Evil and the Holy Cross

Personal Theodicy Apologetics The problem of evil is something everyone has to face sooner or later. As Schlesinger points out, philosophers want to understand “why there is any suffering in the world at all.”[footnoteRef:2] The problem with a philosophical approach to suffering is that it does not reveal the whole story or the whole picture of why suffering (evil) exists. Religion, on the other hand, does provide that whole story—and depending on the religion, the story will be a little different.

Christianity teaches that evil is a result of sin—that it is not something that came of its own into the world or that God created but rather something that His creatures chose of their own free will. The choice to pursue evil (defined as an absence of the good) altered God’s world—or at least man’s perception of it. Prior to man’s fall, he lived in happiness in the Garden of Paradise.

His sin led to his expulsion from this happy state into a world full of danger, suffering and death. He now had to face the repercussions of his actions—i.e., the evil of his sin, made apparent to him now in all of nature. Yet God did not abandon man to evil lest man despair of ever getting back to God, his origin and his end (if he should so choose to return). God even gave man the prescription for overcoming evil.

This fact was demonstrated by Christ, Who took to the desert for a period of fasting to show to us that we need to strengthen and prepare our spirits for doing battle with evil. Even Christ was tempted by Satan—not once but three times. Ultimately, because He had conditioned Himself to do battle against the spirit of evil, Christ prevailed. However, today, Satan uses different tactics in trying to pull souls away from God.

He argues that since he exists and evil reigns all over the earth, a good God must not exist—for if a good God did exist and was all-powerful, why would so much evil be allowed? That is the major question with regards to evil today.

It is a question that can ultimately only be understood in the Christian context, for it is the Christian religion that gives the fullest, most meaningful expression of the problem of evil and how that problem is solved—for it was Christ who defeated death and Satan once and for all through Cross. [2: G. N. Schlesinger, “The Problem of Evil and the Problem of Injustice,” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Thought, 13 no.

2 (1972), 42.] The Cross is the perfect symbol and perfect entry point for a discussion of the problem of evil. The Cross is a reminder that in this world, one must be prepared to suffer in order to reach God. Suffering is often associated with evil—pain with unhappiness and misery. So why would the way to God be found in such a path? The Old Testament prepared us for this question.

Psalms and Isaiah 53—they show that the “suffering and death of the Servant himself”—i.e., the Son of God—occurs because he shoulders the punishment for sin: “He embodies the covenant faithfulness, the restorative justice, of the sovereign God; and with his stripes ‘we’ (presumably the ‘we’ of the remnant, looking on in wonder and fear) are healed.”[footnoteRef:3] However, it is not a matter of an end to suffering in the world—but rather the beginning of a way to God through suffering.

It is like instead of seeing evil and running away from God because the evil is too overwhelming one sees the evil and embraces the suffering and does so out of love for God and out of a desire to want to unite oneself to God. Just as Christ suffered and died on the Cross for us that the gates of Heaven might be opened to us once more, we can take up our crosses and follow Him out of love for Hm. [3: N. T.

Wright, Evil and the Justice of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 68.] Christ’s sacrifice was a direct response to the first sin—the Original Sin—the fall of man in the Garden of Eden, which resulted in the closing of the gates of Heaven to mankind.

God provided mankind with a succession of promises, covenants that He would not abandon man but would provide a way to redeem mankind, and along the way the sacrifice motif was made obvious—whether it was the sacrifice of Abel, the (near) sacrifice of Isaac, or the sacrificial lamb slaughtered to celebrate the Passover. God was sending messages again and again to His people that they must be ready and willing to sacrifice in order to get back to God.

Suffering was a punishment for sin—but it was a just punishment, just as a student who disobeys in class is punished: it is part of the process of establishing or re-establishing order. The student’s act of disobedience should not be taken as evidence that order does not and cannot exist. Yet that is the argument made with respect to evil: they say that since evil exists, the order and beauty of a good God cannot exist. It is essentially a non-sequitur.

Yet, some argue that God should not have created creatures who would go on to do such evil.

The argument against this is given by Plantinga and deserves to be quoted in full because it encompasses the very essence of life that God gave to man and to the angels, neither of whom were made to be robots programmed to execute a certain command: on the contrary they were made with the freedom to choose to love or to hate—and that freedom to choose is what makes the whole drama of life what it is: “God has not compelled men to sin just because He created them and gave them the power to choose between sinning and not sinning.

There are angels who have never sinned and never will sin. Such is the generosity of God’s goodness that He has not refrained from creating even that creature which He foreknew would not only sin, but remain in the will to sin.”[footnoteRef:4] Who can deny that the world would be better off without drama? But since man first sinned, the drama was introduced of man’s own choosing—and God has given the conclusion—the climax—the Cross—the way home.

It is up to man to weather the storms and tempests of evil in the world while holding on to the Cross as the buoy that leads back to God. [4: Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom and Evil (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1974), 30.] As Feinberg notes, the free will defense serves to “justify God” but it does not explain natural evils (disasters) for some.

Feinberg argues that “the free will defense doesn’t cover natural evils that occur without someone’s action.”[footnoteRef:5] But actually it does—as has already been explained. Man lived in paradise where there were no natural evils. He sinned. He was removed from paradise and the repercussions of his sin were to suffer coldness, hunger, shame, loss of control of his body, and death. The world was essentially turned upside down by man’s sin, such was the gravity of it.

There is, therefore, a direct connection between man’s Original Sin and natural evils. Man was never exposed to them prior to the fall and after the fall he was as punishment for sin. The free will defense explains perfectly why natural evils occur—but only if one is using Christianity to explain it, going back to Genesis for the whole story.

Evil is an existential problem, as Adams and Adams suggest,[footnoteRef:6] and as such it is a “free will” problem, regardless of whether the evil exists in the moral realm or in the realm of the natural world—for morality is not disconnected from nature and nature is not disconnected from creation, which was given to man to rule over—a place he lost through sin, leaving man and nature in a kind of perpetual combat for rule. Or, as C. S.

Lewis puts it, “try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.”[footnoteRef:7] In other words, natural evils, suffering, immorality—these are all bound up and wrapped up in the meaning of life, and it is the meaning of life that people reject when the meaning points back to God and his imbuing his creatures with the ability to choose their own adventure (but also the responsibility of facing the repercussions should they choose to go against the good).

In rejecting the meaning of life (that all leads back to God), they continue down the same path of Lucifer and Adam in the first sin: they choose evil because they do not want to submit to or align themselves with the good. It is an either/or choice eventually and one that every living soul must make.

The problem of evil in the world exists because every soul has to decide and determine which path it will take, whether it will choose to love God and live in accordance with God’s teachings, accepting suffering in the spirit of Christ and offering it all up to God that the sacrifice might benefit souls in a propitious manner, just as Christ’s sacrifice let loose a veritable flood of God’s grace into the world leading to the conversion and salvation of many; or whether it will choose.