The Problem of Evil
Why would a good and loving God allow bad things to happen to good people?
The one question that confronts Christians everywhere is “why would a good and loving God allow bad things to happen to good people?” or “how could God exist when there is so much evil in the world?”
This question is known as the Problem of Evil. The real gravity of this question does not come out of abstract philosophical conversations but rather comes out of real people’s real stories of real suffering–cancer, death, murder, divorce, disease…pain.
For the Christian, when we're asked this question or when we find our own hearts asking it, we often seem lost or in a haze. We either don’t know what to say or are afraid we’ll say something wrong.
These two “epistolary” (in letter form) essays are my best, prayerful attempts to respond to this question with pastoral truth and love to two different audiences.
The first is a letter to Mara. She has experienced a tragic loss and is asking the question out of deep emotional pain. Her name is taken from Naomi in the book of Ruth who renamed herself Mara or “Bitter Sadness” after the deaths of her beloved sons.
The second letter is to an agnostic college student who is approaching the question philosophically. I named him Thomas after the disciple whose doubt was great but whose belief–after meeting Christ and touching His wounds–was greater.
My prayer is that by reading both of these letters, we will learn not only how to respond to this question but also how to love each other as Christ loves us.
Letter I: A Response To The Bereaved
Dear Mara,
I am sorry—sorry for your pain, for your loss, and for your suffering. Here is the boundary, the wasteland, where words fail. You have entered the land of absence and confusion where God is deafeningly silent. It feels as if He has slammed the door of His presence in your face.
In moments like these, I fear to say anything, but if you will let me, I will do so in trembling and with love. Why does God allow the suffering and evil that exist in this world? You have heard my talks and sermons. You know my “answers." Free-will, soul-making, the perfection of the beloved, pain as the “megaphone to rouse a deaf world." In moments like these, all those fall flat.
You are in the “valley of the shadow of death."
Only the Good Shepherd, who “lays down his life for his sheep,” can steer you through. While I cannot comprehend your pain nor give you the answers that you want, Jesus understands. He gives more than answers. He gives you Himself.
His entire life was one of self-sacrifice. One death following another. It climaxed on the cross, the most painful, shameful, and horrifying death imaginable. His closest friends were silent, as was the Lord. He cried, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?…My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, with no response. Silence.
But what I want you to hear are two of the most important truths of your life.
First, Jesus endured "the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves” because He loves you.
He can understand your pain. Sit with you in it. Cry with you in it. Feel it in his heart of hearts and bones of bones. He can redeem it and envelop your story into His story. A story that concludes not with death but with the eucatastrophe of the resurrection.
Second, even though God is silent, He is not callous, unfeeling, or unloving. When God turns away from Jesus as he “cried out again in a loud voice," the Scripture says that “the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split.” In ancient cultures, when death came, those who loved the deceased would rip their clothes in agony, just as their hearts were ripped in two.
God was no different. In anguish, He tore his robes, the temple veil, in two. He truly and deeply felt excruciating sadness. God wept, through groanings, indistinguishable from earthquakes.
“You may be in the wasteland, but, trust me, God and His Son have been there and are there too.”
You may be in the wasteland, but, trust me, God and His Son have been there and are there too. His silence, as C.S. Lewis said after grieving the loss of his wife, Joy, “is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, ‘Peace, child; you don’t understand.’”
We may not understand evil and suffering, but God and His Son do. They are with you in it, as am I.
Letter II: A Response to an Agnostic College Student
Dear Thomas,
Thank you for sharing your concerns and questions about God and the problem of evil with me. Thank you for trusting me enough to share my thoughts.
By way of beginnings, there are no easy answers to this question. Since you have expressed your own agnosticism, I am going to refrain, as much as possible, from using Scripture in my answer. I respect and applaud you for leaning into the uncertainty with the hope that there may be an answer. However, I will briefly share some Scripture here.
The last way that I want to come across is like Job’s “friends.” They were on the right path when they kept their mouths shut. The moment that they began to speak, they showed themselves to be wholly insufficient in responding to the palpable, gratuitous evil manifesting in Job’s life. They used simple axioms and sterile, “orthodox” answers as band-aids on Job’s gaping, festering wounds. None of that will do. I deny all easy answers that mitigate, minimize, and avoid dealing with the reality of pain and evil, but I do not deny any answers at all. So here is my best.
Though, before my attempts at an answer, I want to make sure that we are on the same page with our terms. You have asked, “why does God allow the suffering and evil that exists in this world?” I know that you have expressed that the Christian descriptions of God as all-powerful and perfectly loving are difficult to reconcile with the existence of evil.
Let’s start with “God.”
The Christian God is a Trinitarian God, meaning that He is one God expressed in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He has, for all time, existed in relationship with Himself in a kind of pulsating dance of love.
What about “all-powerful?" Here, I mean that God can do all things that are actually and logically possible, so God could not create something that is inherently incoherent like a square circle (Yes, even God cannot do some things!).
Now, what of “perfectly loving?” Here is the rub, and I will appeal to my betters. In The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis, he lays bare the hidden straw foundations that too many people caught up in popular religion like Job’s “friends,” have based their faiths in God upon. These are, namely, on an erroneous belief in God’s antiseptic, tepid, and even indifferent kindness:
“[b]y Love…most of us mean kindness—the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven—a senile benevolence.”
Many people think that kindness is the kind of love that God possesses, but kindness is kin to apathy. A kind person does not care at all about the other person so long as the other is not suffering. They might as well not even exist.
But Lewis supplies a corrective. The dynamic love of God desires the perfection and the sanctification of the other, even if that is actualized through hardship and suffering:
[i]f God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
If God is a relational God, then we exist within a relational universe. Humanity’s perfection means being drawn into the great dance of love between the persons of the Trinity. This means becoming an object of God’s love and reflecting His nature back to Him.
With this picture of God, the universe, and our place in it, I very much believe that the existence of evil is not incorrigibly irreconcilable with a Trinitarian God who is all-powerful and perfectly loving.
So now, why does this kind of God allow suffering and evil? Why, in a “relational universe” do violence, cruelty, viciousness, and selfishness abound? Ultimately, evil stems from God’s gift to humanity of free will.
Because God desires to be in a relationship with humanity, by nature of His Trinitarian essence, He creates beings that have the free choice either to enter into a relationship with Him or reject that relationship. In order for there to be love or, at the very least, to be any kind of relationship, there has to be a legitimate degree of mutual reciprocity—a submission and acquiescence to the other’s will—between the two subjects.
“Real relationship and real love require real choice.”
Real relationship and real love require real choice, and choice implies a real option to reject the other’s love. In your own relationships, would it mean as much if someone was forced to love you versus chose to love you? This might be fulfilling for a brief time, but imagine a lifetime. You would know that it was all fake and that you manipulated the other person. That would be tyranny and abuse of the highest order.
In our lives, “consent” is desired in relationships above all else. You have seen the uproars against “relations” that were forced without consent. God giving us free will to turn to Him and accept His love by our own choice means that He is inviting us into a real relationship with Him. The alternative is creating us as automata, programmed to love him, or, worse, as slaves, forced to.
The history of humanity, then, is a repetition of persons choosing not to turn to God. Rather they choose to put their own selves in the place of God. “Christians” are included in this too. They abused His grace and, in turn, abused others.
Herein is the origin of much suffering: genocide, war, widespread hunger, abandonment, inquisitions, murder, and so on. Each results from the free human choice to privilege self over God and over others. This is the mighty cost of freedom, relationship, and love. God, in His wisdom, decided it was worth creating a world with an inextricable connection between a real capacity for suffering and a real capacity for relationship.
But if God is all-powerful, can He not do something to solve this insufferable connection between suffering and free will?
As we discussed earlier with God’s all-powerfulness, God cannot do something that is incoherent. I am afraid to say that a world, wherein we have real, free will, cannot exist without suffering. If God intervened every time someone made a morally evil choice and stopped them, our moral choices would be rendered wholly insignificant and meaningless.
“If we are to have actual choices, there have to be actual consequences. ”
If we are to have actual choices, there have to be actual consequences. Moreover, if God constantly and directly intervened in human affairs, we would have undeniable proof that God exists. This casts our free will into futility (a point I'll expand upon later).
Now, you may be thinking, “okay, I can see why God allows moral evils to exist between humans who have free will. But that does not answer the question of natural evils, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, pandemics, or mental diseases? Those have nothing to do with our moral choice and cannot be reconciled with a good and loving God.”
Excellent question. I do agree with you that nature is, as Tennyson said, “red in tooth and claw.” It is brutal, savage, cruel, and indifferent to the concerns of humanity.
My response is that if we humans are to have any kind of sense of individual self-hood and any ability to exercise our free will, then nature would have to look as it looks to us presently—filled with both thorns and roses.
First, there must exist some kind of physical nature that is outside of oneself that can then enable a human agent to recognize what is “me” and what is “not me.” It is hard enough sitting with my own thoughts sometimes. Imagine having everyone’s thoughts all jumbled upon each other!
So the physical universe exists as a neutral plain in which we can all have our own autonomous, independent self-hoods. This necessity of a physical universe ensures that there will be beings, objects, mountains, storms, and oceans, outside of ourselves. Each of which—by nature of their independent existence and by the operation of their fixed natural laws, like gravity or thermodynamics—could have the capacity to cause one harm, depending upon our relative proximity to these objects.
Imagine a fire. It has the capacity to provide warmth from the cold and cook our meals. If we move too close to it, we begin to experience pain.
Second, it is precisely in a physical world like ours with autonomous beings and independent natural objects that moral development—which culminates in our perfection—could actually be possible. Also, that any moral significance could exist at all.
Think of the best character traits imaginable—courage, perseverance, patience, humility, or self-sacrificial love. These could only be cultivated in a physical, fixed universe with limited resources and loaded with an inherent capacity for pain and suffering coupled with our proper response to these adversities.
Remember the bildungsroman, initiation scene in 300 (2006) with the young Spartan boy who would later become King Leonidas. Before he could be king, he had to become the kind of man who had kingly virtues.
So what did the Spartans do?
They exiled him into the brutal, tempestuous, and wild nature with the stipulation that he could only return with the skin of a wolf. The killing of that wolf required cultivated wisdom, cunning, skill, strength, courage, and patience. The very qualities of moral virtue needed for him to be king. Each of which he developed in the austere and unforgiving world of nature.
A child learns to walk when the father takes his hand away, at the cost of a few scraped knees. We become the kind of creatures God desires when we learn to stand in a world filled with hardships.
This is exactly what we see with Christ: “[i]n bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered.”
Even Jesus, the son of God, was made perfect by his sufferings. The most opaque instance being against the unyielding, natural, and wooden beams of the cross.
It is only against the grain of a cross or the obdurate physical universe that any kind of moral development or perfection can occur and that any kind of moral significance can exist. John Hick puts it well in his work Encountering Evil:
“A child learns to walk when the father takes his hand away, at the cost of a few scraped knees. We become the kind of creatures God desires when we learn to stand in a world filled with hardships.”
"The fact of an objective world within which one has to learn to live, on penalty of death, is also basic to the development of one’s moral nature. For it is because the world is one in which men and women can suffer harm—by violence, disease, accident, starvation, etc.—that our actions affecting one another have moral significance."
A world without suffering and pain would be a world without moral choice. There would be no moral growth or development because no action could have harmful consequences, as mentioned before. Thus, the physical universe and its natural evils, as harrowing as they can be, enable the possibility of morality and moral choice. Even the choice to be unselfish or to demonstrate Christ-like sacrificial love requires scarcity, lack, and, yes, pain. Souls are shaped by friction.
Now, you may be thinking that this painful “soul-making” is not love at all. But remember Lewis’ distinction between kindness and love—the latter desires that the object of love be perfected. Lewis calls this God’s intolerable compliment, as noted previously.
In The Problem of Pain, Lewis provides an analogy of an artist’s beloved work of art. It is passionately and painstakingly scrubbed. It is reworked by the artist out of a loving desire for it to be perfected. An artist would be content to leave a doodle unfinished. He would also be content to throw it away.
But for Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Michelangelo’s David, or Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, they would work and re-work their art scrupulously and tirelessly in order that it would be perfect.
If we were that piece of art, however, we would rather be content to be left alone and not experience the pain of erasing, scraping, and being reworked. As Lewis said, we would be desiring less love, not more. And you, Thomas, are God’s divine work of art, his beloved: “[f]or we are God’s masterpiece.” He is in the art of soul-making, and pain is one of his paintbrushes.
Third, let us return to our question of why there are natural evils. They exist so that the world may be religiously ambiguous. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “esti deus non daretur, as if there were no God." This enables us to exercise our free will in choosing to be in relationship with God.
If God created us as beings immediately aware of his unmediated, immaculate, and radiating glory, all the while set in a utopian paradise, we would have no choice in choosing to acknowledge him, follow him, love, and be loved by Him, by nature of His irresistible qualities.
Again, this would be compelling us to be in relationship with God. A subject who is made to bow is a slave. Thus, God created a religiously ambiguous world. We do not have an immediate awareness of God’s presence, thus preserving the integrity of our free will choice to believe in Him.
The ravages of the natural world make us ask the very questions that you are asking: how could a good and loving God make a world like this?
It is only in asking that genuine, heart-rending question that one can make a free choice to trust God or reject Him. Have faith in Him or disbelieve in Him. Be in relationship with Him or shake one’s fist at a God who isn’t there.
It is only in a world like ours, where it seems like God may not exist, that we could actually be free to believe that He does. Now, I am not saying that it is impossible to know and be sure that God exists in a religiously ambiguous world. But this assurance follows after the free will choice of faith through the work of the Holy Spirit.
Now, you may be thinking “yes, I can understand why some moral and natural evils exist, but what about gratuitous, unnecessary, and pointless evils? There are surely some evils that happen that simply cannot exist for some kind of greater good like soul-making or free choice. We could have both of those goods without this much suffering.”
On this point, Thomas, I have no answer.
It is here that my understanding of God and His love reaches its outermost limits, but here is what I will say. God, who by definition is an ineffable mystery, transcends our understanding of Him. If we could wrap our minds around Him and His ways, either our heads would split, or He wouldn’t be that great.
Our best shot at understanding God is Jesus, for as Jesus said, “[a]nyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” He is the clearest form and revelation of the Father. He willingly left the unmediated presence of the Father to become a man, to be rejected by His people, family, and friends, to be incarcerated unjustly, and to be executed in the most harrowing, shameful, and excruciating sense. He left Heaven and descended into our Hell. And the Bible says that all of this was done out of love.
Many of our human stories are rife with pain, unspeakable pain, but Jesus entered into our human story and took on the full weight of that pain on the cross. The clearest instance of where evil was reconciled with the goodness of God was in the intersecting beams of the cross.
We may not understand why gratuitous evils exist. But we can know that Jesus, the very form of God, entered into that evil, and even died at the hands of it. Although, through His resurrection, He defeated it. Outside of Christ, there is evil with no solution, no restoration, and no justice for those billions who have suffered at the hands of tyrants, nature, and abuse.
Only in Christ is there any answer, any hope, and any justice, for we believe that He’s coming back to make things right.
Thomas, I am inviting you to find your story wrapped up and enveloped in Jesus’, but the choice is completely yours. God has left that choice open to you.
“Only in Christ is there any answer, any hope, and any justice, for we believe that He’s coming back to make things right. ”
In light of all the pain in this seemingly God-forsaken, wounded world, you could touch the wounds of Christ. The same Christ, who screamed the scream of all mankind, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me”—and still say, from your heart of hearts, “My Lord and My God.”
Thank you for your courage to lean into the doubt and ask tough questions. I pray that you find what you are looking for. As Tennyson said elsewhere, “[t]here lives more faith in honest doubt, / Believe me, than in half the creeds.
Related Articles
How to Understand the Old Testament by Grant Caldwell
How to Read Difficult Scripture by Brad Bogue
References & Future Reading
Holy Bible: King James Version. https://www.biblegateway.com/
Holy Bible: New International Version. Biblica Inc., 2011, www.biblegateway.com/versions/ New-International-Version-NIV-Bible.
Holy Bible: New Living Translation. Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2015, https://www.biblegateway.com/
Lewis, C S. The Four Loves. rpt in. The Beloved Works of C.S. Lewis, New York: Inspirational Press, 1960. Print.
Lewis, C.S. A Grief Observed. 1961. New York: Harper Colins. 1996. Print.
Lewis, C.S. The Problem of Pain. 1940. New York: HarperOne. 1996. Print.
Hick, John. Encountering Evil. rpt. in Peterson et al. Philosophy of Religion, Oxford University Press, 5th ed., 2014. 357-364.
Snyder, Zack et al. 300. Warner Entertainment. 2007.
Tennyson, Alfred Lord. The Poetical Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Complete Edition.“In Memoriam.” Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. 1885. Print. 411-448.
About Christ Church Memphis
Christ Church Memphis is church in East Memphis, Tennessee. For more than 65 years, Christ Church has served the Memphis community. Every weekend, there are multiple worship opportunities including traditional, contemporary and blended services.
