If you are a friend or family member, then you may now that recently I have taken a position as the Associate Pastor of Discipleship at a local church. One of the blessings of this position is that it comes with a mentor, in the form of the Senior Pastor, who has been pastoring for forty plus years and in the course of the employment negotiations expressly stated that he was interested in mentoring me into and through this position. Well, last week, in our weekly mentoring session he brought to my attention that I was trying to do too much too quickly. Guilty! One of the evidences against me is that I have not written in the form of a blog since I took the position. So, in the interest of balance I am back!
This morning as I was listening to a radio show discussing the problem of evil when the idea of moral sufficiency came up. Hume summarizes the problem of evil by referencing Epicurus’s question, “Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil (Hume, 1907, p. 107)?” The idea is that a good god would not want any evil and an omnipotent god could end evil. Yet evil exists. The problem then is that God can not be good and omnipotent or evil would not exist. The allegation has teeth specifically against the Christian God because of the Christian claim that God is both good and omnipotent.
Moral sufficiency puts a monkey wrench in the reasoning. If it could be shown that there is a reason that a good and all powerful god would allow evil to exist then the problem as understood by Epicurus and Hume goes away. The first time my daughter was given a shot she screamed bloody murder and the look she gave me communicated that what I had just allowed to occur was evil, at least from her perspective. But her perspective is the crux. We know that the pain of the shot is far outweighed by the protection of the vaccine. Knowledge that she does not yet have. The moral sufficiency of the pain she endured was found in the protection provided by the shot. That good outweighed the bad.
Does the Christian God have a reason to allow evil that is morally sufficient to retain both His goodness and His omnipotence? Before we can answer this question, we must discuss two additional categories: moral evil and natural evil. I believe that there must be enough moral sufficiency to overcome both categories and while I believe that the moral sufficiency does exist it exists in different ways. Moral evil is any evil that is the result of moral agents like you and me (Feinberg, 2001, p. 414). To be a moral agent is to have the ability to decide and then act on moral grounds. Natural evil is, “evil that occurs in the process of the functioning of the natural order (Feinberg, 2001, p. 414).” Think of a volcano eruption that kills or even an animal that tears apart a person or another animal. If there is no god then natural evil can’t be evil; it just is. To call natural evil evil is to ascribe the moral agency for the action to God.
Let’s start then with moral evil and specifically the moral evil Cain enacted on Abel. “Cain spoke to Abel his brother. And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him (Gen 4:8).” A moral agent, Cain, caused an evil act in that he killed Cain. It would be hard to argue any more simple act of evil than the act of killing another. It can be justified, true, but in this case, it would be hard to argue a justification. Cain was angry (Gen 4:5) and it was out of anger that he killed his brother.
Here, the Christian God has a plethora of options if He were truly omnipotent. Among them are the direct intervention of stopping the act prior to or the intervention of resurrecting Abel’s after the fact. Both of which are well within the capabilities of omnipotence. Just as Q (A Star Trek reference). And yet He didn’t. That in and of itself is a moral problem. An act of evil requires justice. Morally, God must deal with the act. Justice would require both a punishment of the intent, or heart, and a restoration of consequence. To intercede, before or after, is to ignore the heart of Cain. Cain intended to kill Able and to override that intention is to override the free will of the agent and take away his/her agency. However, once that agency is removed moral evil as evil ceases to exist. It becomes something that is neither moral or immoral.
Now, I’m not saying that “free will”, as a moral good, is morally sufficient to defend God’s allowance of evil, but I would like to point out that if we remove “free will” we are no longer dealing with moral evil anyway. No, the moral sufficiency that we are looking for comes from the consequences of Cain’s act. Cain’s act requires justice, and a morally perfect being would be well within His authority to exact that justice immediately. Oddly, enough, that which we call natural evil is the result of this immediacy. The consequence of disobedience is that dying you shall die (Gen 2:17) and all of creation has been groaning (Rom 8:22) in that process since the fall. If an omnipotent and morally perfect, i.e. good, creator is justified to enact justice immediately then why can’t that justice be in the form of a volcano or lion?
What if a volcano opened in the earth below Cain’s feet or rained fire and brimstone upon his head or a lion sprang from the bushes and consumed him, would Cain be receiving anything more or less than what he deserved? If justice demands death, then any form that justice takes would be sufficient. You and I deserve volcanoes and lions, and like Cain we deserved them at the moment of our disobedience. A good God knows this and I think that his willingness to postpone that judgment is actually indicative of His goodness.
What this means then is that God’s goodness is not just the moral sufficiency for natural evil but that it is the moral requirement for a justice required by your moral evil. God’s own goodness necessitates justice. Natural evil becomes the mechanism of that justice. So, what is God waiting for?
The writer of Hebrews tells us that, “it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment (Heb 9:27).” Why is God waiting for you to die before meting out justice? He is waiting for you to accept His redemption in Faith. In time He, the very good God, went to the Cross on your behalf as the punishment for your moral failings. He is giving you an opportunity to accept that judgment so that you won’t have to face it on your own. At the time that Cain killed Ablel, Able was already there and Cain was not.
Abel faced the judgement after he was killed by Cain and although he didn’t have the gospel in completion his obedience to the law was a manifestation of his heart’s faith in God (Gal 3:11-12). “By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous (Heb 11:4).” Abel did not know the mechanism of his salvation, but his faith was in the One who promised salvation. The problem, from God’s perspective, is that Cain was not yet there. Should God execute justice on Cain, Cain would be utterly undone. Cain’s lack of faith was demonstrated in contradiction to Abel’s faith (Gen 4:5). Even after Cain killed Able God chose, and is choosing, to postpone ultimate judgment in the hope that Cain would come to a faith sufficient to see him through God’s judgment.
What this means is that your salvation and my salvation is the moral justification for evil in this world. A good and omnipotent god has decided to allow evil for a time in the hopes that those He loves would choose Him. Is this reason sufficient to justify the postponement of justice? I think so. And if we consider that the offered salvation is an eternal salvation instead of an eternal judgment the reason becomes eternally sufficient. Your eternal well being is the reason morally sufficient to justify God to hold off on judging evil. But only for a time. Please, do not wait too long.
Thank you again for reading my blog. I apologize for my tardiness and have accepted the gentle reprimand of my mentor. I will continue to write. May it be a future barometer of those times in which I am failing to appropriately balance the responsibilities God has given me.
Feinberg, J. S. 2001. “Problem of Evil.” In Evengelical Dictionary of Theology, edited by Walter A. Elwell. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic.
Hume, David. 1907. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons.