Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters

5. It Isn’t Natural: Why Do Evil and Suffering Mark the World?

105 Why Do Evil and Suffering Mark the World? It Isn’t Natural 5 If there is a God, why is there evil? And if there is no God, how can there be good? Boethius 1 How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter? Woody Allen 2 The story so far: the authors of the book of Genesis believed that order, goodness, and beauty exist in the world because it is the creation of a personal God—a God who has created a sacred space in which life, including human life, can flourish (chap. 2). God’s purpose (as a thoroughly good person) in creating this world was to bless his creatures, to show them love and faithfulness, to rescue them as necessary from danger and distress, and to forgive and restore them as necessary when they falter (chap. 3). The human creatures who stand at the center of God’s purposes are, each one, created by God in his image, equal in standing before him and with a full part to play in the governance of the cosmos in communion with him (chap. 4). The fundamentals of this 106 Seriously Dangerous Religion story are all expressed in Genesis 1–2, although in developing each one we have explored more broadly the remainder of the Old Testament. The story so far has been upbeat. It is important now to emphasize, therefore, that our biblical authors were not naïve about the world in which they lived. They understood that life does not always, in fact, flourish in this world; the very fact that God must rescue human beings from danger and distress already implies this. Creation suffers in various ways, and so do human beings. This is an obvious aspect of existence , and all serious philosophies and religions have tried to account for it. For those who stand in continuity with the biblical tradition, it is a particularly challenging aspect of existence, precisely because they believe that there exists one God who is good. This is why so much has been written within the Jewish and Christian traditions, in different genres, on the “problem” of suffering—a “problem” precisely because suffering seems to call into question the existence of one good God. Woody Allen expresses the dilemma in a humorous (but still serious) way, in his account (in the second epigraph to this chapter) of his unfortunate experience with his typewriter. Our biblical authors do not ignore the reality of suffering. How, then, do they account for it? To begin, we must turn in the first instance not to Genesis 1–2 but to Genesis 3. Here, as we shall see, the “accounting ” is offered in terms of the embrace of evil by God’s human (and other) creatures. It is the embrace of evil, our biblical authors claim, that explains much of the suffering that arises in the world. Suffering . . . and Suffering I deliberately say “much” of the suffering, and not “all” of it, for it seems fairly clear that the book of Genesis is not interested in providing a global, all-encompassing explanation of suffering. As we shall see, it does not care to account for the suffering as such that is inevitably involved in bringing children into God’s good world; it seeks to account only for the increase in suffering that evil produces (Genesis 3:16). Likewise , Genesis is not interested in accounting for the suffering inevitably involved in an occupation like farming, but only in understanding the increased suffering that results from the entrance of evil into the cosmos (3:17-19). Suffering as such—if we mean by this the hard work of bringing children into the world and raising them, or of planting and harvesting crops—is apparently not conceived of in Genesis 3 as It Isn’t Natural 107 incompatible with life in God’s good creation. It does not need to be accounted for. It is intrinsic to living in the place where God has put us to live. So also, it appears, is death. We did not pause to note this earlier, but it is interesting that when God first mentions death in Genesis 2:17, the earthling does not ask, “What do you mean, die?” He understands what is meant; he can apparently already make sense of it. As Genesis 3:19 tells...