Behold The Man*

Evil and the God of Love

This was my editorial in the March 1985 issue of Mustard Seed,
a small magazine I once produced. It is no more
than an attempt to be thoughtful about an age-old problem.

I wonder how many of you have read the story of Joni, who as a teenager was left paralysed from the neck down after she dived into too shallow water? In her book she describes her struggle to come to terms with her injury, and how her Christian faith was matured in spite of, or rather because of, what had happened to her. Recently I have been reading her book, and her name was also mentioned during the interview I had with Gladys in preparation for her article in this issue. We were discussing the problem of evil and suffering, and almost as an afterthought Gladys suggested that perhaps God allows us to suffer in this world in order to make us better able to serve him in the next.

This is, in fact, one of the suggestions John Hick makes in his book whose title I have borrowed for this editorial. Speaking of the picture Jesus gives us of God as our loving heavenly Father, he writes, "If there is any true analogy between God's purpose for his human creatures, and the purpose of loving and wise parents for their children, we have to recognise that the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain cannot be the supreme and overriding end for which the world exists. Rather, this world must be a place of soul-making."

Without wishing to deny the validity of this insight, I must confess that I have great difficulty when I try to apply it to someone as severely injured as Joni. But if we ask whether a loving human father could ever will severe suffering on his child, I'm not sure that the answer must always be no. I am thinking of a story I heard of a man who, in an attempt to extract information which would have implicated and condemned his friends, was forced to watch his son being tortured. In the midst of his pain the young boy cried out, "Don't tell them, father". And in anguish his father kept silent, although he could if he wished have spared his son. We might even say that he willed his son's suffering, just as we would say that God willed the suffering of Jesus when he allowed him to be crucified. And this is an analogy which has the advantage that it is true to the Christian insight that God shares our agony when he allows us to suffer.

The major objection to this analogy, however, would seem to be that it implies that God shares not only our agony but also our powerlessness in the face of evil. Yet surely a central theme of the incarnation is that when God gives himself to man, he comes to him most often with his power clothed in apparent weakness, perhaps because only in this way can he invite imperfect man to be his partner rather than his slave. Evidently evil, or at least its effects, can be overcome only by love and not by power. And thus it was love rather than logic that demanded that man be made free in the face of God. And such love bears any price. As Soren Kierkegaard has said, "The fact that God could create free beings vis-a-vis himself is the cross which philosophy could not carry, but remained hanging from."

Or if I might suggest another analogy, it is like someone with the power to suspend gravity who refrains from doing so because of the consequences it would have. For I suspect that, in order to fulfil his ultimate purpose of a new heaven and a new earth, God has made his universe subject to a spiritual economy which we cannot know, but which even he cannot permit himself lightly to violate. So that in some mysterious way God makes himself dependent on the prayers and actions of puny man to overcome the evil he cannot directly eschew without breaking his own laws.