Does God Allow Evil in Order to Produce Good?

by Dr. Ray S. Anderson

Her story was tragic and deeply disturbing. Six months prior to coming to me for pastoral guidance, her 7-year-old daughter had died of a brain aneurysm on a Sunday evening while she and her husband were attending a service in their church. The child had been left home with a babysitter and they were summoned out of the service by paramedics who responded to the call for help.

Tragic as this sudden death was and her grief over the loss of their only child, what happened next was disturbing and the cause of her outrage directed against God. The funeral service for her little girl was held in the church with the pastor officiating. During the service, in an attempt to bring some meaning and comfort to the parents, he suggested that God wanted to bring spiritual renewal to the members of the church and had selected one of their most prominent families and had taken their daughter home to be with the Lord, where she was far better off than to live in this world. God’s purpose in doing this, the pastor went on to say, was to cause the members of the church to reflect upon the brevity of life and to call them to repentance and renewed commitment to the Lord. He then gave an invitation to those who wished to acknowledge their new commitment to Christ to come forward for a prayer of dedication. Following the service she never again went back to the church.

As the woman told me this story, her face flushed with anger and she said, “I could never worship a God who would do that!” She went on to express her anger at God for killing her child, even expressing feelings of disbelief in God’s existence. I remained silent, except to agree with her that a God who would do such a thing in order to coerce others into a response of deeper commitment was not a God that I could worship. I moved my chair alongside hers and took her side against God. After many minutes during which she poured out her anger at God, she paused, and taking a deep breath, said, “I really don’t believe that God killed my child. But what other reason could there be for her death? Isn’t God in control of everything that happens? If he loved her in the way that we do, why could he not have intervened and saved her?”

At the time, I was only a year or two out of seminary, and no discussion in my theology classes had ever dealt with this question, other than to affirm the importance of upholding the attributes of both God’s sovereignty and goodness. Now, faced with this question, in the face of this woman’s grief and suffering, I found the traditional arguments for God’s goodness and sovereignty quite inadequate.

To my surprise, she did not really demand an answer to her question. She only wanted the permission to ask it. As I directed her to consider the tears of Jesus at the tomb of his friend Lazarus as the very tears and grief of God, she left feeling closer to God than when she came. But it was a different God than the one she carried into her room on the crest of her anguish and anger.

Years later, I discovered the book by Rabbi Harold Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. His son died at the age of 14, following extended illness due to progeria, the rapid aging disease. Failing to reconcile this tragedy with the theological concepts of God’s power and love with which he had been trained, he wrote the book in which he raised the question as to whether God could be both all powerful and good. “I believe in God,” he wrote,

… but I do not believe the same things about him that I did years ago, when I was growing up or when I was a theological student. I recognize his limitations. He is limited in what he can do by laws of nature and by the evolution of human nature and moral freedom. I no longer hold God responsible for illnesses, accidents, and natural disasters, because I realize that I gain little and I lose so much when I blame God for those things. I can worship a God who hates suffering but cannot eliminate it more easily than I can worship a God who chooses to make children suffer and die for whatever exalted reason.

When I ask my students to read this book and respond to Kushner, a great deal of anxiety is produced. Most feel sympathetic toward the rabbi but rush to defend God’s sovereignty. Some suggest that because Kushner is not a Christian and does not understand that God destroyed the power of sickness and death through Jesus Christ, he is unable to retain a concept of God’s sovereignty. Invariably, they end by some kind of appeal to God’s permissive will during the interim time, where suffering continues due to sin, but for which there will be compensation in the end. I often urge them never to offer this bit of wisdom to someone who is actually suffering! Whatever our concept of suffering and the reality of evil, we do well to remember that for the one who suffers, it will always be perceived as evil and not as good.

To tell a woman that the death of her young child was God’s plan to develop in her a deeper spiritual life and a stronger character will likely provoke the response, “I would rather have my child and remain weaker in character, given the choice.” Some who have gone through the cycle of self-development, experiencing grief and loss, and who finally survive, may well testify to a faith and a hope that is stronger by virtue of having stood the test. But only those who have suffered such grief have the right to make such a statement.

Can we believe in a God who permits evil that good may come?

Ivan Karamozov, a character in one of Dostoyevsky’s novels, does not think so. Ivan challenges the theology of his brother Alyosha, a novice in residence to become a monk. Ivan recounts incidents of the torture of children, and one case of a general who set his dogs on a boy, which chewed the child to bits before the eyes of his mother. When Aloysha protests and suggests that this horrible crime can only be explained by submitting to the inscrutable will and purpose of God, Ivan responds with outrage bordering on blasphemy in his brother’s eyes. “Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me, please? It’s beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children.”

Sensing the protest mounting in Aloysha, Ivan continues: “Oh, Aloysha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be, when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives or has lived cries aloud: ‘Thou art just, O Lord, for thy ways are revealed.’ When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can’t accept that harmony.”

What Ivan cannot accept is the theological answer to the problem of evil that God will finally reconcile all things to himself and reveal a pattern of perfect justice that will vindicate him and produce a final harmony. Not even retribution against the offender will satisfy the injustice that this horrible evil was permitted. No forgiveness and no atonement can wipe away the fact that a grievous wrong was done. “I don’t want harmony,” Ivan cries out. “From love for humanity I don’t want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man, I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I must respectfully return him the ticket.”

With less eloquence, but with equal passion, the woman who had lost her child was close to “giving back her ticket,” if it meant being asked to believe that God had a reason and the power to weave the death of her child into some eternal harmony of peace and joy. While I had not found in my earlier theological training a response to her question, I had read Dostoyevsky and understood well the complaint of Ivan against a too simplistic explanation for the evil which afflicts the human condition.

I had also read the complaint of the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk who was prepared to call God to account for the injustice he saw all around. The question raised by Habakkuk was the opposite of the one by Kushner. “Why do good things happen to bad people,” Habakkuk wanted to know. “Your eyes are too pure to behold evil, and you cannot look on wrongdoing; why do you look on the treacherous, and are they silent when the wicked swallow those more righteous than they?” (Habakkuk 1:13). One looks in vain for a philosophical answer to his challenge. God’s response is succinct and apparently sufficient, “the righteous live by their faith” (2:4). God accepts the charge that there is injustice in the world and does not defend himself, but only says, in effect, “who else is there to trust but the One who created and upholds all things and who loves you?”

God does not duck and dodge the reality of evil, attributing it to human sin and blaming it on the Devil. God is the author of the drama in which pain and pleasure, suffering and joy, good and evil are part of the plot. Faith means that we as human participants in that drama know that there is an author and that the drama is being constructed even as we live it out. The righteous do not live by their righteousness, God reminded Habakkuk, but by faith. God takes full responsibility. This, at last, is a start.

The theological question with regard to suffering is: What does it mean to say that God takes responsibility for evil and that we can have faith in him to do this? The biblical tradition has no view of evil as a problem outside of the concept of God’s providence. God’s providence is expressed through his partnership with human persons in suffering, which is the divine power to be present as our advocate in the contest of suffering for the purpose of redeeming those who suffer. The providence of God is bound to his promise. This promise is a miracle and a mystery of divine love. Suffering and injustice can produce a crisis of faith, leading us directly to God as the one who must ultimately take responsibility. In his taking responsibility through participation in the dilemma of evil, God provides redemption from evil, not simply a solution to it as a problem.

This is why, for example, the dramatic story of Job is told in such a way that the Devil is permitted to inflict Job with catastrophic losses, and yet is limited by God as to the destruction of Job himself. God is the author of the drama of life, and he can allow the characters he has placed in the story to run the course of their role and live out the character assigned to each. At the same time, God has the ‘story under control,’ so to speak. And this, in the end, is the message of the book of Job.

We are troubled by the fact that the Devil and God seem to conspire against Job, and that God would allow such evil to exist. We want a different story, where we can sort out the good and the bad from the beginning and ensure that we are always on the good side! But we are not the author. For the Hebrew people, it was sufficient to know that God was not only one who could enter into the story at will, but who also had the story under control. They knew that the source of salvation was not in a perfect world, but in God who kept the story under control and who could be trusted to preserve their lives in the end. Ultimately, their trust in God was grounded in his love and his covenant promise. They understood God’s providence to be aligned with his covenant promise, not with nature. Attempts to read God’s purpose out of the events which occur in the natural world always lead to futility or fatalism.

The traditional concept of God’s sovereignty viewed God as controlling (causing) every detail and event in human history. The alternative to this was held to be chaos and confusion, leaving humans subject to the capricious winds of fate and fortune. Even the ancients looked to the stars, if not the entrails of animals, for an explanation and cause of what appeared to be random events. To live in a world without a supervening order and cause was more than the human spirit could bear. Where religion took away freedom, it gave back certainty, which, in the end, made fatalism more comforting than faith.

That God is in control is certain, at least as one reads the Scriptures. But being “in control” does not mean “controlling every event,” I tell my students. The root metaphor of God’s relation to the world is not power, as in being Creator, but love, as in being parent. When God’s power is grounded in God as Creator, it becomes mechanical and merciless.

Process theologians John Cobb and David Ray Griffen contrast these two kinds of power. “The problem of God’s relation to evil is usually couched in terms of the first image of power. People want to know, therefore, why God does not snatch a child out of the way of a backing car, stop a bullet that is about to kill an innocent person (or stop the finger that was about to pull the trigger), or prevent the operation of the Nazi death camps. Superman is pictured as doing things like that. If God is even more powerful than Superman, why does God stand idly by? We would despise Superman if he did so.”

This is the kind of power which is viewed as a quantitive magnification of the kind of power which we use when we want to force something to conform to our will or to produce something by making a product. Cobb and Griffen argue that God uses a different kind of power, based on God’s creative love. “We should not think of God as a super-Superman, out-coercing the coercive forces of the world. Rather, God has the evocative, inspiring, transforming power needed by the all-pervasive, loving, creator of the universe.”

God’s power is a different kind of power, not a lesser power, as Kushner suggested. We are not forced to choose between God’s power and God’s love, but rather to find in God’s love the power to grant freedom to the created order while at the same time, exercise ultimate control over it.

If we conceive of God’s control more like that of a parent who loves rather than a creator who coerces, we can find a helpful analogy in the way that parents often relate to their children. For example, parents may take their children in a car with the purpose of an outing at a recreation park. As they depart everything is on schedule until some unforeseen events begin to transpire, such as a highway construction project which forces a detour or a flat tire on the car which requires the assistance of a two truck. These events are unpredicted and purely random, out of control of the parents in the sense that they could have either predicted or prevented them. The children do not blame the parents for these happenings, but are only concerned that they really do arrive at their destination. The parents assure the children that they are “in control” of the situation even though changes will occur which will affect their arrival time, etc.

The point of this analogy is that in somewhat the same way we can say that God is in control of the world and of our lives, but does not control, or cause, every event to take place. This allows for both the freedom to initiate and complete actions within the limitations of our finite and temporal existence, but also ensures that in God’s providence, his purpose for our lives will be completed.

More recently, theologians have argued this position under the concept of “open theism,” where God not only acts so as to cause certain events to take place, but God also reacts to things as they take place. There is then, in this view, an allowance for a certain degree of randomness in the way in which things occur in this world without surrendering overall control with regard to the final outcome.

The overall theme of Scripture gives us an understanding of God as acting and reacting as a contemporary presence in our lives. I would begin with a more Christological analysis of God’s relation to the world where God’s power is grounded in God’s love for the world expressed through the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Does God permit suffering and allow evil to impact our lives in order to produce some good? The answer is no. The fact that “all things work together for good for those who love God” (Romans 8:28), cannot mean that God uses evil things to bring about good. Rather, in spite of evil, God works through all things to bring about good as the outcome of our faith and trust in him.

The death of woman’s child was not predetermined by God, was not known by God “in advance,” and was not caused by God. When we undertake to love so as to bring forth life, such as the birth of a child, we participate in creating some of the very pain and sorrow which is inevitable for love to exist in this world. In bringing our three daughters into the world through our love, we ensured that there would someday be three graves at the end, many tears along the way, and even some inexplicable sufferings for them and for us. To embrace possibility with love is to embrace the tragic as well as the triumphant. Love does not dwell on this, but in the end, love knows how to accept it. God is love. Think about it.

Dr. Ray S. Anderson is senior professor of theology and ministry. This article is an excerpt from his book Dancing With Wolves While Feeding the Sheep (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2002) and is reprinted with permission.