The Monday Morning Quarterback

Yesterday I continued my sermon series, "Where Is God?", by addressing the question, "Where is God in Evil?" I think this topic is an important one examine for disciples of Jesus, so that we can live faithfully and with integrity in a culture that is not comfortable with the notion of evil. N. T. Wright in his book, Evil and the Justice of God, argues that modern people respond to evil in three ways: 1) we tend to ignore evil unless it's in our face; 2) when evil does impact our lives we are surprised; and 3) our response, then, is "immature and dangerous."

I tried to set some of the groundwork for further exploration of this topic. I noted that the theological term for the problem of evil is, theodicy, and the classic question with which theodicy deals is, "If there is a God and God is (as Jewish, Muslin, and Christian theology all claim) a good, wise, and supremely powerful God, then why is their such a thing as evil (19)? I think, as followers of Jesus, it is a hard question, and we must wrestle with this question and not slip into giving facile or shallow answers to it.

I also spent some time defining evil relying on the definitions i gleaned from N. T. Wright's book and from David Bentley Hart's book, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? Hart is an Eastern Orthodox Theologian who is well-versed in Western theology as well as philosophy. Wright defines evil as: "the force of anti-creation, anti-life, the force which opposes and seeks to deface and destroy God’s good world of space, time, and matter, and above all God’s image-bearing human creatures" (89). Hearkening back to Thomas Aquinas and other ancient theologians, Hart writes, "Christian tradition’s most venerable and indispensable…commitments is the definition of evil as…a privation of the good, a purely parasitic corruption of created reality, possessing no essence or nature of its own” (73).

Wright gives what I found a helpful understanding of reality as a hole or a missing wrung on a ladder. In fact, he refers to evil as a moral and spiritual black hole. I also like the analogy of evil as a virus, a parasite that can't live on its own, but can only survive on its host, the good. This understanding at one and the same time acknowledges the reality of evil (unlike Christian Science, for example, and some Eastern religions that teach that evil is an illusion) but that it has a different kind of reality that the good created world.