judgment and as opportunities for relationship building, intimacy, and identification. The religious martyr who perseveres at the cost of his life wins his highest good. For in loving God more than any temporal good and trusting God to see to his good in the face of death, he is rightly related to God. He is also freed from the power of evil, because evil controls us only by bribing us with temporal goods we want more than we want to obey God. There is no remaining capital with which to “buy off” the martyr who is willing to pay the highest price for his loyalty. Finally, such a martyr has become heir to Christ’s promise that “the pure in heart… shall see God” (Matt. 5:8).
THE MARTYRDOM MODEL AND ITS LIMITATIONS
I have proposed martyrdom as a paradigm of redemptive suffering. And the redemptive potential of many other cases that, strictly speaking, are not martyrdoms can be seen by extrapolation from the considerations of the preceding section. (a) For instance, there is suffering in which the victim not only will not but cannot obtain the benefits of relationship development. Some are too witless to have relationships that can profit and mature through such tests of loyalty. Some people are killed or severely harmed too quickly for such moral struggles to take place. At other times the victim is an unbeliever who has no explicit relationship with God to wrestle with. Even so, this type of suffering may provide the persecutor and onlooker with opportunities for reconciliation. (b) Alternatively, much suffering comes through natural causes—disease, natural disaster, or death—and so apparently involves no personal persecutor (other than God) who can be moved to repentance by the victim’s plight. Here, nevertheless, the victim’s faith in God may be tried and emerge stronger.
When all is said and done, however, not all suffering can be seen to have a redemptive value via this model. For example, what about cases at the intersection of types (a) and (b), where no one observes suffering naturally inflicted on the young or mentally deficient?
Further, some would argue that the cost/benefit ratio for such a “redemptive” strategy renders it morally unconscionable: the price for the victim is too high and the success rate is too low, both in relation to God’s goals with the persecutor and in relation to his purposes with the martyr. Martyrdom often deepens the cruelty of the tormentor and tempts the victim beyond what he can bear (for example, in modern brainwashing). The possible conversion of the persecutor and onlooker and the possible enriching of the victim’s faith are not, it is claimed, goods great enough or (often) probable enough to justify such losses on the victim’s side. In short, it seems there would have to be more in it for those who suffer in order for such divine license to sinners and noninterference with nature to be morally justifiable. Yet, what further goods could there be?
THE VISION OF GOD AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
In my opinion, suffering cannot seem a wise, justifiable, or loving redemptive strategy except when embedded in the larger context of a Christian worldview.
Intimacy with God as the incommensurate good. Christians believe that
(T17) The best good is intimacy with God and the worst evil is his absence.
Human beings were made to be happy enjoying a “face-to-face” intimacy with God. Genesis implies that Adam and Eve experienced it in the garden (Gen. 2-3) and it is that to which the saints look forward in heaven. By contrast, hell will be some sort of existence entirely bereft of God’s presence. Unbelievers may find this latter point difficult to credit, since they deny the existence of God and yet find in the world as it is many goods to be enjoyed and satisfactions to be taken. A Christian will not be surprised at human pleasure in things here below, because he insists that the whole earth is full of the glory of God. When we appreciate a beautiful mountain scene or immerse ourselves in Mozart or are lost in a Cezanne painting, we are experiencing God shining through the mask of his creatures. When humans share deep, satisfying intimacy, part of the joy they taste is God in the middle of it. And this is so whether or not he is recognized there. Since ordinary human experience is thus “Godinfested,” we are in no position to imagine the horror of a creation in which he was entirely hidden from view. St. Paul speaks for Christians when he acknowledges that “now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been understood” (1 Cor. 13:12). Nevertheless, for a few saints and perhaps on rare moments in the lives of most Christians, it seems as if God drops his mask to give the believer a more direct if still unclear view. Maybe it was out of such rapturous experience that St. Paul wrote with confidence that “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom. 8:18) and counted “everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus as my Lord” (Phil. 3:8). In other words,
(T18) The good of “face-to-face” intimacy with God (the evil of his total absence) is simply incommensurate with any merely temporal evils (goods).
St. Stephen cannot help forgiving his murderers when he sees Jesus (Acts 7:56-8:1); the martyrs “have forgot their bitter story in the light of Jesus’ glory.”
Morally sufficient reasons and the incommensurate good. If a face-to-face vision of God is an incommensurate good for human beings, that will surely guarantee, for any cooperative person who has it, that the balance of goods over evils will be overwhelmingly favorable. Indeed, strictly speaking, there will be no balance to be struck. And no one who received such benefits would have any claim against God’s justice or complaint against his love. God will have bestowed on those who see him “up close” as great a good as such a finite container can take. If so, it seems that God’s justice and love toward creatures can be vindicated apart from any logically necessary connection between the evils suffered here below and some great enough good. In short, where “excuse” is taken to mean “morally sufficient reason,”
(T4) The fact that an evil was necessary for a greater good would provide an omniscient and omnipotent being with an excuse only if the evil were a logically necessary prerequisite to or consequence of the good,
is false. This is not to say that, subjectively speaking, a person in the middle of terrible suffering might not complain, doubt, or rail against God. Nevertheless, retrospectively, from the viewpoint of the beatific vision, no one would be disposed to blame God for not eliminating or preventing various evils or to regard God’s love as limited or insufficient. And St. Paul is able to adopt this position even in prospect (Rom. 8:18).
Divine wisdom, temporal evils, and the meaning of life. What about the interpretation of (T4) on which “excuse” means “prudential justification”? After all, if God wants the saints to enjoy the beatific vision (which ex hypothesi has no logically necessary connection with temporal evils), is not their sojourn through this vale of tears a waste (foolish management) for him as well as “a pain” for them? Could God really be serious about this life if his principal response to its ills were simply to obliterate it in a final cloud of glory? Would not such a scenario rob our earthly suffering of any meaning? Once again, does not the conjunction of (T4) and (T5) combine to show that God is foolish?
This objection assumes that the only way that an omnipotent, omniscient God’s permission of evils could be rationalized is by a logically necessary connection between the actual evils and great enough goods. Traditionally, Christians have disagreed. After all, the rationality of a person’s behavior is in part a function of his purposes and his consistency and efficiency in pursuing them. No doubt God could have “brought many sons to glory” (Heb. 2:10) without a detour through the temporal world. His not doing so is explained by his wider and over-arching purpose in creation, which is to raise the finite and temporal above itself into relationship with the infinite and eternal. His persistent commitment to relationships with created persons (T6 and T7) reaches a radical focus in the Incarnation. The evils of sin, sickness, and death were not part of God’s original intentions but a byproduct of his creation of free persons and/or a plurality of mutually interfering natures (for example, humans, birds, and mosquitoes); and the Christian does not know (T5) why he permits so many of them. (For Christians, the answers to Q2-Q4 remain a mystery) Nevertheless, the Christian revelation does say that God incarnate faces evils in deadly earnest, ultimately on the cross. It would not be consistent for the God who is so committed to the temporal order as to enter it and suffer in it himself to snatch his people out of it in some gnostic ascent. Thus enduring temporal suffering, God’s people share in the divine commitment to the temporal order.
Suffering as a vision of the inner life of God. For all that, I believe Christian mysticism would not hesitate to admit a logically necessary connection between temporal suffering and a very great good, on the ground that temporal suffering itself is a vision into the inner life of God. The relation is thus not one of logically necessary means or consequence but rather that of identity. Perhaps—pace impassibility theorists—the inner life of God itself includes deep agony as well as ecstatic joy. Alternatively, the divine consciousness may be something beyond both joy and sorrow. Just as for Otto human beings can only experience the divine presence now as tremendum (a deep dread and anxiety), now as mysterium (an attraction beyond words), so perhaps our experiences of deepest pain as much as those of boundless joy are themselves direct (if still imperfect) views into the inner life of God. Further, just as lesser joys and pleasures (for example, the beauty of nature, music, or painting) may be more obscure visions of the glory of God, so also lesser degrees of suffering.
Instructed by Christian mysticism, I suggest that a Christian might endorse not only
(T18) The good of “face-to-face” intimacy with God (the evil of his total absence) is simply incommensurate with any merely temporal evils (goods)
but also
(T19) Any vision into the inner life of God has a good aspect, this goodness at least partly a function of the clarity of the vision.
He need not go so far as to maintain that any vision of God, however obscure or painful, has an incommensurately good aspect. Nor need he deny that
(T20) Experiences of suffering have an evil aspect proportionate to the degree of suffering involved.
Nevertheless, he might be led to reason that the good aspect of an experience of deep suffering is great enough that, from the standpoint of the beatific vision, the victim would not wish the experience away from his life history, but would, on the contrary, count it as an extremely valuable part of his life.
Note that, unless the Christian maintains that any experience of suffering whatever has an incommensurately good aspect, he will not claim to rest his whole defense on this putative logically necessary connection of identity alone. Rather, his vindication of divine goodness might still rely heavily on the incommensurate goodness of the beatific vision itself. Nevertheless, Christians believe that God intends to be good to his people in calling them to share his dogged pursuit of relationships within the temporal order. The fact of (T19) might be seen to lend credibility to the wisdom in this divine purpose, by giving a depth of meaning to their temporal suffering independently of its external relations to other logically independent goods, whether eternal or temporal.
Objections. The danger in this Christian-mystical suggestion (as Ivan Karamazoff and J.S. Mill contended about other attempts to draw a logically necessary connection between temporal evils and great enough goods) is that it runs the risk of making suffering seem too good. To begin with, someone might object that if suffering were a vision of the inner life of God, there would be nothing wrong with our hurting people, and especially with our causing them great suffering. For such experiences are alleged in (T19) to have a good aspect in some direct proportion to their intensity. A Christian could reply, “Non sequitur.” God is the one who is responsible for ensuring that each person’s life is, with that person’s cooperation, a great good to him on the whole. Christians believe that God calls his people to share in his work. But God is the one who defines the finite person’s responsibility for another’s good. Christians could agree with secular moralists that sometimes one person has an obligation or at least a right to cause another person to suffer for his own good—for example, by spanking the two-year-old that runs into the street or by speaking a painful word of correction. But Christian mysticism would neither compel nor countenance this suggestion that any created person has a vocation to sadism (or to masochism, either).
Again, someone might charge, on this view it would be fully compatible with divine goodness if human beings suffered eternally in hell forever. Indeed, insofar as suffering lasted forever, it would constitute for the damned soul an infinite good.
A twofold reply is possible: First of all, given (T11) and (T12), Christians do not believe that God would be wrong to consign sinners to eternal punishment. Second, it is arguable whether, given (T18), it is accurate to conceive of hell as the continuance of temporal evils, however sinister, rather than as the absence of God. As noted above, I doubt that we have any notion of how devastating that would be, although we might speculate with C. S. Lewis that the absence of God would bring a total disintegration of created personality. In any event, hell considered as everlasting temporal punishment is not the “good” Christians believe God to have in mind for his people. For one thing, not every good is fitting for every sort of creature. As Aristotle observed in rejecting Platonic forms long ago, the putative metaphysical good of immutability is logically (metaphysically) ruinous to plant and animal natures. Similarly, some adult freedoms and pleasures are harmful for children. Perhaps omnipotence would be inappropriate for created persons of limited wisdom and good will. And even if the everlasting temporal suffering of a created person would have a good aspect, and indeed accumulate toward an infinite sum, it is a good that would break down and destroy the creature (in something of the way the tortures of brainwashing do). A loving God would not, any more than a loving parent, want to give his children goods that would naturally tend to destroy them.
A more profound answer to this second objection reverts to (T7) and the nature of the relationships for which God created us, namely, relationships of intimate sharing and loving self-giving. He wants us to share not merely his agony (or the aspect we experience in this life as agony) but also his joy. He wants us to enjoy our relationship with him and wants to make us happy in it. Needless to say, the experience of everlasting temporal torment does not “fill the bill”; for that we need a more balanced view of God.
CONCLUSION
Christians will not want to depreciate the awfulness (awefulness) of suffering in this life, by the innocent and the guilty, by the intelligent and the witless alike. They will not appear beside racks of torture to proclaim that it does not really matter or to exhort the victim to gratitude. Nevertheless, they see in the cross of Christ a revelation of God’s righteous love and a paradigm of his redemptive use of suffering. Christian mysticism invites the believer to hold that a perfectly good God further sanctifies our moments of deepest distress so that retrospectively, from the vantage point of the beatific vision, the one who suffered will not wish them away from his life history—and this, not because he sees them as the source of some other resultant good, but inasmuch as he will recognize them as times of sure identification with and vision into the inner life of his creator.
For Christians as for others in this life, the fact of evil is a mystery. The answer is a more wonderful mystery—God himself.
Marilyn McCord Adams, “Redemptive Suffering: A Christian Solution to the Problem of Evil,” in Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment, ed. Robert Audi and William J. Wainwright (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 1986.