“I see no evidence of a deity at work trying to ease the sufferings of mankind.  Half a million children, not to mention the adults, were killed in the Holocaust.  If there were a God anywhere, surely He would have stopped that slaughter.”

             – M. Lee Deitz, an atheist who used to be a fundamentalist preacher[1]

“For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.  For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God.  For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.  For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now.”

– Romans 8:18-22

 

The argument that it is impossible to believe in an all-good, all-powerful God in the face of the world’s suffering and evil is one of the most common (maybe even the most common) objection to Christian truth claims today.  But interestingly enough, the existence of suffering and evil in the world was rarely mentioned as an objection to Christian theism before the 18^th century, and this argument did not really begin gaining ground until the mid-19^th century.  This suggests that perhaps this argument is not as intuitive or as obvious as skeptics imagine.  Perhaps it is our cultural view of suffering that is incompatible with Christian theism – not the fact of suffering itself.

So, in order to address this skeptical argument, we need to first look at the presuppositional beliefs about suffering that lead skeptics to think that suffering is incompatible with Christian truth claims, and then we’ll look at what the Bible itself says about suffering in order to see if there is a biblical corrective to the presuppositions that pervade our culture.  In fact, these presuppositional beliefs about suffering are so common that even many (perhaps most?) Christians in contemporary North America and Western Europe probably share them to at least a certain extent – which is one reason why many Christians find their faith shaken when they experience tragedy or prolonged suffering.

If you are interested in exploring this issue in more detail, I would highly recommend Tim Keller’s Walking with God through Pain and Suffering.  Some of the material that I’m presenting here is based on information from Keller’s book.

 

How Ancient Cultures and Other Religions Viewed Evil and Suffering

To get a sense of how we have arrived at our current cultural presuppositions about suffering, let’s take a quick historical tour that will show us how unusual our contemporary assumptions really are.

For several millennia, most of the world’s population was pagan or animist, and they did not have the difficulties reconciling suffering and divinity that contemporary Westerners often have.  No ancient pagan would have been surprised to hear that God is not fair.  To see the gods’ unfairness, one had to look no further than the droughts that regularly brought ancient villages to the brink of starvation or the sudden floods that washed away their crops and threatened to capsize their homes.  The ancients equated their gods with natural forces that were capricious, brutal, and uncaring.  Baal, the Canaanite storm god; Seth, the Egyptian god of chaos; or Zeus, with his unpredictable lightning bolt, were symbols of the terrifying and utterly unfair forces of nature.

If the gods were capricious, they were also cruel.  According to both Sumerian and Greek myths, the gods had created human beings only to be their slaves, and the ancients resented the endless, pointless toil that was now their lot.  “Men never rest from labor and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night; and the gods shall lay sore trouble upon them,” the Greek poet Hesiod lamented in the 8^th century BCE.  “Bitter sorrows will be left for mortal men, and there will be no help against evil.”

Paganism emerged from a belief that the supernatural realm was tied to natural forces, which is why all forms of paganism viewed the gods as somewhat capricious.  Just as a sea-wind or rain could be a blessing in the right circumstances, so it could also be a curse when it came at the wrong time or in the wrong measure.  And because nature was unreliable – that is, one never knew for sure that the right amount of rain would come at the right time – it was obvious that the gods that controlled natural forces were capricious as well, ready to withdraw their blessings at the slightest provocation or for the most petty of reasons.  That was why ancient pagans took such pains to offer regular sacrifices in the precise manner that the gods demanded.  There was nothing worse than having an angry god plaguing a city.

The gods were also capricious because they were like humans, and as everyone knew, humans were often selfish and petty – especially those in power.  If the greatest potentates of the ancient Near East were tyrannical and cruel, one could expect the gods – who were even more powerful – to be at least as prone to anger and jealousy.  The gods had their throne rooms and attendants, just as earthly kings did.  And like their earthly counterparts, the gods demanded obedience and honor; anything less would be likely to provoke the gods’ wrath.

For most of the ancient pagans, religion was not about love, self-improvement, or a quest for justice and meaning, but was instead a practical matter of survival.  The gods needed to be placated if one were to survive.  The ancients were under no illusion that religious exercises were enjoyable or that the gods were universally beneficent.  They did not expect them to behave justly.  And yet they knew that they needed to serve the gods in order to prevent them from harming their families and communities.  Religion had a terrifyingly practical function in the ancient world.

The pagan myths might have given convincing explanations for the origins of a chaotic, unfair, capricious world, but they failed to explain why humans retained a longing for justice and fairness in spite of that world.  After all, if people were simply the product of an unfair system – the creation of jealous gods who had killed their rivals in order to create people and who had no love for the human race and no qualms about committing murder – why did humans themselves feel that the world was not right?  Why were their own moral sensibilities greater than those of the gods who had created them?  Where did this sense of fairness and justice come from?  Why could they not simply act like their fellow animals and kill their prey with impunity, never stopping to consider whether what they did was right or fair?  Why were they morally disgusted with the thought of having sex with their sisters, raping unsuspecting virgins, or eating their children, as some of the gods had supposedly done without regret?

In the mid-first millennium BCE (c. 600-300 BCE) – the time that historians call the “Axial Age” – several religious teachers in the ancient Near East, beginning with the Persian prophet Zoroaster, offered a new explanation for good and evil that the pagan myths had failed to provide.  The world was a battleground between two rival personal forces – one good and one evil – they said.  For religious thinkers after Zoroaster, ranging from the Gnostics to Mani, the good god was invariably identified with the spiritual realm, and the evil god with the material.  The goal of every human, then, was to achieve enlightenment by escaping from the material realm.

In dividing the world between the evil material realm and the blissful realm of the spirit, the Gnostics and the Manicheans borrowed not only from the dualism of the Zoroastrians, but also from the thinking of Plato and other Greek philosophers, as well as from Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, which taught the possibility of an escape from the body through a long trajectory of reincarnation, followed by nirvana.  In all of these religions, there was a strong emphasis on choosing the good over evil and redeeming oneself through either good works or spiritual knowledge.  Life was not fair, these religions taught, but there was a way for humans to escape life’s unfairness by choosing the good over evil and, in some cases, gaining secret knowledge that would allow one to escape the material realm.

All of these religious and philosophical groups recognized, as the ancient pagans had, that the world was an unfair and evil place, but unlike the pagans, they thought that the problem of evil had a solution.  Like the pagans, many of them believed that the spiritual realm was a world of rival deities, but unlike the pagans, they thought that some of these deities were purely good and others purely evil.  If there was a good power in the universe, they thought, there must be a solution to the problem of evil – that is, there must be a way to escape from the clutches of the evil world and become purely good.  If people could just gain the right knowledge or learn the right behavior, they could escape from the evil material realm, they thought, and become united with what was purely good.  If they could not do it in this life, perhaps they could do it in the next life or the one after that.  In these religious systems, the good powers in the universe are not omnipotent; they may be no more powerful than the evil deities, and thus, they are powerless to stop the evil in the world.  But neither is evil all-pervasive; it is not strong enough to permeate a person’s spirit, even if it corrupts his or her flesh.

Humans therefore are capable of escaping evil through their own efforts.  They can purge themselves of the desires of the body and become a purely good spirit that will escape the evil realm and become united to the good essence of the universe.  In Hinduism and Buddhism, this union with the essence of the universe is called nirvana, and can be reached through a long cycle of reincarnation.  In Manichaeism and Gnosticism, spiritual liberation comes through secret knowledge and asceticism, and death is the great liberator, because it frees the soul from the evil flesh in which it is imprisoned.  In Zoroastrianism, the heavenly reward comes solely through good deeds, which, after death, are weighed in a balance against one’s evil deeds.  Those whose good deeds outweighed their evil deeds will be admitted to paradise.  Just as the universe itself is involved in a cosmic struggle between good and evil deities, so too do the powers of good and evil struggle within each person.  If the good outweighs the bad, the person can enter an eternal paradise.

Despite the many differences between Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism and Gnosticism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, all were engaged in the quest for liberation from the evil of the world, and all offered a way to do that through individual effort.  Traditional paganism had offered only a way to manipulate the natural forces in the world through propitiation of the gods, but these new religions of the Axial Age offered far more: They promised a way of liberation for the individual who was willing to follow their path.  Because they offered a message of hope and deliverance, these religious ideas, whether in their original form or in a modified version propagated by philosophers and mystery cults, swept the Mediterranean world and gained numerous converts.  Unlike many Westerners of the early twenty-first century, the converts to these new religions did not expect the world to be a good or fair place, and they did not believe that a good, all-powerful deity presided over the universe, but they did believe that through great effort, they could find the secret to escaping an evil world and achieving self-liberation.

 

The Answer That Christianity Provides

The Bible presents a radically different view of suffering and evil that makes sense of both the existence of evil in the world and our longing for justice, while also offering a solution.  The capricious natural forces that we see are a reflection of a fallen world, not ultimate reality.  We cannot merely extrapolate from contemporary nature (as the ancient pagans did) and assume that we can get a true picture of God, because the world that we see today is not God’s ultimate intention; it is instead a fallen creation that will one day be transformed into the new heavens and the new earth.  And unlike either ancient paganism or the new religious movements of the Axial Age, Christianity teaches that the problem of evil is not merely a problem with the world itself or with an external force invading the world; it is a problem with our own hearts.  We need a divine rescue.  This is what Christianity offers.  No other world religion imagined that an all-powerful, all-loving God would enter into his creation and bearing its suffering in order to redeem it and transform it.

Christianity, then, is alone among world religions and philosophies in affirming the following points:

• It acknowledges the full reality of evil in the world today, and in fact, goes beyond all other religions in acknowledging the depth of evil that resides in the human heart. A person with a consistent Christian worldview will never be surprised at the amount of either human or natural evil in a fallen world.  (Gen. 6:5; Rom. 3).
• It says that the evil and suffering that we see in the world today are a temporary aberration, because God created the world as a very good place (Gen. 1:31) and will one day transform it into a perfect place (Rev. 21-22).
• It affirms that God is both all-powerful and all-good. He is not the author of evil, but he is sovereign over creation, which means that the evil that exists is under his (good) control, and he is using it for his (good) purposes (Gen. 50:20; Rom. 8:28).
• It says that God redeemed his creation from evil through entering into the world’s suffering and bearing its evil on the cross (Rom. 8:11-39; 2 Cor. 5:20; Gal. 4:4-7).
• It says that our suffering is temporary and that it has a purpose. God is using our suffering for his glory by allowing us to participate through suffering in the work of Christ (2 Cor. 12:9-10; Col. 1:24; 1 Pet. 2:19-25).

Tim Keller says in his book Walking with God through Pain and Suffering that what makes suffering difficult to bear is not merely the pain of the suffering itself but the belief that the suffering is meaningless.  Christianity gives meaning to our suffering by explaining both its origins and purpose, and also by promising a deliverance.  That is a message of hope that no other religion has produced.

 

The Deist Answer to Suffering

In order to accept Christianity’s message of suffering, we have to believe in two ideas that are difficult for some people to accept: 1) Original sin and human depravity; and 2) The fact that the purpose of our suffering is God’s glory and our ultimate good, not our temporary happiness.  At the end of the 17^th century and beginning of the 18^th century, a new philosophical movement developed in Western Europe that rejected both of those notions, along with the doctrine of the atonement.  That new philosophical movement was deism.  According to the deists, humans were basically good, and God wanted them to be happy by living according to the dictates of reason.

In its full-fledged form, deism rejected the idea of special revelation (that is, any revelation from God apart from the natural creation) and miracles, as well as original sin and the atonement.  These full-fledged deists included 18^th-century American intellectuals such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, as well as many of the leading French and British philosophers of the Enlightenment.  But alongside these full-fledged deists who rejected organized religion, there were also a larger number of self-professed “Christians” who adopted some deistic ideas even while continuing to affirm their belief in the Bible.  These “rational Christians,” as they called themselves in the 18^th century (or “liberal Christians,” as they were later called), questioned or rejected the idea of original sin and total depravity, and often deemphasized or rejected the idea of substitutionary atonement.  As a result, they eventually found themselves unable to harmonize their idea of God with the reality of evil in the world.

Deists proclaimed the rationality of God and the natural goodness of humanity, so when confronted with evil in the world, they tended to explain it as a product of people’s failure to follow the principles of reason.  Moral education, they believed, would lead to human betterment.  Liberal Christians talked a lot about God’s love, but by deemphasizing or denying human depravity, they, too, found themselves unable to offer any better solution to the problem of human evil than moral education and the promise that God loves everyone.

The lack of a robust Christian theology of evil is why the existence of suffering and evil has been so faith-shattering for people in the Western world 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st centuries.  This was not the case for Christians in earlier centuries.  Before the late 18^th century, for instance, it was very common for Christians to experience infant deaths in their families, and those deaths did not shake their faith.  John Calvin, for instance, lost his only wife after only seven years of marriage, and all of his children died in infancy.  The early 18^th-century Puritan pastor Cotton Mather lost thirteen of his fifteen children in infancy or childhood.  Jonathan Edwards lost his 18-year-old daughter on the eve of her wedding when she contracted tuberculosis from her fiancé.  All of these men and their families continued trusting in the sovereignty and goodness of God in the face of great personal tragedy.  But in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, liberal Christians who had rejected a Christian theology of suffering lacked the theological resources to cope with the suffering and evil in the world, so when they encountered personal tragedy and discovered that the world was not as beneficent a place as they had imagined, their faith was shaken.  Some of them abandoned faith altogether.  Charles Darwin, for instance, became an agnostic after reflecting on the suffering in the natural world and experiencing the death of his 10-year-old daughter.  After the Holocaust, an entire group of Jewish and liberal Christian theologians posited the “death of God” theology, suggesting that belief in God was no longer tenable after the world had experienced such a massive tragedy.

The answer to this objection, then, is to point out that the “Christian” faith that people are often rejecting in the face of suffering is really not true Christianity at all, but rather a deistic distortion of Christianity that naively denies the full extent of human evil.  Deistic-minded “Christians” will have their faith shaken in the face of tragedy; Christians with a biblical worldview and robust Christian theology of suffering should not.

Thus, when someone asks us how we can believe in a good God when there is so much suffering in the world, we can explain that this is a problem only for people who believe in a deistic-like God and innate human goodness.  For most other people in world history, suffering and evil have not been barriers to theistic belief.  Pagans, polytheists, and people in the Axial Age who believed in divinities that were not all-powerful never had a philosophical problem with this idea.  And Christians who believe the Bible’s account of human evil and God’s atoning work in Christ don’t have a problem either.  It is only when people retain the biblical truth of God’s power and goodness, but reject the Bible’s account of human sin and the atonement, that questions about suffering and evil become faith-shattering.

But what about atheist philosophies of suffering and evil?  Why isn’t the atheist answer to suffering a better answer than the Christian one?

 

How Atheists View Suffering and Evil

Because they reject the idea of the supernatural, atheists have to view suffering and evil as intrinsic parts of the natural world order, much as ancient pagans did.  At first glance, that may seem to solve the theodicy problem of suffering and evil – that is, the problem that theists face when they try to harmonize evil with the existence of a good, all-powerful God.  But in reality, atheists face the same philosophical conundrum that the ancient pagans did: they cannot account for our longing for justice and goodness, they cannot produce a universal moral standard that condemns evil, and they cannot promise a deliverance from evil.

In reality, few people are content to simply accept suffering and evil as part of the natural world, even if that’s their philosophical starting point.  Instead, they usually adopt some modernized version of what Axial Age philosophers presented – that is, they try to find a way to transcend evil and suffering in their own lives through a program of self-help.  Sooner or later, though, many people who try this find themselves confronted with evil of a magnitude that they cannot ignore or explain, or they find themselves incapacitated by sickness or injury and thus unable to escape suffering.  They then fall into despair.  As Tim Keller noted, our modern Western culture has adopted autonomy and personal freedom as some of its highest values, and suffering has no function in this value system; it is simply a disruption of a person’s life goals.  Thus, when suffering finally comes, despite people’s best efforts to avoid it, they are often crushed.

 

Presenting the Gospel to People Struggling with Doubts about Suffering and Evil

The gospel provides an answer to the despair that many contemporary people feel in the face of suffering and evil.   But if someone says that they have rejected the idea of God because of the reality of suffering, what should we say?  How should we present a gospel answer to their question?

I think that the best approach might be to find out whether the person is: 1) Struggling to reconcile a deistic / liberal Christian view of God with the reality of suffering; or 2) Resting in an atheistic fatalistic understanding of suffering and evil as simply part of the natural order; or 3) Relying on a self-help, personal therapeutic approach to dealing with suffering and evil in their lives.

If the person’s view of Christian theism is essentially deistic, we need to present a theology of original sin and human evil, and point out that deistic or liberal Christian views of God cannot account for the amount of evil and suffering that we see in the world.  People who adopt these views will therefore constantly struggle with their beliefs whenever they encounter evidence of evil and suffering on a scale that they did not expect.  A biblical worldview is the only worldview that both acknowledges the full extent of the evil that exists in the world and presents a solution to it.

If the person has an atheistic view of suffering as part of the natural order, it might be useful to ask the person how they account for their own longing for justice and goodness.  Why are we uncomfortable with evil if it is simply part of the natural world?  And, what is our hope of making the world a better place if we adopt an atheistic view of suffering?  Many atheists are also advocates of social justice, and if this is the case for the atheist with whom you’re talking, point out this incongruity.  Note the despair that the atheistic worldview should produce, and point out that the gospel offers something better – that is, a genuine hope that does not deny reality.

If the person is relying on a self-help approach to transcending evil and suffering, note that this view is also going to lead to frustration, because it minimizes or denies the extent of evil that resides within us, and it ultimately offers us no assurance of global deliverance from evil.  Self-help programs, of course, can take many different forms, including secular humanism (which focuses on societal transformation), New Age movements (which focus on personal transformation), psychological therapy (again, personal transformation), and a host of other approaches.  But all of these approaches take as their starting point the belief that people can transcend the problems of evil and suffering through their own efforts.  The track record of these various approaches has not been good, because they all ignore the extent of evil within the human heart.  Pointing out the futility of these approaches – and the despair that can result when each approach fails – can be a way to open the door for a presentation of a gospel-centered view of suffering.

 

Why Did God Ordain the Fall?

At this point, the skeptic may have a number of different questions, but in my experience, one of the most common is: Why did God allow the fall?  Perhaps the skeptic will concede that the doctrine of the fall can explain the existence of suffering and evil, but the skeptic might then ask how we can explain why God would allow the fall in the first place.

Traditionally, most Christians who have tried to answer this question have presented some version of the free-will defense, which says that because love is meaningful only when it is freely chosen, God wanted to create free creatures who could choose whether to love him or reject him.  This necessarily required God to create the possibility of a fall.  Though the fall did produce great evil, it allowed for an even greater good – the good of human freedom and a relationship between God and free individuals.

I think that this traditional answer is flawed from both a biblical and philosophical perspective.  I say this cautiously, because it has been the majority view among Western Christian apologists, and it has had a lot of impressive advocates, including C. S. Lewis.  But Reformed Christianity has generally rejected this view, and I think for good reason.

Reformed Christians have said that God ordained the fall for his glory.  But what glory did he receive from the fall?  Here I follow the lead of the 17^th-century Puritan writer John Owen, who wrote that God ordained the fall so that he could show how he would respond to free creatures who rejected him.  In other words, the purpose of ordaining the fall was to reveal God’s justice, mercy, and love in Christ.  While the traditional free will defense suggests that human freedom itself was the good that resulted from allowing the possibility of the fall, the Reformed view says that Christ’s redemption was the good that resulted not just from allowing the possibility of a fall but by creating a world in which the fall would definitely happen.

I think that if someone asks about this, it can be useful to present this explanation.  But it’s also important to note that it’s dangerous to set ourselves up as the judge of God’s purposes.  If someone rejects Christianity on the grounds that God should not have acted in the way that he did, we should ask on what grounds they are judging God.  Are they appealing to a transcendent, absolute moral standard (which should not exist, if the atheistic view of the universe is correct)?  Do they claim to have enough knowledge on which to judge God’s actions (which, if one thinks for a moment, is really a ridiculous claim)?

In the end, if we can show the philosophical shortcomings of each view that challenges the biblical explanation for suffering and evil, and if we can present the gospel message as the only satisfactory answer to these other views, we will not only undermine one of the most common objections to the Christian faith but we will also have the opportunity to win a hearing for the gospel.  Christianity is the only worldview that has ever offered a view of suffering and evil that fully acknowledges the extent of the problem while also offering a divine solution.  Skeptics might consider the existence of suffering and evil a barrier to Christian truth claims, but in reality, the questions that skeptics are asking about this topic provide the perfect moment for a gospel-centered answer.

 

 

[1] M. Lee Deitz, “My Conversion from Fundamentalism,” in Leaving the Fold: Testimonies of Former Fundamentalists, ed. Edward T. Babinski (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), 310.