This essay is a contribution to theodicy—the justifying of God’s ways to humankind—in the face of the many evils of our world. But it is offered as a modest contribution to such a project, in fact, a very modest contribution.
One kind of evil consists of the personal evils that occur in a life which are, to all intents and purposes, unfair. Sometimes we think we observe a correlation between some vile action and what then happens to the agent. He “gets what he deserved”; he had it coming to him. But at other times, and perhaps more frequently, there is an absence of such a correlation, and even an inverse relationship. Why do the wicked prosper? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do the innocent suffer? (Ps. 73). Why is the incidence of pain and evil so seemingly unfair and pointless, so utterly destructive? My project here looks at one classic view of God’s relation to human action and how it addresses this sort of evil.
Yet about this modest area of enquiry I shall make a bold claim. I shall claim that such a view of God’s relation to human action and suffering—what I call the “no-risk” view of divine providence—can hope to make sense of the kind of relationship between God and humankind that figures prominently in the Bible and in Jewish and Christian religion and piety. Views of providence as “risky” have to soft-pedal at this point. Furthermore, the account I defend offers as paradigms of the divine-human relationship those very incidents in scripture which “openness” theologians say that they alone can do justice to. I refer to famous instances of divine-human dialogue in scripture—the Lord’s dealings with Abraham and Moses, with Job and Jonah and Hezekiah, and, of course, with Jesus himself, the Suffering Servant. So I shall make bold to occupy the very ground that Christian openness thinkers appeal to by invoking a view of providence that is the very opposite of theirs and which they excoriate. The “openness” view describes itself as “relational,” as if every other view is “nonrelational.” But it has no monopoly. There are divine-human relations that it cannot account for, and the account it does offer is unacceptably anthropomorphic.
To allay a possible misunderstanding or two, I shall begin the argument a little way back. When there is a theological or philosophical debate about God and personal evil and how it is to be addressed, it must not be taken for granted that there is agreement about everything else except the matter in question. More may be implicated in their differences than how people are to think of evil in their lives. These differences may start much further back, in their respective concepts of God. If one has a concept of God as a Mr. Fixit (in either the diplomatic or financial senses) or thinks of him along the lines of a coach or a football manager or a military general or a family counselor, then that person’s approach to God’s relation to personal evil will necessarily be different from that of someone who thinks of God as the transcendent and yet immanent Creator, the ground of being whose thoughts are not our thoughts and whose ways are not our ways. The first approach sees God as one person, or three persons, among many others. The second approach sees him as the incomparable Triune Creator of all that is.
Similarly, someone who thinks that the universe is arranged principally for our benefit, or even for one’s own individual benefit, will necessarily have a different approach to the justification of personal evil than someone who believes about God that “of him and to him and through him are all things” (Eph. 1:11). Someone who thinks of the universe principally as an arena in which God and humankind can each exercise their libertarian free choices will necessarily approach personal evil in a different way from one who thinks that God works all things after the counsel of his own will. Someone who thinks that most problems about the relation between God and the universe can be solved by careful thought will necessarily approach the justification of the ways of God differently than will someone who thinks that God’s judgments are unsearchable and his ways past finding out (Rom. 11:33). Someone whose attitude to personal evil presupposes that the death of our bodies is the terminus of life will necessarily approach the evaluating of that evil differently from someone who looks forward to the life everlasting.
A person approaches the problem of evil holding many other beliefs. Evil can be discussed in abstraction from these, but not in isolation from them. So thoughtful treatments of the problem of evil cannot simply address it as a philosophical problem, as a problem of the consistency or inconsistency of certain sentences, or of the analysis of certain concepts. The problem is also theological—in fact it is basically theological. For insofar as it is concerned with the ways of God, then different accounts of those ways will inevitably lead to different approaches to evil.
A different God, a different religion, means a different approach to the problem of personal evil. In what follows we are touching not merely on one view of providence but on a view of God and of religion itself. We shall return to these important matters at the end.
WHAT THE VIEW IS
My aim is to relate personal evil to the no-risk conception of divine providence, and so I shall spend the next few paragraphs sketching that view, which I believe is the scriptural view. And in view of the thrust of this essay as attempting to relate providence to evil, my sketch of this view of providence will particularly emphasize the purposiveness of divine providence, its teleological character.
In his paper “‘The Place of Chance in a World Sustained by God,” Peter van Inwagen tells the story of Alice, who suddenly remembers that she had promised to buy a box of crayons for her son, turns into an unfamiliar street in search of an appropriate shop, and is struck and killed by a car whose brakes have failed. Van Inwagen comments: here death may well be a “chance” occurrence (in the sense that it was not part of anyone’s plan), even though in one sense her death has an obvious explanation. The positions and conditions of the vehicles explain what happened, but that explanation does not reveal to us the point of the event, nor could it, for according to van Inwagen the event has no point.
For van Inwagen such an event—a chance event in the sense of an event that was not a part of anyone’s plan—is not (and perhaps cannot be) a part of God’s plan either. For (I take him to be saying) nothing that has no point for a human being can have a point for God and so be a part of God’s plan. While not all no-risk views of providence entail the denial of van Inwagen’s view, the view I shall go on to defend does.
On van Inwagen’s view, then, God takes risks in sustaining the universe, since chance events like Alice’s death can take place. This question of whether God takes risks in governing the universe has to do not with mere ignorance—with the sort of risk that is involved in betting on the turn of a card—but with what might be called “real” risk, namely, the real possibility that the universe might not turn out, or might not be turning out, in the way that God, in sustaining and governing it, wished or wanted or intended. If God takes risks, then (I shall assume) some events turn out as he does not intend, and as a consequence he suffers. (Of course it is perfectly possible to suppose that God might take risks in making such and such an arrangement, but that nothing in that arrangement turns out other than as he wants it to turn out, as when I take a risk in crossing the busy street but nevertheless cross it safely.) I also assume that the risky events in question, were they to occur, would have significance or importance; they would not be flea bites.
God’s governing of the universe is purposive, means-end governing; in contrast, a carburetor governs the mixture of air and fuel in an engine, but it does not have any further end in doing so (although carburetors are installed by engineers to achieve such further ends). Divine governing is purposive. It is also what I shall call “positive government.” A person might govern a situation simply by frustrating any event that he does not want to occur, like a bouncer outside a nightclub. On this model, God would certainly be said to govern the universe, to be “in control,” if he adopted such a strategy with respect to all events as they unfold. Let us call such modes of government—no doubt there are many subvarieties—negative government. Positive government, in contrast, is government where there is no need to eliminate anything, because the governor is willing for whatever happens within his jurisdiction to occur exactly as it does occur.
On the positive government model, then, there is a close relationship between means and ends. God does not govern the universe in order to achieve certain ends while leaving it entirely up to us how these ends are to be achieved. The end or ends are brought about through the particular means that God ordains.
But are there not other ways of eliminating risk than divine, positive government of all that occurs? Assuming a strong, libertarian sense of freedom, many have argued that perfect divine foreknowledge, divine omniscience as it relates to what is future, eliminates risk for God, because God knows beforehand what will occur. This is sufficient to eliminate mere epistemic risk, of course, but the universe might nevertheless turn out in important respects other than God intended and so have been risky to create: risky, but without surprise for God. This is most notoriously the case in respect to the Fall; on some views the Fall was foreknown, and so not surprising for God, but nonetheless it was not as God intended. But I will not argue thus here. Many have argued that a no-risk sense of divine governing can be held consistently with libertarian free will by appealing to God’s middle knowledge, but I believe that middle knowledge faces philosophical and theological difficulties that render it implausible. However, I shall not rehearse these points here.
To be sure, these perfect divine foreknowledge and middle knowledge views may be defended as no-risk views, but they are not the view I shall defend. I shall explore the idea of divine positive governance of the universe, assuming that these two mediating positions are unavailable. The no-risk view I defend here eliminates risk for God by appealing to his foreordination and not to foreknowledge or middle knowledge and the actualization of certain counterfactuals of freedom. God works all things according to his own will, including the evils that beset us all, down to the last detail. I shall from now on refer to this view as the exhaustive or “meticulous” view of providence.
I have argued for this view of providence in standard philosophical fashion by claiming that it follows from generally accepted ideas about divine omniscience and divine omnipotence and basing my argument on what seems to me to be the reasonable principle that, in reflecting philosophically upon the concept of God, the connotation of such terms as omnipotence and omniscience when applied to God should be as wide as possible. Thus the term “omnipotent” is more appropriately applied to God when it connotes power over more types of actions and events than when it connotes power over fewer types of actions and events. Further, the term is more appropriately applied to God when it connotes power over more instances of each type of action over which power is exercised than power over fewer such instances. And it is similar to the scope of omniscience. After all, the rationale for employing such “omni” terms in the first place is to convey the idea of maximality. Their application should not be limited unnecessarily; otherwise, such terms when applied to God come to possess only rhetorical or hyperbolical value. In openness theism the account of omniscience is “tailored” to allow for the operations of libertarian free choice, and as a consequence there is much of the future that God is ignorant of even though he is, formally speaking, “omniscient.”
The presumption must be, therefore, with respect to any type of event and to any instance of that type, that an omnipotent being has power over them in the sense that he positively governs them, and that an omniscient being knows the truths that are the correct descriptions of such actions, and indeed that divine omniscience and omnipotence are closely connected in that omniscience is an exercise of power. Of course, omnipotence and omniscience may be said to extend further than power and knowledge over what is in fact the case; they extend to possibilities. And so an omniscient being knows not only all actualities but the contents of all possible worlds, while an omnipotent being has power over possibilities, power to prevent or to actualize them.
Here, however, because of the need to connect the no-risk, meticulous view of providence explicitly to evil, I shall adopt a more a posteriori approach. I shall briefly argue that the biblical and therefore the Christian view of God is that he governs all events and actions meticulously—and therefore that the Christian approach to evil must have this view of God as its foundation.
A worked-out view of divine providence and evil has to be consistent with the following biblical data: that God is the creator and moment-by-moment sustainer of his creation (Gen. 1:1; Col. 1:16f; Heb. 1:3); that of him and to him and through him are all things (Rom. 11:36); that he knows the end from the beginning (see Isa. 46:10) and works everything after the counsel of his will (Eph. 1:11); that nothing can impede his purposes; that seemingly chance occurrences are in his control (Prov. 16:33), as are the hearts of kings (Prov. 21:1); that he intends good by the same action as others intend evil by (Gen. 50:20); that Satan and human tyrants are his servants (1 Chron. 21:1 with 2 Sam. 24:1 and Ezra 1:1; Acts 4:27); and that divinely inspired prophecies and dreams are fulfilled to the letter (Num. 23:19; Deut. 18:21-22; and, e.g., Gen. 37:5-8 with 42:6-9). In particular, this providence extended to every detail of the earthly life and ministry of Jesus Christ John 19:31-37; 1 Cor. 15:3-4).
A DIFFICULTY OR TWO
Given that some free (and therefore responsible) human actions are evil, let us ask whether such evil actions as these could be positively governed by God. Could they be part of a scheme of things that, overall, God wills? If God positively governs evil actions, is he not evil?
The divine character can be safeguarded when God positively governs human actions that are morally evil by recognizing that he willingly permits some particular evil actions. He is not and cannot be the author of such actions, but he may be willing for them to occur. But is not a God who is willing for an evil action to occur the cause of that action and so himself evil? I wish to present two alternative arguments for thinking that he is not.
Willing Permission
As a preliminary to considering the first argument, it is necessary to clarify the meaning of willing permission. God positively governs some acts by permitting them. Yet for such permission to be consistent with meticulous positive government, it has to be a particular kind of permission; it has to be willingly given, and it has to be permission of particular actions and not merely the permission of certain types of action. But doesn’t introducing the idea of permission unacceptably modify the idea of divine positive government by introducing an element of conditionality? It does introduce an element of conditionality, but perhaps necessarily so. So far as God may ordain but not cause evil, there is an element of conditionality about what happens, since what happens is conditioned upon what agents other than God do. Such conditionality is presumably present in God’s relations to all human actions. Nevertheless, such conditionality is risk-free for God.
Divine permission is compatible with the absence of risk for God as long as there are types of actions that God can prevent but nevertheless cannot cause, even though he may be willing for them to occur. Then God controls an evil action by permitting it—by deciding not to prevent it—and the evil action occurs because it is caused by the natures and circumstances of those who perpetrate it. The evil action is then not caused by God, although he willingly permits it as a necessary component part of some broader overall will. This leaves us with questions of why God has willingly permitted evil, and of exactly how evil comes about in a world created by an all-good God. Thankfully, attempting to answer these questions falls outside the scope of the present essay.
So, God may willingly permit an evil act; indeed, since God cannot perform an evil act, if an evil act occurs, he must have permitted it, and if his government of that action is positive, he necessarily only permitted it, but willingly so.
The nature of this permission is well expressed by Augustine:
“In a way unspeakably strange and wonderful, even what is done in opposition to His will does not defeat His will. For it would not be done did He not permit it (and of course His permission is not unwilling, but willing); nor would a Good Being permit evil to be done only that in his omnipotence He can turn evil into good.”
So for a being S willingly to permit an action A is for A to be the action of someone other than S; for S to ordain the occurrence of A and to have been able to prevent A; and for A not to be contrary to what S intends. On this conception, God foreknows everything and unconditionally governs everything, but he does not causally determine everything in the sense that he is the efficient cause of everything. Nevertheless, nothing happens that God is unwilling should happen.
But it may still be insisted that if God willingly permits X, then God is the cause of X. It is tempting, but I believe crude and misleading, to assimilate the working of such permission to intramundane models of causation, and particularly to theories of physical determinism. Such permission has this in common with physical determinism, that what is physically determined and what is willingly permitted will each come to pass. But willingly to permit an action is not to cause that action in any straightforward sense of “cause.” As part of his critique of the no-risk view, John Sanders describes the Lord, in willingly permitting a rape, as himself a “rapist.” Such ill-judged language is based on a thorough misunderstanding.
We can express some of the difference between willing permission and causation like this. While it seems clear that intramundane causation is transitive, that if (where A, B, and C are mundane events) A causes B, and B causes C, then A causes C, there is no necessary transitivity in the case of the causal aspects or features of the divine willing permission. It is thus not necessarily the case that if God positively governs by willingly permitting some event B, and B causes C, then God causes C; rather, God may will C by willingly permitting that B causes C. As the Puritan Thomas Watson put it, “Herein is God’s wisdom, that the sins of men carry on his work, yet he has no hand in them.” God’s willing permission is thus not a straightforward case of mundane causation. It is a case of “cause” used analogically. This is just as it should be, given God’s mysteriously transcendent and yet immanent relation to his creation.
So, there are ways of safeguarding the divine righteousness in the case of human acts that are morally evil, namely, the idea of God willingly permitting particular evil actions, in the sense understood. But it must also be understood that this is not a theory offering an explanation of the meshing of divine and human action, but an account that attempts to safeguard the consistency of the biblical data.
Thus if, for any event E, E occurs, then God positively governs E either by bringing it about or being willing for it to occur. Whatever occurs does so because God positively governs it in this sense; whatever is true in virtue of what occurs is true because God so governs it. So, while saying that all events are positively governed by God entails that all events are willed by God, this is not equivalent to asserting that if E occurs, God has caused it.
Just as many argue, in developing a free will defense, that not even God can ensure that a free agent only does what is morally right, invoking willing permission makes the important point that there is no possible world in which God can do evil. He may, however, willingly permit evil. This is an instance of particular permission; God permits particular acts, as distinct from giving general permission, as when a teacher allows a class to write an essay on any topic they choose. And God may do so willingly, not because he is willing for the evil act to occur per se, but because he ordains some wider good of which that act is a necessary part (e.g., Gen. 50:20; Acts 2:22-36). This willing permission of evil is something like the willingness of a parent to allow her sick child to undergo some extremely painful, but necessary, course of treatment, or even that the child should be subject to the malice of others. And God may willingly permit such a particular action, though of course without any feeling of psychological pressure or tension that often accompanies such human permittings.
The Action-Description Argument
Nevertheless, there are biblical data about divine and human action which do not appear to be covered by this idea of willing permission. The tyrant Cyrus is referred to as God’s “shepherd,” his “anointed,” the one “who shall fulfill all my purpose” (Isa. 44:28; ch. 45). This can hardly be an instance of mere permission (“I will go before you and level the exalted places,” Isa. 45:2). Is the Lord, then, the cause of the evil that Cyrus perpetrated? Is he an accomplice of Cyrus’s, an accessory, or even perhaps the chief partner in his war crimes? Cyrus’s action may be described by him as an act of war (Isa. 45:1; Dan. 10:1). But why should we believe that it was only as so described that the Lord brought it about that Cyrus went to war for Israel? For the Lord, Cyrus’s action was not only an act of war but an act of deliverance of his covenant people. Biblically, the incident that draws a distinction in the descriptions of the same action most vividly is found in the history of Joseph and his brothers, where, at the climax of the story, Joseph asserts that though the brothers intended his banishment to Egypt “for evil,” the Lord meant it “for good” (Gen. 50:20). Here the idea of an action having multiple descriptions is invoked. That is, the same action may be described in contrary but equally true terms. For instance, Christ’s death, which took place according to the Lord’s “definite plan,” was at once both a wicked act, the righteous self-offering of the God-man, and the Lord’s laying on him the iniquity of us all (Acts 2:23).
So did God intend Cyrus’s act of war, Joseph’s banishment by his jealous brothers, the wickedness of Christ’s crucifiers? If the answer to these questions is “Yes,” does it follow that we can prefix every true description of every detail of the universe with the phrase “God wills” or “God intends”? This interesting question is ambiguous as it stands, as made clear by the point about one action having different descriptions. Whereas Cyrus intends war in furtherance of his imperial ambitions (Isa. 45:4-5), there is no reason to think that God intends that war to further his imperial ambitions. Rather, God’s willing of that war is one element of an all-encompassing divine plan for the universe and especially for his covenant people, Israel. It would be fallacious to suppose that the divine attitude is the same with respect to every detail of that one divine plan separately considered.
As Aquinas put it, “God, and nature, and indeed every causal agent, does what is best overall, but not what is best in every part, except when the part is regarded in its relationship to the whole.” God permits and causes certain evil actions in furtherance of some wider considerations. This is not, then, a case of God doing evil that good may come, as is often claimed. For God is not doing evil; rather, when one of his creatures performs an evil action, that action is ordained by God as part of some broader plan that is a faithful expression of God’s goodness. It is a fallacy to think that because some arrangement is wise, every detail of that arrangement, considered in isolation, is wise. It does not follow that every thread of my tartan tie is tartan.
An Objection
One of the most frequently cited objections to the idea of God both willingly permitting and causing human actions is that this would cast God in the role of a puppet master, with you and I as the puppets. For anyone who is familiar with the literature, it is almost unnecessary to cite instances of the puppet objection, but here is one in respect of good rather than evil actions, although the point of principle is the same.
“If God causes the agent to will some moral good, then we might attribute some moral goodness to God in consequence, but why would we attribute moral goodness to the agent, who is nothing but a puppet of God’s will?”
Sometimes the language is updated; the objection is couched not in terms of puppets or dummies, but in terms of automata and brainwashing. Thus Richard Gale states:
“They (viz. the causal compatibilists) accept, for example, cases of extensive brainwashing, posthypnotic suggestion, or intentional control over the inputs to a brain-in-a-vat as freedom cancelling. There are recognized limits to how far one person can go in causally controlling the behaviour of another person without negating the latter’s freedom. Now God is a person, but his control over created persons is even more extreme than in these man-man cases; not only does he sufficiently cause all of their behavior by bringing about certain instantial conditions and have the counterfactual power to produce alternative behavior, he also creates the causal structure of the universe, whereas finite controllers merely take advantage of a given causal structure.”
What shall we say to the puppet objection? I shall invoke Augustine’s strategy and underline the sui generis character of the divine-human relation. (Recall his reference to “a way unspeakably strange and wonderful” in the quotation from his Enchiridion given earlier.) While this move is philosophically unsatisfactory, since philosophers like to have answers to their questions, it is nevertheless highly appropriate. For, after all, the divine-human relation is sui generis. What could be more extraordinary than the relation between the transcendent Creator and Lord of all and his creation, including his human creatures? If God is sui generis, then any relation between anything else and God looks likely to be sui generis as well. Surely any imaginable relation between any two or more of God’s creatures is likely to be more tractable to the human intellect than that between the Creator and any intelligent creature?
Moreover, the proponents of the puppet objection recognize this. For they do not in fact claim that, given meticulous providence, the relationship between God and his human creatures is literally that of a puppet master to a puppet. If they do, where are the strings? A puppet master is also a creature. What they presumably mean is something like this: that given meticulous providence, there is no closer or more appropriate analogy of the activities of God in respect to his creatures than that of a puppet master to his puppets. But to say that God is in certain respects like a puppet master is not to say that he is a puppet master. A proponent of meticulous providence could thus adopt an analogical counterargument as a strategy with respect to any analogy that his opponent offers, whether it be automata, programming, telepathy, super-neurologist, or whatever. All are misleading, and all fail to capture the divine-human relationship as the meticulous view of providence understands it, in exact terms.
THE DISTINCTIVE ETHOS OF METICULOUS PROVIDENCE
With these rather extensive preliminaries behind us, we must now attempt to address the relation between meticulous providence and personal evil.
Earlier I made the bold claim that in approaching the issue of God and personal evil, an upholder of meticulous, no-risk providence can confidently interpret the central biblical narratives that the openness thinkers believe they alone can do justice to. Openness theology sees these passages as cases of God being surprised, of him changing his mind, as he learns how his children freely react in the circumstances of their lives. Only such an approach, they say, does justice to the texts. All other interpretations do not take the passages with the literalness that is required.
But this is not so. Let us consider the case of Hezekiah (see 2 Kings 20:1-11; Isa. 38:1-8). If we grant that God knows Hezekiah’s life from beginning to end and that he ordains every detail of it, what was he doing in first telling Hezekiah, through the words of Isaiah, that he will die, and then telling him that he will live a further fifteen years? To answer this question we must ask another: what operational consequences (so to speak) was the Lord intending by communicating to Hezekiah in this way? In considering the significance of the Lord’s answer to Hezekiah’s prayer, one must not pay exclusive attention to the relenting—or repenting—of the Lord and take this as evidence of his all-too-human vacillation. Rather, one must take the incident as a whole. And it is obvious, when we look at it in this way and (so to speak) operationally, that Hezekiah is being tested by the Lord. The purpose of the testing is to bring out Hezekiah’s faith in God, or to make him aware of his faith, or both. Hezekiah is brought to a position that would have been impossible without the testing, for it seems to be psychologically and logically impossible for someone who is being tested to know the outcome of the test beforehand. If the outcome of the test were known beforehand to the one being tested, then how could the trial that the person endures be a genuine test? So God accommodates himself to the human situation. It is a divine testing, where the test employed is not some evil occurring as a result of an action of the creature, with God as a bystander unable to prevent it, but where the evil or loss or trial is sent by God himself. The case does not require that Hezekiah himself believed that God was ignorant of what he, Hezekiah, would do, nor that God was insincere in saying that he was going to die, but a recognition that he, Hezekiah, actually had to intercede. And it is quite gratuitous to say that the king does not take the prophet Isaiah’s words to imply a fixed future.
But though this point about divine testing is important, and is one that the openness view cannot handle because that view does not adequately acknowledge the biblical idea of Fatherly correction, it does not exhaust all that needs to be said about meticulous providence and personal evil. The point of narratives like Hezekiah’s is that evil is threatened. But what of those cases where evil has occurred? On the no-risk view, such occurrences are also from the hand of God. Taking some examples from the New Testament, we may consider the case of those grieving Christians to whom Peter wrote (1 Pet. 1:3-9), or the incident of Paul’s thorn in the flesh (2 Cor. 12:7-10), or the plight of the Hebrew Christians to whom the Letter to the Hebrews was written. Their houses had been wrecked (Heb. 10:32-34) by those who did not like the fact that they were both Jews and Christians, and as a result they were in danger of losing heart. The writer does not offer comfort by telling them that God was alongside them, a surprised and somewhat bewildered, suffering God. Rather, after reminding them of various facts, such as the utter reliability of God’s promises (Heb. 6:13-15), and that they have a great, sympathetic High Priest in heaven (Heb. 7:26-28), and that the heroes of the Old Testament also endured suffering (Heb. 11), and especially that Jesus had suffered (Heb. 5:7, 12:1-4), he invites them to see what had happened to them as an instance of Fatherly discipline. Fatherly discipline! But God our Father can only discipline us if we are in his hands.
The case of Paul’s thorn in the flesh shows us another way in which the occurrence of personal evil may be faced. The Lord refused to remove the thorn, the result of the tormenting of Satan’s messenger, despite Paul’s pleadings. Why was this? As Paul understood it, it was so that he could experience for himself the sufficiency of God’s grace and of God’s strength revealed in human weakness. As a result, although he struggled with the pain of persecutions and other difficulties—he was no masochist!—he could nevertheless delight in them.
Do these New Testament examples simply make the familiar point about the value of evil in “soul-making”? Yes and no. The expression “soul-making” is a vague one; everything depends upon how the “making” of the soul is to be understood. The virtues Paul mentions are not human dispositions, which may be produced in any of several ways, but they are graces, which are (as philosophers sometimes say) “internally related” to the ways in which they are produced. Paul’s faith and patience and strength in weakness were conceptually connected to the ways in which the Lord produced these in his life. They could not have come about in just any way.
One more kind of example may be thought of as the limiting case of what we have just been considering. Sometimes the evils that occur in a life are so overwhelming that the thought that they might be divinely purposed is blotted out. How could the terrible earthquake, or a fatal cancer, or the abuse of the three-year-old be purposive? Our immediate reaction is to say that they cannot be. But this answer is too quick. What we should say, according to the meticulous view of providence, is that we do not presently know how these events fit into God’s purposes in a way that is consistent with his character. Earlier we noted that because of its stress on divine transcendence, this whole way of thinking about God contains an element of mystery, of not-knowingness. Why did God send these things? We do not know. Perhaps we haven’t even a clue. What, in these circumstances of radical ignorance, ought we to do?
Quite apart from the obvious reaction of doing what we presently can to alleviate suffering and distress, the most appropriate reaction is surely to submit to the will of God in silence. This can be very irksome. But the point is not new (see, e.g., Ps. 38:13 and 39.9; Job 2:11-13; Hab. 3:17-19). This silence is neither the silence of contempt for God nor some fatalistic silence that comes with a shrug of the shoulders. It is not the silence of one who has been crushed, with no will to live left. It is the silence of sympathy and solidarity with those who suffer, and of enduring the utter bafflement of events willed by God that presently seem to be utterly at odds with his character: it is, for Christians, one form of the familiar contrast between faith and sight. In such circumstances much can be done, but talking is not part of it.
Anne Bradstreet’s poetry has a number of instances of her submission to God’s willing of personal evil in her life, as in her quaint and yet vivid and moving “Here followes some verses upon the burning of our House, July 10th, 1666.” She awoke to find flames engulfing the building. Recording her crying to God for strength in her distress, she wrote
And, when I could no longer look,
or I blest his Name that gave and took,
That layd my goods now in the dust:
Yea so it was, and so ’twas just.
It was his own: it was not mine;
Far be it that I should repine.
We see each of the reactions to evil—a recognition of Fatherly discipline, the fostering of Christian virtue, and submission in the face of God’s inscrutable will—in the case of Christ himself, at least if learning may be said to involve discipline. Without entering into the niceties of Christology, we may note that his life, climaxing in Gethsemane, was characterized by submission to his Father’s will (Matt. 18:1-5; Matt. 26:39, 42). His loud cries and tears were heard because of his reverent submission (Heb. 5:7-8). As a result, although he was the Son of God, he learned obedience by the things that he suffered. For Jesus was at all points in the hands of his Father and of the Holy Spirit, as is vividly illustrated by the fact that his temptation in the wilderness was the result of the leading of the Spirit (Matt. 4:1).
CONCLUSION
I did not promise to offer a theodicy, or even a defense against the charge that evil is at odds with the goodness of God. Rather, assuming that that charge is false, I attempted to spell out some of the consequences of believing that this evil world, with ourselves as parts of it, is at all points in the hands of God. I did this by trying to sketch a distinctive ethos that is characteristic of those who believe that the shape of their lives, and especially the evils in their lives, are part of God’s will for them. Such a view has a clear basis in scripture. The openness view, because of what it believes about God’s ignorance of the future, cannot offer an adequate interpretation of these data, nor can it participate fully in this distinctive ethos.
At one point in his book God, Freedom, and Evil, Alvin Plantinga says that he is offering philosophical enlightenment in connection with the logical problem of evil and that he is leaving to others the pastoral problems arising from encountering evil. But we have seen that the issues of philosophy, theology, and the occurrence of personal evils in a life should not be so tidily boxed. Part of a fully Christian philosophical response to evil involves identifying and rejecting the unbiblical and consequently sub-Christian conceptions of God that are rife in so many “Christian” philosophical responses to it. For Christians, philosophy and theology should not be separated, nor should philosophy and pastoral care.
Paul Helm, “God’s Providence Takes No Risks”, in The Problem of Evil, ed. Michael L. Peterson (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame Press, 2017), 344–362.