Suffering and Evil – Our Fault?

by Philip Sudworth.

A glance at one typical day’s international news provides ample evidence of the widespread suffering and evil in the world and many of us are all too aware of individual personal tragedies.  The Christian teaching that God is both all-powerful and loving can seem difficult to square with the existence of painful diseases, mental illness, famine, natural disasters, war, or violent crime.  In many cases, the victims of tragedies, violence or diseases are faithful Christians who have spent their lives helping others. This can seem to run counter to a “a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.”  (Psalm 86:15). It is a prime argument for atheists and a major cause of a loss of faith among Christians.

One Christian response is that we live in “a fallen world.” This is based on the Biblical story of humankind’s fall in Genesis.  This tells how God originally created a perfect world but Adam’s disobedience brought death and disorder into it.  The explanation that ‘we live in a fallen world’ seeks to show that any evil is the fault of man, not of God.  In this view, all suffering is the result of sin.  It may be a sin committed by the sufferer himself or by someone else, or it may be due to our inheritance of Adam’s original sin.  New Testament passages such as Romans 5:12 – “Through one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin” – reinforce this understanding and the interpretation of Jesus’ role as redeemer, ‘the new Adam’.  The question arises, however, as to how all this fits into the divine plan. Did Adam’s disobedience cause God’s original plan to go wrong and necessitate Christ’s crucifixion as a Plan B, or was an inevitable Fall always part of God’s strategy? How did putting the forbidden fruit within human reach fit into God’s plan? Was it always intended that Adam and Eve would eat it?  Did God know the outcome before putting the tree there?

Why would God think it justice for all humans to be punished throughout the generations for the disobedience of our first ancestors? That doesn’t seem to fit with “The Lord our God is merciful and forgiving, even though we have rebelled against Him.” (Daniel 9:9)? The suggestion that people’s suffering today is an original punishment on the whole of humanity conflicts rather starkly with the notion of a God who loves us  

Against the background of the Fall, it has been suggested that probably as much as 85 percent of the suffering in the world is caused through what humans do to each other or through our abuse of the planet’s resources.  It is man’s selfishness and consequent disregard for others and for nature and for God’s laws that lead to wars, to obesity in some countries and starvation in others, to many accidents, to factories and cars pumping out toxic fumes.  In this view, suffering comes because people do not have the right relationship with God or with others and do not live as God intended.  The disobedience was, therefore, not a single act for which we are all punished but a continuing series of mistakes, to which each of us contributes and for which we are jointly responsible.  As a species, and as individuals, we are reaping what we have sown. However, the basic problem of why a loving God should allow suffering remains, even if we can explain away all but 15 percent of the actual pain in the world – or even all but 1% of it.

The snake who successfully lured Adam and Eve is equated with the Devil or Satan who tempted Jesus.  He is seen as a personal, spiritual being in active rebellion against God or as a force working to harm God’s creation and leading human beings into damaging behaviour.  In baptism and confirmation many churches pose to the candidates (or godparents) the question: “Do you renounce the Devil and all his works?” It is not always clear, however, what powers the Devil is believed to have.  Does he cause earthquakes, droughts, floods and disease?  Is he limited to persuading us to do wrong?  Why he is allowed to operate at all, if God is all-powerful?  certainly, there is within each of us the potential for evil.  Whether that is within our own human nature or the work of a being or an external force is a matter of belief.

Whether we take the account of the Fall in Genesis as history or a universal truth expressed in story form, it is far from an explanation that satisfies all the questions that suffering and evil raise in the 21^st century. We will consider in the next article in this series whether suffering and death, and the possibility of evil were not a punishment but were built into the original design of the world.