Stephen Fry- 'God is Evil' and RC Sproul- 'God is good'
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STEPHEN FRY AND CANCER
Stephen Fry was asked what he would say if he were "confronted by God."
Stephen Fry was asked what he would say if he were "confronted by God."
Fry replied, "I'd say, bone cancer in children? What's that about? How dare you create a world to which there is such misery that is not our fault. It's not right, it's utterly, utterly evil.
Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain. That's what I would say."
Interviewer: "And you think you are going to get into heaven, like that?"
Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain. That's what I would say."
Interviewer: "And you think you are going to get into heaven, like that?"
Fry replied: "I wouldn't want to. I wouldn't want to get in on his terms. They are wrong. Now, if I died and it was Pluto, Hades, and if it was the 12 Greek gods, then I would have more truck with it, because the Greeks didn't pretend to not be human in their appetites, in their capriciousness, and in their unreasonableness.
They didn't present themselves as being all-seeing, all-wise, all-kind, all-beneficent, because the God that created this universe, if it was created by God, is quite clearly a maniac ... utter maniac, totally selfish."
They didn't present themselves as being all-seeing, all-wise, all-kind, all-beneficent, because the God that created this universe, if it was created by God, is quite clearly a maniac ... utter maniac, totally selfish."
THEOLOGICAL RESPONSE 1: RC SPROUL
The problem of evil has been defined as the Achilles’ heel of the Christian faith. For centuries people have wrestled with the conundrum, how a good and loving God could allow evil and pain to be so prevalent in His creation.
The philosophical problems have generated an abundance of reflection and discussion, some of which will be reiterated in this issue, but in the final analysis, the problem is one that quickly moves from the abstract level into the realm of human experience. The philosophical bumps into the existential.
Historically, evil has been defined in terms of privation (privatio) and negation (negatio), especially in the works of Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas. The point of such definitions is to define evil in terms of a lack of, or negation of, the good. We define sin, for example, as any want of conformity to, or transgression of, the law of God.
Sin is characteristically defined in negative terms. We speak of sin as disobedience, lawlessness, immorality, unethical behavior, and the like. So that, above and beyond the problem of evil always stands the standard of good by which evil is determined to be evil. In this regard, evil is parasitic. It depends upon a host outside of itself for its very definition. Nothing can be said to be evil without the prior standard of the good. Nevertheless, as much as we speak of evil as a privation or negation of the good, we can’t escape the power of its reality.
At the time of the Reformation, the magisterial Reformers embraced the definition of evil they inherited from the earlier church fathers in terms of privatio, of privation and negation. They modified it with one critical word. Privatio began to be described as privatio actuosa (an actual, or real, privation). The point of this distinction was to call attention to the reality of evil. If we think of evil and pain simply in terms of negation and privation, and seek to avoid the actuality of it, we can easily slip into the absurd error of considering evil an illusion.
Whatever else evil is, it is not illusory. We experience the pangs of its impact, not only in an individual sense, but in a cosmic sense. The whole creation groans, we are told by Scripture, waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God. The judgment of God upon the human race was a judgment that extended to all things over which Adam and Eve had dominion, including the whole earth. The curse is spread far beyond the house of Adam into every crevice of God’s creation. The reality of this curse puts a weighty burden and uncomfortable cloak upon all of life. It is indeed a cloak of pain.
Many years ago I had a dear Christian friend who was in the hospital going through a rigorous series of chemotherapy treatments. The chemotherapy at that time provoked a violent nausea in her. When I spoke to her about her experience, I asked her how her faith was standing up in the midst of this trial. She replied, “R.C., it is hard to be a Christian with your head in the toilet.” This graphic response to my question made a lasting impression on me.
Faith is difficult when our physical bodies are writhing in pain. And yet, it is at this point perhaps more than any other that the Christian flees to the Word of God for comfort. It is for this reason that foundational to the Christian faith is the affirmation that God is sovereign over evil and over all pain. It will not do to dismiss the problem of pain to the realm of Satan. Satan can do nothing except under the sovereign authority of God. He cannot throw a single fiery dart our way without the sovereign will of our heavenly Father.
There is no portion of Scripture that more dramatically communicates this point than the entire Old Testament book of Job. The book of Job tells of a man who is pushed to the absolute limit of endurance with the problem of pain. God allows Job to be an unprotected target for the malice of Satan. Everything dear to Job is stripped from him, including his family, his worldly goods, and his own physical health. Yet, at the end of the day, in the midst of his misery, while his home is atop a dunghill, Job cries out: “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; Blessed be the name of the Lord” (1:21).
It is easy to quote this utterance from Job in a glib and smug manner. But we must go beyond the glib and penetrate to the very heart of this man in the midst of his misery. He was not putting on a spiritual act or trying to sound pious in the midst of his pain. Rather, he exhibited an astonishing level of abiding trust in his Creator. The ultimate expression of that trust came in his words, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (13:5).
Job prefigures the Christian life, a life that is lived not on Fifth Avenue, the venue of the Easter parade, but on the Via Dolorosa, the way of sorrows that ends at the foot of the cross. The Christian life is a life that embraces the sacrament of baptism, which signifies, among other things, that we are baptized into the death, humiliation, and the afflictions of Jesus Christ. We are warned in Scripture that if we are not willing to embrace those afflictions, then we will not participate in Jesus’ exaltation.
The Christian faith baptizes a person not only into pain, but also into the resurrection of Christ. Whatever pain we experience in this world may be acute, but it is always temporary. In every moment that we experience the anguish of suffering, there beats in our hearts the hope of heaven—that evil and pain are temporary and are under the judgment of God, the same God who gave a promise to His people that there will be a time when pain will be no more. The privatio and the negatio will be trumped by the presence of Christ. ■
(2006). Tabletalk Magazine, June 2006: The Problem of Evil, 4–7.
THEOLOGICAL RESPONSE 2: WAS DARWIN LIKE STEPHEN FRY?
Charles Darwin finally gave up his belief in God not because he discovered evidence for evolution by natural selection (a theory he developed some years earlier) but because of his anguish at the death of his ten-year-old daughter. When he published The Origin of Species in 1859, he purported to prove that the world itself did not need God, an act of vengeance against the God whom He insisted did not exist.
The problem of evil is not just a philosophical or even a theological problem. It is concrete, personal, sometimes irrational. Many people cannot conceive of a loving, all powerful deity, given the evil and suffering in the world. Even when they are convinced rationally that the existence of evil by no means rules out the existence of a good God, they are overwhelmed with the darkness they see in life. And though non-believers seek any pretext to rebel against God, Christians too are sometimes overwhelmed by tragedy and grief, to the point that they question their faith.
When one of their children is wracked with unbearable pain, or is brutalized by a criminal, or dies in a senseless accident, Christians can hardly keep from asking, why did God not intervene? Perhaps He cannot, which saves His benevolence at the expense of His power. Or perhaps He will not, which upholds His power, but which throws His goodness into question.
These conundrums can be solved rationally and theologically, as the articles in this issue of Tabletalk show. But the answers are sometimes small comfort to a soul stretched to the breaking point on the rack of this world. In all of his agony, he cannot help but ask, “Where is God?”
Part of the problem is that people tend to imagine God as someone far away, looking down, as from a great height, on the pain and malevolence that plague His creation. Not only attackers but also defenders of God tend to operate in terms of that picture. But Christians do not believe in a God who is merely distant.
The God Christians know became incarnate in Jesus Christ. He entered the human condition. He suffered. He took the world’s evil into Himself. He died. And He rose again, so that those who have faith in Him will enter a realm where every tear will be dried and the problem of evil will disappear.
Much theodicy (the justification of God’s justice and goodness in light of suffering and evil) makes no reference to Jesus Christ. It analyzes an abstract deity. There is nothing distinctly Christian about it. The arguments could just as easily apply to the Allah of Islam. To be sure, the problem of evil applies to every kind of theism and such metaphysical reasoning has its place.
But the triune God of Christianity has a different relationship to His creation—and to sin, evil, and suffering—than the gods of other religions or the impersonal deity of the philosophers. Bringing Christ into the problem of evil does not answer all of the metaphysical questions, but He does complicate it in an important way. And, more importantly, Christ brings profound comfort to people in their deepest need, because they know that God is with them in their suffering.
The second person of the Trinity suffered. He was scourged. He fell under the weight of the cross. He was weary, thirsty, bloody. And on the cross He experienced the utmost physical pain the Roman Empire could engineer and was tortured until He died. And the physical pain was only part of Christ’s agony. He also experienced emotional agony. He was despised and rejected (Isa. 53:3). In the garden of Gethsemane, He knew loneliness. His friends and disciples abandoned Him. He was mocked, humiliated, stripped. And worst of all, He was forsaken by His heavenly Father.
That should make a difference to someone enduring physical pain or emotional desolation. Jesus Christ, through whom the whole universe was made, was also wracked with pain. He too experienced rejection, isolation, ridicule, and cruelty. He too felt the absence of God.
But Christ’s suffering resolves the problem of evil in another way. He received the world’s evil. By His own will, He allowed Himself to suffer at the hands of evil men. But more than that, He bore in His body the sins of the world. That is another way of saying that He bore the world’s evil.
Christ took upon Himself the punishment that evil deserves. And through His work on the cross, He gives us evil people who turn to Him free forgiveness.
And in that mysterious exchange that took place on Calvary, in which Christ took on our sins and imputed to us His righteousness, something else took place. According to the prophet Isaiah, He would not only bear our sins. He would bear our suffering. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows (Isa. 53:4).
The problem of evil and the problem of suffering are resolved in Jesus Christ and His cross. God has intervened. He is not absent. His power and His love come together in the work of Christ.
This is not just a solution to an intellectual puzzle. It gives concrete strength, support, and comfort to people in anguish. When the worst happens, the sufferer can know that Christ has been there, bringing redemption, and that even God the Father knows what it is like to lose a child.
(2006). Tabletalk Magazine, June 2006: The Problem of Evil, 62–63.
THE BIBLE AND EVIL THEOLOGICAL RESPONSE 3
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that evil exists. You don’t even have to be a theologian to know that evil exists. All that is necessary for you to know that evil exists is to exist. In this fallen world, we are bombarded with evil from every side—not only the evil of this world but the evil within our own hearts as well, and that is where the real problem exists. As fallen creatures who exist in this fallen world of sin and misery, we do not reflect the light of God’s glory as we should. We are but a dim and distorted shadow of the glorious light of Almighty God. For the Creator of the universe is neither the author nor approver of sin. However, in our rebellion, which was sovereignly permitted by God, we not only authored sin but approved it. Thus, the problem of evil is our problem, one that we created and one we have to live with until the Lord returns.
When we understand the genesis of the problem of evil, we cease asking the Lord why so much evil exists. Having been confronted by our own guilt and shame before our holy and righteous Lord, we should realize the foolishness of the commonly uttered assertion: “If God is a good God, He would not allow so much evil to exist.”
Instead, we would begin to ask the more appropriate question: “If God is a just God, why doesn’t more evil exist?” Why is there not more death and destruction on this earth? Why do we not struggle more than we do? Do we not justly deserve to experience more pain and misery in this world of sin? When we begin to ask such questions, we have just begun to understand our radical corruption, and in turn, we have just begun to understand the grace of God.
Just as all glory was restored to Christ after He endured the cross, so we too must bear our crosses before we receive our crowns at the feet of our Savior. In his Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life, John Calvin comments: “We, therefore, truly profit from the discipline of the cross when we learn that this life, estimated in itself, is full of unrest, trouble, and misery.… In consequence of this, we should at once come to the conclusion that nothing in this world can be sought or expected but strife, and that we must raise our eyes to heaven to see a crown.”
In truth, the problem of evil is only a problem for those who have never been confronted by the problem within their own hearts. However, as Christians, we have been confronted by the evil in our hearts and have been made to live coram Deo, by the wonderful grace of God.
(2006). Tabletalk Magazine, June 2006: The Problem of Evil, 2.
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