To fear the Lord is to hate evil.
Prov. 8.13

Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts.
Amos 5.15

Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good.
Rom. 12.9

Introduction

We do evil, and we have evil done to us. This forces on us (at least those of us who adhere to a more or less traditional doctrine of God) an enormous philosophical problem—to say nothing of existential pain and the weight of moral responsibility. If God is all-good, he is absolutely opposed to evil; and if he is all-powerful, he is perfectly capable of keeping it from happening. How, then, does it happen? If love is almighty, then why are there any ills at all, much less ills unlimited?¹  And are these ills not proof that our faith is unjustified, that God does not exist, or at least that our thoughts about God are irredeemably wrong?

Perhaps it is a mistake to engage the problem philosophically? After all, “God’s ways are not our ways, nor his thoughts our thoughts’ (Isa. 55.8). Can we not, then, simply trust God to justify himself, and leave the business of theodicy to divine wisdom and timing? Toward the end of his life, Merton argues that the problem of evil cannot be resolved in words. “The realm of knowledge is the realm of alienation and peril…”² What matters, instead, is resisting evil in humility, allowing the inevitable experiences of suffering to open one’s heart to God.  

There is wisdom in what Merton said, to be sure, but I remain convinced we should not hide behind too-quick appeals to ‘mystery’. If we come to share Merton’s conclusions, it should only be at the end, not the beginning, of our reflections. We are called to “be prepared to give an answer” to any who ask why we trust in God’s goodness in spite of everything. And so, we must say what we can say, however tentatively and provisionally.

The Will of God and the Beginning of Evil

We cannot say that God creates evil. And we cannot say that God cannot keep evil from happening. That would mean God is helpless, incapable of bringing about what he promises. In either case, he would not be worthy of worship. So, it seems we’re left to say that God permits evil for some reason or purpose. But how can we say that, truthfully?

Traditionally, evil is regarded as the result of sin and sin as the result of death. More to the point, evil is the outcome or upshot of the sin of Lucifer and the angels who rallied to him in his rebellion. According to the Roman Catholic Catechism, “Behind the disobedient choice of our first parents lurks a seductive voice, opposed to God, which makes them fall into death out of envy. Scripture and the Church’s Tradition see in this being a fallen angel, called ‘Satan’ or the ‘devil.’ The Church teaches that Satan was at first a good angel, made by God: ‘The devil and the other demons were indeed created naturally good by God, but they became evil by their own doing.’”

But of course, this just raises another line of questions: how, if they were sinless, and there were no evil powers to tempt them, and they lived in the presence of God, being what they are, and knowing how they know, could they have turned away? How could even one angel do this, much less many? The fall of human beings is relatively easier to understand, because they do not live in contemplation of the glory of God, and they are tempted by the evil one.

The most common argument in defense of God is that He ordains and/or permits sin, and so evil, because through it, he can bring about goods otherwise impossible. John Wesley, for example, is happy to sing the felix culpa: “In God’s wisdom ‘all the evils introduced into the creation may work together for our good,’ so that ‘we may well praise God for permitting these temporary evils, in order to [bring about] our eternal good…’”³ 

Wesley, like many others in the tradition, believes that the freedom which God creates for angels and humans necessarily entails the potential of turning away from the good. Indeed, this potential for estrangement is essential to the nature of freedom. Only if lovers are free not to love is their love in fact authentic. And so God’s hand is forced: if he desires creatures who are truly free, then he must risk their self-alienation and self-destruction.

But I would argue it is better to say that the freedom God creates for angels and humans includes the potential to turn away from him, not because that potential is necessary, but because it is gracious. God is the one who determines the essence of all things, so he could have created a freedom without the potential for self-destruction. And that is precisely what he has done in the incarnation. Assuming human nature, God fills it with his own free will, which, unlike the will of innocent or fallen creatures, is not deliberative and arbitrary, but absolutely at one with the truth.

So, God cannot do evil any more than God can create it. For that reason, it is misleading to talk about God using evil. It is better to say that he raises up good after evil than to say that he makes good from it. And the good that he brings about after evil does not retroactively justify it, but condemns it, exposing it as altogether useless and meaningless. In the crucifixion, the just one justifies the unjust. But he does not in that way justify the crucifixion. God raised up the black church under the darkness of slavery, but that does not justify slavery. Instead, it exposes it as unjustifiable on any grounds whatsoever. And the same goes for all evils. None is necessary.

But if that is true, why would God allow evil in the first place? Not because he could use it to make goods that otherwise would have been impossible. I am sure of that. But if not for that purpose, then why? Perhaps we can say that God has no purpose for evil, but that he does have a reason for allowing its possibility? In this way we find ourselves assured that nothing, not even our rejection of him, alters his love for us or thwarts his purposes to lead us into full flourishing. Whatever might have been, we in fact have turned from God. And, as a result, this is, as Simone Weil says, the worst of all possible worlds. Even so, we know in Christ that God is for us, with us. “Nothing can separate us…” (Rom. 8:28).

The Will of God and the End of Evil

The way that God ends evil tells us everything we need to know about how it began. Our “blessed hope” is not for God to deliver the final report on wrongs and rights, but for him to set all wrongs right once and for all. This is why apostolic prayer, at its heart, is a longing for the Eschaton: “Come quickly, Lord Jesus.” We long for this “coming” because it is history’s telos, which is to say, it is the bringing of all creatures great and small into their fullness, and precisely in that way, it means the death of death, the end of evil, and the end of even the potential for sin.

Christ’s “second coming” or “appearing” is not an event in time, but an event that happens to time. No matter what so-called “end-time” preachers on late-night Christian TV tell us, our hope is not that Jesus will show up in the skies over Jerusalem sometime in the near future. Our hope is that he will reveal himself to all moments at once as their hope. For now, we can speak of this “coming” only as a future event. But in truth, we are no closer to or farther from it than anyone else at any time or place.

In this coming, God will not make the past not to have been. Aquinas (ST I.25.4) was right about that. But God will make the past to be different from what it was when we experienced it. We cannot know now what might have been if God had been present to our suffering—not hiddenly, as he was, but in glory. But Scripture promises that that is exactly what happens in his “appearing.” We shall be like him when we see him as he is. His glory will transfigure us, and with us, all things.  

The Will of God and the Sufferings of Jesus

If we hope to think rightly about good and evil, justice and injustice, everything depends on the sense we make of the story of the cross, because, as the shape of the cross suggests, in that moment all realities converge to be integrated or disintegrated for good. Contrary to popular imaginings, this story does not reveal God against God, or God against us, even though it does reveal that we are against him. The cross reveals God for us and with us—against evil.

We must say, then, that Jesus’ death is God’s will only in the sense that God desires through it to defeat the powers of death once for all. It is not God’s will that any should perish, and for that very reason he gives himself up to death for the sake of those who are perishing. It is not God’s will that any should perish—including himself. He gives himself up to death against his own will, at the cost of his own negation. In the garden, Christ cries, “Not my will but thine be done,” and this conflict between his natures reveals the absolute unity of the persons. The Son desires life for himself precisely because the Father desires life for the Son. The Spirit, after all, is not the Spirit of death or even the Spirit of life-and-death, but the Spirit of life. 

We talk sometimes as if “justice” demanded the death of the Son, as if justice exists as a reality to which even God must submit. But, of course, that is all wrong. “Justice” simply names what the Father’s wills. And what the Father wills is not the death of the Son but the death of death—and the redemption of all who have been lost to death.

Think of it like this: if my wife, Julie, and I are at the beach with the kids, and we see Emery, our youngest, drowning, all we want is to save him. When she tells me to rush out to him, she is not wanting me to die. And when I dive in, I am not doing so because I want to die. But all either of us really cares about is that Emery is saved—whatever that might cost us. In the same way, obeying the Father costs Jesus his life. But because he and the Father are one in the Spirit—we are not, after all, talking about three gods in collaboration, but the tri-personal act of one God—his obedience is not servile and so his death is not imposed upon him. He lays his life down willingly, not because the Father desires his death but because he, like the Father, wants us to live.

On the cross, Jesus ends evil. And he ends it in such a way that we know evil’s beginnings never could have been God’s will. On the cross, he also creates a new beginning for us. According to St Irenaeus, in our first beginning we were made innocent, but not perfect, and so we were capable of turning from the good to our ruin. But in this new beginning, we are made perfect, made to share in the freedom God creates in the incarnation. And that means evil has been ended so that no new beginning is possible for it.

The Sufferings of Christ and the Church’s Responsibility to Hate Evil

But, for now, evil remains very much a reality for us. And philosophical reflections are worthwhile only insofar as they empower us to hate it—to do whatever we can to unmask evil, in either its satanic (false light, false order) or demonic (false darkness, false disorder) forms, to unmake it before it unmakes the world. As the words of the prophet Amos make clear, we do not hate evil at all if that hatred does not alter the actual practice of judgment in our everyday lives: “maintain justice in the courts.”

We also must not forget that evil is always still at work in us, even after we’ve been baptized and ordained, even after we’ve matured into the faith. I heard someone lament once that the liturgical prayer of confession and absolution leaves no room for the change that sanctification brings about. But that seems to me like a grave misreading not only of the liturgy and but also of the nature of sanctification. The call to holiness is not a call to sinlessness but a call to Christlikeness. And the work of the Spirit in our lives is not to make it so we never sin, but to make it so that we live with sin—our own and others’—differently. So, we have to acknowledge that evil is at work in us, as well as in the world. But more than that we have to take responsibility to counteract that evil—never forgetting either that the evil one is clever enough to turn our good intentions against us or that we must counteract evil only with good.

But so long as we imagine that God mysteriously ordained the rise of evil in the beginning, and from all times desires Jesus’ crucifixion as the way to bring about our justification, then we can never be sure that other evils do not somehow fit into the divine masterplan. And that confusion will paralyze us, leave us numb—both to our own suffering, and to the suffering of others.

This was brought home to me recently in my studies of US Pentecostal responses to the internment of the Japanese and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A former missionary to Japan sees an opportunity to minister to the Japanese in the camps. But she never questions the morality of the decision to force the Japanese into these concentration camps. And overwhelmingly the responses to the bombings were a mixture of morbid curiosity and apocalyptic fantasies about God’s “atomic power.” 

How did it come to that? Because the spirituality that gave rise to US Pentecostalism is wounded by deep confusion about good, evil, and the will of God revealed in Jesus. William Tyndale’s The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) makes that confusion explicit. He argues that God has ordered the world so that kings rule over magistrates, and magistrates over men, and men over their wives, and parents over their children. If the one who rules wrongs the one who is ruled, if the lesser is violated by the greater, then those in submission should rejoice because this is a sign that God is at work. Like many in the Christian tradition before and after him, Tyndale is convinced that “The Spirit through tribulation purges us, and kills our fleshly wit, our worldly understanding, and our belly-wisdom; and he fills us full of the wisdom of God. Tribulation is a blessing that comes from God…” And this leads him to say, “tyrants and persecutors are but God’s scourge, and his rod to chastise us.” And the same goes for parents and husbands, too: we are not to resist the evil that they do to us. He offers this example: if we know a corrupt judge has condemned a man to hang for a crime we know he did not commit, we should trust that God’s justice is working secretly in the judge’s injustice to rectify some wrong the condemned man had hidden from others.

Tyndale realizes that it is dangerous to internalize the message of the cross wrongly.

Indeed, this is what we are taught (even babes!): to kill a Turk, to slay a Jew, to burn a heretic, to fight for the liberties and rights of the church (as they call it). Indeed, we are brought to believe that if we shed even the blood of a Christian, or if a son sheds the blood of his father, for the defense not only of the pope’s godhead, but also for whatever cause it may be (indeed, even if it is for no cause), just because his holiness commands it – that we deserve as much as Christ deserved for us, when he died on the cross.

But he cannot see that he has internalized the same message. As a result, in his economy, it is virtually impossible to tell the good from the evil, justice from injustice. “A Christian man, therefore, receives all things by the hand of God, both good and bad, both sweet and sour, both wealth and woe. If any person does me good, whether it is father, mother, and so forth, I receive that from God, and I give thanks to God…”

This does not at all square with the gospel of the cross. Scripture does say if we suffer for doing right, we are blessed (1 Pet 3.14). And it does say that we should glory in our sufferings (Rom. 5.3-4). But this does not mean that suffering itself is a blessing or a means of grace. And it does not mean that we are blessed because we suffered well. No, Christ suffered for one reason: “to bring you to God” (1 Pet. 3.18). And what he has done for us, we now do others. That is why we can glory in our sufferings.

It is best to say not that God wills for us to suffer, or even for us to go through suffering, but that God wills for us to go to the suffering ones, so that their suffering in turn can go through us. If we are present to their sufferings, then God is near, and evil must yield to goodness as darkness yields to light.

The problem is, we encounter evil at all only as it comes to us possessing the body of a good. For example, the evil of torture never appears to us nakedly, but always in the guise of a “necessary evil,” a wrong that is ultimately not wrong because it is necessary in defense of “the greater good.” It appears to us, as Satan always does, as a “messenger of light,” appealing to our patriotism, our hatred for our enemies, our fear of death. And so, our first task is always discernment—how is evil at work in this good, and how can we affirm the good while rejecting the evil?  

And that is why it’s so important to confront God in our prayers, as the Psalms teach us to do, as the prophets did, as Jesus himself did. On the cross, God confronts God, not only joining, but leading the chorus of our complaints. And precisely in that moment, the moment in which he turns his face away from us, his goodness is revealed. And so we lament, as Israel did and does, because we trust that goodness, and because we know the truth comes just in the confrontation. We do not merely unburden ourselves, simply get our disappointments off of our chests. We bare our hearts, and find God’s trustworthiness hidden under our own vulnerability. All to say, if we do not protest, if we do not lift up our grievances and accusations in prayer, we will never come to see that the evil we’re protesting is not in fact God’s doing. And we will never know to join him in resisting it.

Conclusion

In conclusion, a brief reflection on the Legion story (Mark 5), which discloses what I take to be an essential truth about evil and God’s resistance to it. “Legion”—a former legionnaire?—is in the tombs, marked with all the signs of trauma, an outcast in constant misery. And the society has to institutionalize him. Jesus delivers him, but it comes at a cost to the economy. And so the people beg Jesus to leave. This is the way with evil: makes it so that we have to keep the neediest people at the extremities. But that means we have no room for Jesus, who threatens our very way of life by offering life to those like Legion. The sick, we keep outside the city. The healer, we kill—also outside the city.

Legion wants to follow Jesus, but he’s not allowed. He is sent back: “Go home to your own people…” If God is like Jesus, then perhaps Dante’s Paradiso ends in exactly the wrong way: he is led to turn his attention away from Beatrice to the one on the throne, and he is fixed in a gaze that makes him forget everything else but God:

With fixed heed, suspense and motionless,
Wond’ring I gaz’d; and admiration still
Was kindled, as I gaz’d.  It may not be,
That one, who looks upon that light, can turn
To other object, willingly, his view.
For all the good, that will may covet, there
Is summ’d; and all, elsewhere defective found,
Complete.

But Jesus does not absorb our attention as an object of beauty. He carries our attention away from himself toward the unhealed world, and leads us as he led the man who had been known as Legion back into the city—to the people who have rejected him—with nothing but a story and a growing awareness of mercy.

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