Our Responses to the Problem of Evil
I was recently in a conversation about the problem of evil and shared some of the ideas from Karen Kilby's article "Evil and the Limits of Theology." I reflected on this essay a few years ago, but it bears revisiting.
When discussing the problem of evil Kilby argues that we need to distinguish between our intellectual, moral and pastoral responses to evil. We often confuse these responses, which can muddy the waters and lead to some inept pastoral responses.
First, the intellectual response to evil concerns our theological debates about why God permits evil to exist.
Next, the moral response to evil concerns how we should refuse to be reconciled to evil and should struggle against it in the world.
Finally, the pastoral response to evil is how we come alongside those who are suffering or who are victims of evil.
Kilby's argument is that we need to keep these responses distinct and separate or great damage can be done. For example, pastoral damage can be done if we try to offer an intellectual response to evil by a graveside. No one needs to hear "the reason" why a child has died. People who are suffering don't need an intellectual explanation about "why" this pain, loss, or suffering has occurred. Unfortunately, however, this is a too-common mistake as people have felt that a theological "explanation" might help soothe and salve the pain of a sufferer. But as we (should) know, our pastoral response to evil shouldn't be logical or theological. We don't share a "reason" or "explanation." We simply share presence, tears, grief, and love. We shouldn't be doing a lot of talking and explaining around pain.
Another thing to monitor is letting our intellectual response bleed into our moral response. This concern gets less attention, but it's still a big issue. Specifically, any intellectual "explanation" of evil has the potential to lessen its force, weight, and impact. If evil has a "reason" we become, in some small way, reconciled to its existence. This weakens our moral response to evil, our absolute, undiluted antagonism towards its existence.
In this vein, Kilby goes on to make the provocative claim that assurances about God's presence in our suffering can tip into a theodicy, or something theodicy adjacent. That is, we don't know why evil exists, but we do know that God in Christ is "with us" in our pain. This is true, but Kilby warns against using this intellectual conviction as a pastoral response we push onto others. Yes, it is consoling to know that God is "with us" in our pain, but we need to monitor when such a consolation, even if true, is being pushed onto others rather than claimed for oneself.
From a different angle, we can also mistake our intellectual quest about the problem of evil for our moral response. We can come to mistake our theodic angst, how theologically distressed we are about the suffering of the world, for actually doing something about the suffering of the world. Our rage against the evil of the world can become performative, theological playacting. As I describe in Reviving Old Scratch, I was once caught in this trap, mistaking my intellectual response toward evil as a moral response. But as I say in the book, evil isn't a puzzle to be solved but a reality to be resisted. Don't mistake your intellectual response to evil for a moral response. Of course, think about the problem, but don't mistake thinking for acting.
To summarize, then, it's important to make distinctions between our different responses to evil. They each have their proper purpose and place, but we must be alert to the problems that arise when we mistake one response for another.
I have to confess that a great chasm lies between my belief in God, which for me is the unity of being, life, mind, wisdom and love, and my refusal to believe that God knowingly creates a child who will be thrown alive into an oven in a Nazi concentration camp, or be shot to pieces in her second grade class room. Many believers solve this problem for themselves by taking the position that God purposely refuses to see the future. But for myself, a God who lives, creates, knows and loves only in the present speaks better for God. As far as the presence of evil itself, love being the greatest of all things needs free will...if it is not free will, it is not love. That means that evil is the vacuum left by the refusal and absence of love. Finally, as to the question of how we respond to those who have suffered, and I know the suffering of losing a child, simple presence and love transforms a truthful, "I don't know" into a sacred answer.
Within my own spiritual journey, when confronted with the personal horrors of suffering and loss, the Paraclete has responded essentially in those very three ways that Kirby has described. But not in the order and manner in which my small mind would have preferred. To me, all three are not conflated or askew, but spring from the same root and are in effect ‘The three-fold cord’ found in Ecclesiastes. Intellectual, Moral and Pastoral Responses like [Faith, Tradition and Reason] must be held in a very difficult balance and in tension. An over reliance on any one mode or method, can lead to the perpetuation of isolation and continued suffering. Joy and growth occur in deep worship and fellowship, and when blended with intellectual acuity, together they can open up pathways of understand and healing for ourselves first, and then others.
The apparent incoherent and spiritual impalpability that a ‘Free Will Theodicy’ seems to offer, is not easily reconciled with an Omniscient & Loving God who appears complacent to the ongoing horrific nihilism of mankind. But in balance, [and it is the hardest balance to ever embrace intellectually] it is that the same Free Will granted to those who chose “Evil”, that is afforded to me as well; that I might chose the “Good”. The ‘chain of causality’ behind both, in any one person’s life, is not micromanaged and controlled by God, and if it were to be, it would be a Farcical Universe where True Self-Sacrificial Love did not exist, nor our ultimate redemption as created entities. But Love is who He is, and it is what He does [a-temporally], thus His ultimate answer to our pain, suffering and self-destructive predatory nihilism, is ‘The Cross’ [The Incarnation, His Death & Resurrection – [and ultimately OUR Resurrection!] It is not only our resurrection as individuals, but our resurrection as a ‘Species’ as well, intended to reflect His glory and spread His love into this universe and beyond. In and of ourselves, we cannot escape our own biology and the existential angst that comes along with it. Only when we are united with the Divine in Jesus, will any of us ever escape that trap.