A Struggle Not Worth Letting Go
On Evil and Original Blessing
I've been reading through Augustine's The City of God and was struck by his discussions about the origins of evil.
Specifically, as with all Christian theodicies, Augustine has the puzzle of trying to explain how evil could come from good. That is, if the world was primordially perfect how could it fall?
In pondering Augustine's answers, my attention came to focus upon the assumption that creates all this difficulty. Specifically, the conviction that the world was created good. This assertion, what some have described as "original blessing," is a bedrock Christian commitment. All the world, and all of us, are fundamentally good. And yet, this is the very conviction that creates what we call "the problem of evil."
More simply, Christians are wedded to two claims about the world:
The world and humanity were created good.
Evil exists.
The "problem of evil" is the tension that exists between these two claims. For if you deny either claim the "problem of evil" goes away. This is what causes Augustine fits in The City of God. It would be much easier if Christians could say that evil always existed, that evil is a constitutive part of the cosmos. But that's not what Christians believe. Nor do Christians deny the existence of evil. So we're forced to live in-between these two convictions.
In short, it's the Christian commitment to "original blessing" that creates the "problem of evil." What's interesting here is how a lot of the Christians who struggle most with the "problem of evil" are the same Christians who embrace and preach "original blessing" over against pessimistic views of both humanity and creation. Original blessing is used to ground both human dignity and creation care. As they should! But many of these same Christians miss how one of their deeply held convictions (original blessing) is implicated in their downstream faith struggles (the problem of evil).
Like Augustine, we refuse to reject original blessing. Original blessing is one of the most beautiful ideas gifted to us from Genesis, that God looked upon world and saw that it was "good" and that humanity was "very good." But if we rightly embrace original blessing we will inherit its theological implications. So if you're struggling with "the problem of evil," just remember that those struggles flow from a very beautiful religious conviction that isn't worth letting go.
I have come to believe part of the problem of "evil" is how we define evil and understand the Mystery Underlying Creation (whom we call "God"). If we consider the created order as somehow different than how a deity sitting outside of creation designed it, were going down a blind alley. Earthquakes are not evil - they are part of plate tectonics which recycles carbon into the earth's crust making life possible. Hurricanes are not evil, they are part of the mechanism to balance heat in the atmosphere. Carnivorous animals are not evil, even if they occasionally kill people, they are part of the ecological balance of the environment.
It is only when we conceptualize God as relationship (hence the notion of the Trinity) and the fact that higher primates (especially Homo Sapiens) have the innate ability and mental capacity to manipulate and break relationships do we begin to see sin and evil as negation of relationships.
Our relationships with God, ourselves and others (as well as our environment) become subject to the big capital I of our egos, and it is God, through the pattern of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth who offers us a way through it. God invites us not only to the mountaintop of the transfiguration, but also to follow Jesus up the hill to Jerusalem where our precious egos are crucified, laid in the tomb and raised to new and everlasting life. As Robert Farrar Capon put it, "Jesus did not come to teach the teachable, reform the reformable or improve the improvable, he came to raise the dead".
The problem of evil is that we believe that evil exists in the same sense as good creation exists. John 1:3 "Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made."
Evil exists as a lie that when believed and acted on, affects all things that exist. The things that exist never cease to be good but evil curates its rumour of existence within good creation causing the good to act on evil. Evil is a metaphysical lie that causes us physical grief. In this sense, evil does not exist except as a perpetuated metaphysical lie. All things are created good, and remain good and if they were treated as such, there would be much less evil in the world, or perhaps much less evil in us and in our circle.