The Problem of Evil
When asked my favourite book of the Bible, the choice has long come down to one of two: either the Song of Songs or Job. Lately the scales have been tilted toward the Song, but for a long time it was Job that won out for me, and it remains a close contender. What I adored about Job when I first read it was that it seemed to have finally justified God's creation, to have shed light on why existence was what it was. After disputing with God for so long about whether being alive was worthwhile in the first place, I finally felt I'd been shut up, and I was glad for it—so glad I committed God's speeches to Job at the end to memory. Job convinced me to love God—whether or not he loved me back.
How I understood the Book of Job in this period was deeply inflected by Spinoza. From the Ethics, I had come to be familiar with a formal definition of God as the substance of existence, the absolutely infinite being-in-itself of which no other could exist, the manifest sum of all perfections and powers of existence. Spinoza's definition of God, in my reading, corresponded in practically all elements to the God of classical theism, except perhaps in his dubious omnibenevolence. Spinoza argued firmly that what is "good" is a subjective product of human experience not applicable to God, indexing what in our finite lives increases our power to exist more fully, but irreducibly subjective and totally irrelevant to God, whose existence is bound by nothing of the sort. The only non-subjective good, for Spinoza, could only be God, as God perfects and empowers all existing things and the true contemplation of God is an inexhaustible source of joy. Yet at the same time, while Spinoza argues convincingly that to hate God is impossible and to love God is inevitable, he also sees no reason to assume that the glory of God playing out among finite things through the causal chain will avoid inflicting suffering to human beings. Humans, like all other finite things, are bound to suffer and die, and only in the sense in which we are eternal objects of divine contemplation, rather than in the sense in which we inhabit these finite bodies, can we hope to be spared the consequences of our finitude. Yes, God will always encapsulate our highest good, and will always evoke our love—but no, there is no reason to expect God to prefer our worldly good to our worldly evil.
While Spinoza caused this position to make sense to me, the Book of Job caused it to appear in technicolour. In the monologues of God, and especially in his first speech, he paints a picture of the natural world which is vast and beautiful, undoubtedly full of perfections and reflecting the glory of God. Yet it is also finite, a chiaroscuro of life and death, of the life-giving waters pouring on the desolate dunes, of the eagle's chicks lapping up blood, of the joyous ostrich leaving her eggs on the ground to be crushed underfoot. These descriptions were not of an eternal order in which God's glory is expressed stably among infinite and inviolable things, but one in which that glory played out among finite creatures which waxed and waned, came into being and died, all to the greater glory of God without any hint of subordination to a human standard of what is fair and good. The perfection God was expressing in his work was deeply moving and obviously beautiful, while also being completely unaccountable to my judgements or to anyone's judgements but God's. I found that God was sovereign, and that I could not dispute with God, but could only love him no matter what he did. No matter how he treated me, even if he were to cast me into Hell for nothing, I could only hope to love him and to rejoice forever in that love.
That was half of what I loved about the monologues concluding the Book of Job. The other half was a great deal less obsequious. In both of the speeches of God, and especially in the latter, God seems distinctly to rejoice in the power of his creatures, and to goad us on to being more than we are. The descriptions of Behemoth and Leviathan, of their grand proportions and astonishing power, seemed to me not merely there to reinforce God's greatness as being greater than they, but also as exemplars of fulfilled creations which glorify God by their grandeur. For example, when God says of a person who could go before Leviathan unafraid, "Who could go before me in this I'd reward, / under all the Heavens he would be mine. / I would not keep quiet about him, / about his heroic acts and surpassing grace" (Job 41:3–4, by the Jewish division of chapters, in Robert Alter's translation; note that the Hebrew is apparently cryptic and so these verses get translated in very different ways) I was heartened. Human beings cannot contend with Leviathan, but if we could, God would praise us for it—so then, it would be worthwhile to try! Or for another example, God says earlier on,
Let loose your utmost wrath,
see every proud man, bring him low.
See every proud man, make him kneel,
tramp on the wicked where they are.
Bury them in the dust together,
shut them up in the grave.
And I on my part shall acclaim you,
for your right hand triumphs for you. (Job 40:11–14)
God, then, will not impose our standards of righteousness for us, as God is not subordinate to us—but if we impose them for ourselves, and rectify the world by our own right hand, God will acclaim us for what we have done. God, then, does not want us to be pitiful and under-actualized; God wants us our existences to wax to the fullest, and justice to be brought to bear on all the world. This thought was tremendously refreshing to me. God had his creation, and I could not dispute with it, I could only accept it. Yet within that creation I had been given license and encouragement to go about a creation of my own, the end of which would be the end of wickedness and pride, and so, the beginning of justice and peace. These two thoughts together ended my disputation with God and with the fact of my own existence, and caused me to rally. In fact, the two thoughts may well have been one thought:
One thing God has spoken,
two things have I heard:
that strength is but God's
and Yours, Master, is kindness.
For you requite a man by his deeds. Psalm 62:11–12
Today I do not think in the same terms as I did then. But I'm also not sure that I was wrong, exactly. The account that my Spinozist reading of Job produced of creation is one which strikes me as factually accurate. When I think about, for instance, the most brutal and horrifying facts of the natural world, in which animals have naturally evolved to cause tremendous suffering to each other as a matter of course, I can only think of Job. When I think about the way in which infants become afflicted with horrible and inevitable diseases, I can only think of Job. When I think about prehistorical mass extinctions which destroyed vast amounts of animal life, I can only think of Job. God's glory is manifest on Earth, which is so richly endowed with the works of his hand, but that glory has never been of afraid of afflicting the finite creatures it calls forth with atrocious torments. If we are going to love God, that does not mean we have to find these events palatable, but it does seem to mean we cannot hold God to account for them, or else we would be doing nothing but holding God to account. And the fact of the matter is, we simply are not capable of judging him. How could any human being be capable?
But I know my redeemer lives,
and in the end he will stand up on earth,
and after they flay my skin,
from my flesh I shall behold God. Job 19:26–26
The Book of Job never portrays Job's redeemer. Perhaps this is because he is no longer necessary. After all, Job's fortunes are restored and even increased, so why would a redeemer be required? Yet most readers of the book, at least today, find this ending unsatisfying and willingly say so: Job's original children are dead and his sufferings cannot be undone, so God's final restitution is inadequate. These readers are essentially acting as Job's redeemers, testifying to his agonies and to the need for justice to be done to him. Job's redeemers continue to ensure that his flayed skin is presented before God as a charge, even if God cannot possibly be sentenced. The redeemer is one who continues to make evil a problem.
Christian tradition has long been to read Job's redeemer as an anticipation of Christ—and indeed, Christ is one who continues to make evil a problem. In fact, a lot of my apologia for God seems to go out the window if God has been incarnate as a human being. If God does not act according to human morality, that is no surprise, because God is not a human being. But if the nature of God has been joined to a human nature, then the shocking inhumanity of the world is suddenly inexcusable. Yet paradoxically, this reopening of the wound of evil occurs not because of some new harm done to us, but because we have been given a gift of perfect grace. A God who has deigned to die for our redemption does not owe human beings any more than the same God who has not deigned to do so, and so it would seem strange to charge God with more in light of that event. Nevertheless, it seems inevitable that we should do so, because the horror of the world simply does not make sense in light of a God who has demonstrated such love for us.
I suspect that this open wound is of the essence of salvation. It is not such a bad thing to be part of a religion in which evil is a problem. If evil is an inexcusable flaw in creation, one which we simply must answer for, then we are called to expurgate ourselves of evil in our own creations. Some atheists would disagree with this statement. I have heard it argued that human failings are excusable, because humans are limited in power and wisdom, whereas God's defects are inexcusable because God can do precisely as he wishes. And this is, partially, true: we must make allowances for the failings of human beings. But if someone wants to try and convict the evil of this world, they cannot at the same time plead incompetency to determine what the expurgation of evil might look like, or else their charge is incoherent. The only way the problem of evil can be posed as a coherent problem is through our striving to live in a manner which is not evil. This manner must be the ethic of radical and uncompromising love whose manifestation in Jesus is so unsettling, given how at odds it seems to be with the rest of the world. In order to convincingly make the case that the world ought to be redeemed, we need to live in the manner of the redeemer.
The Johannine tradition of the New Testament charges us, "My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth" (1 John 3:18). I've argued elsewhere on this blog that faith is, essentially, cemented in deed, forged in the acceptance of hope in a new world rather than gain in the present world for its wages. Here I believe we see another aspect of that centrality of the deed to faith, especially when combined with the concept of truth. If we profess the problem of evil in word, but hedge our bets by sitting comfortably in the evil of the world, we do not really profess the problem of evil at all. We do not ally ourselves to a redeeming love in truth, because we happily lust after the world that we claim is in need of redeeming. If we ally ourselves to that redeeming love in deed, however, we can profess the need for redemption in truth. It is for this reason, I believe, that the commandments of Jesus are often so extreme, and so incompatible with worldly functioning if taken at face value. As Christ says of the disciples, "I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world" John 17:14. In giving the word to the disciples, and so inspiring them with a redeeming love, the world has rejected them—and so, from this remove, it becomes possible to formulate the problem of evil.
One of the commandments of the Gospel is, "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you" (Matthew 7:7). This idea, that whatever we ask for and seek of God shall be given to us, is on one level obviously true. God is the source of being from whom all natures are drawn, and so all creatures at all times seek their beings in God and receive them. There is no existence which does not consist in a constant requesting-of-God. Yet on another level it is clearly false, because a great many prayers by human beings go unanswered. One might here, however, make a distinction between what it means to ask in truth or to ask in falsehood. If we ask forgiveness of God, for example, but we do not forgive, the Gospel repeatedly states that we will not receive it. Why? Because we have not asked for it in truth. But if we request forgiveness, and are forgiving ourselves, we know that which we ask for, and then we will certainly receive it. The same may well hold true with the redemption of the world. If we say that the world is in need of redemption but we do not truly ask for it—possibly because we do not address God coherently, but probably because we do not emulate redemption coherently—we cannot receive it. But if we ask for redemption truly, in such a manner that we are not of the world, I believe that we will surely receive it.
Then why has the world not already been redeemed? I can think of three answers. One would be that no one has in truth asked for the redemption of the world in truth. But I do not believe that human beings have always been so insincere. There have been a good many people who have truly modeled a thirst for the redemption of the world, and who would plausibly have prayed for that redemption, and yet we are not redeemed. A second answer would be that these people are redeemed, and are in the Kingdom of Heaven now while we languish on Earth, seeking escape. This would be a gnostic answer. But I believe that this answer is invalidated by the same thing which is at the core of the third answer: the commandment to "love thy neighbour as thyself."
If we truly love in a manner which is not of this world, we must love the people within this world, our neighbours, who really are bound up with this order of things. If someone is not of the world, they nevertheless love the people who are in the world. Therefore, while these saints earnestly pray for the world to come, they by necessity at the same time join themselves as one flesh to people who, in their lust for the world, ask the very opposite from God. In being joined with these people, the saints cannot possibly be pursuing a kind of simple escape, as the people they love as their very selves would not be making that escape along with them. While they may just as well pray for the redemption of all things, they can no longer pray wholeheartedly for that redemption to come upon them at this instant, knowing that what other people pray for is in essence their own damnation. The desire for immediate redemption gives way to a desire for future redemption, one which addresses all the evil of the past, but one in which our beloved siblings may partake of as well as us. It is not enough to truthfully pray for redemption on one's own, but to pray corporately with all the world to be saved.
It is here, I think, that the problem of evil is transfigured into a calling of practical love. The problem of evil persists. It is good that we do not accept this world as sufficient, and it is good that Christ has torn the scab off our hearts—my own heart included. We ought to demand a world different from this one, faithfully hoping to receive that which we ask of God. Yet if we are going to make this request, we must make it together, and if we are going to problematize evil, we must problematize it with a common voice. Therefore the task which is incumbent on us is to invite other people into an unwordly pattern of living, which can only be an ethic of love at the extremes. Anticipating the Kingdom of God in our lives, we gradually make it possible to inherit the Kingdom together.
If I am bound by the noose of emotional attachment,
then I shall bind You, Lord, with the bonds of love.
Go ahead and try to escape, Lord;
I have escaped by worshipping and adoring you. Sri Guru Granth Sahib, Ang 658
God is sovereign. But what is sovereignty? It is not the sovereignty of princes. It seems to us that God, like a nation-state, can make any decision he likes, and play out his majesty however he chooses. But the omnipotence of God does not need to be interpreted in this manner. The priest-in-charge of my church puts it differently: that the omnipotence of God is equivalent to the unparalleled capacity for love. God is the one "to whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid," and the one for whom there is no scarcity with which to provision us according to our needs. Genuine love is a love which is attentive, which notes all the needs of its particular object and ministers to them—and this is what God has the power to do without any restraint. We owe our creation and preservation to such a love. For you love all things that exist, and detest none of the things that you have made, for you would not have made anything if you had hated it" (Wisdom 11:24).
But if God provides for us according to what we ask, out of his unadulterated love for us, then it is possible to bind him. If our hearts cry out for our damnation, what can he do except to provide it? If we ask for Hell, how can he refuse us? In fact, he can refuse us, but not by a simple denial, for if he would not give us that for which we asked he would not be as omnipotent as he is. He refuses us, instead, by our redemption, instilling a change in our hearts whereby we ask for something different. He problematizes the evil we desire and teaches us not to desire it. Our Redeemer stands on Earth.
If this world wills itself forth—if we bind ourselves to it by our emotional attachment, by our lust for it—then we have bound God to express his glory in this manner, amid our sufferings. But if instead we bind ourselves to God, he will not prefer to impose a suffering world. The fallenness of this world is separation from God, and when we profess to need God above all the things of the world, he will not escape from us. It is his nature to love us, and to give us what we ask of him; therefore we must ask for God himself. "They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden" (Genesis 3:8–10). When we have hidden ourselves from God amid the trees, God will not refuse to be hidden from us—but if we walk in his ways, he cannot help but walk with us in the garden again. "Un jour je serai de retour près de toi."
But God loves himself as another: hence three in one, and not one in one. And so the way of God is to love one another as ourselves, and not ourselves as ourselves. It is the nation that wrestles with God all together that asks for the kiss of God and receives it. No one can be saved alone.