by Tom Stuckey
Theodicy is the problem of reconciling the active presence of an omnipotent, just and loving God with a world torn apart by horrendous evil and suffering. The traditional explanation has been the ‘free-will defence’ which argues that the presence of evil is the consequence of giving human beings free will. Human beings rather than God are responsible for the mess. This defence, even when re-worked by Plantinga, does not satisfy me.[1]
John Polkinghorne, in Science and Christian Belief stated that God must bear his share of the responsibility for the existence of evil because ‘he is the one who ultimately sets the boundaries in which we live and move and have our being’. In the very act of creating the universe, divine self-limitation is necessary for the bestowal of the gift of freedom upon creation, but what if God’s self-restraint is excessive; permitting the emergence of the wild and unrestrained?[2] Ian Bradley, in his book The Power of Sacrifice, argues that the first creation story tells of the existence of wild watery forces of chaos which were later to flood the earth (Gen.1.1). Although tamed ‘they never lose their unpredictable power to upset the order and harmony of creation’. He also suggests that chaos possibly exists because of the failure of God’s previous attempts at creating.[3] Mess and creativity belong together as any imaginative artist will tell you, but what is the nature of ‘the mess’ out of which God creates? How toxic is it? Nigel Calder addressing the theodicy issue in a BBC lecture Violent Universe imagines God creating in the youthful exuberance of play. Maybe the energies of God’s Spirit are so explosive that the chaotic is released alongside the symbiotic.[4]
However one tries to explain it, there is tragedy here! Wheat and tares are mysteriously sown into the very structure of the universe in such proportions that evil is able to thrive more rapidly than goodness. Camus, speaking of the enigma of evil and suffering, may be hitting the right note when he says, ‘man is not entirely to blame; it was not he who started history.’[5]
I believe that prayers of protest and anger against God are therefore quite appropriate in such a broken world as ours. The Bible is not devoid of these as seen in some of the Psalms and the books of Job and Lamentations.[6]
Yet this suggestion of a dynamic of evil within God’s creation is contradicted by the Biblical refrain that God saw what he had made and it was not only good but ‘very good’ (Gen.1.31). The Hebrew word tov does, however, have a wide range on meanings (Gen.3.6) none of which suggests that ‘good’ equates with ‘perfect’. This does not imply that God has a moral defect; or that God has done an inadequate job. Rather it raises the issue of whether we can trust such a God who, from a philosophical point of view, may not have created ‘the best of all possible worlds’.
How does God respond to such a charge and restore our faith in him as Creator? God does this by ‘choosing’ to hold himself accountable for the all the tragic defects which permeate his creation. He refuses to exclude himself or excuse himself from ultimate responsibility. For love’s sake he embraces the failed responsibility of human beings, and in an act of divine ‘repentance and promise’[7] becomes the Judge who is Judged in our place.[8] ‘God makes his own the being of man under the curse of contradiction, but in order to do away with it, God suffers it’. ‘He acts as Lord over this contradiction even as He subjects Himself to it.’[9] So grace, faith and hope are revealed in the ‘pain-love’ of God. This Triune God freely and graciously takes within himself/herself the ultimate responsibility for everything; both our sin and the possible failures within himself. This gives us the confidence to say with Job, ‘Though he slay me yet will I trust him (Job.13.15).’
So in recurrent acts of grace God scatters sparks of divinity into his evolving creation and, through the Spirit, leaves living echoes of his presence embedded in the moving matrix of history. This God is not like the entropic Humpty Dumpty of the Western nursery rhyme, always flying apart in a great measure of disorder. God is not split off from himself; that is our condition, rather we are witnessing here the pain-love of God as, in the words of Helmut Gollwitzer, ‘God himself is forsaken by God, God himself rejects himself’.[10]
The song of joy at the birth of the cosmos is also a cry of pain (Job 3). So creation became for God a moment of acute self awareness and discovery. Tangible good and evil came into existence and God has chosen to make himself accountable for everything. Sacrificial love lies at the very heart of the personhood of the Trinity from the very beginning.
The crucified Word made flesh was displayed in time on Golgotha’s hill; at the end of time is to be celebrated in the liberation of all things. This is also same Word – even Jesus – who ‘was slain from the foundation of the world’ (Rev.13.8).
[1] God, Freedom & Evil, 1974.
[2] Polkinghorne, 1994, p.81.
[3] Bradley, 1995, p.66 & p.71.
[4] Nigel Calder, 1969.
[5] Camus,Vintage Books, 1956, p.297.
[6] Stuckey, Covid-19 God’s Wake-up Call, p.15f & 94f.
[7] C. S. Song, Third-Eye Theology, 1980, p.70f. Song looks at creation from an Asian rather than a Western perspective. His book reflects on the pain-love of God and identifies the rainbow of Gen.9.16 as the covenant sign of God’s repentance.
[8] Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.1, 1961, p.222.
[9] ibid., p.185.
[10] Quoted by J. Moltmann, The Future of Creation, 1979, p.65.
Theology Everywhere 