Holding Faith by Rigby Cynthia L.;

Author:Rigby, Cynthia L.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abingdon Press
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

EVIL AS NOT GOOD AND SIN AS ABERRATION

All of this might sound, at this point, like a bit of a fairy tale. After all, the fact of God’s intimate relationship with nature is often far from apparent. Just a few moments ago my middle-school–age son looked over my shoulder, read a few of the preceding paragraphs, and said, “Mommy, you know what saying I don’t like, that we say in church? ‘God is good, all the time. All the time, God is good.’ What in the world does that mean, Mommy, when so many bad things happen in the world?”

Exactly the question we all have. Once we say that everything that exists is good because it was created by a good God out of nothing, it might seem difficult (perhaps impossible) to explain why and how there is so much that is not good. It is so difficult, in fact, and the pressure to account for suffering so great, that we wind up adjusting to account for the seeming discrepancy between what we claim about God and God’s creation and the problematic things that are in evidence all around us. We might assert, given God’s sovereignty and goodness, that things can’t be as bad as they seem.52 Or we might conclude, given the depths of the world’s suffering, that God is not as powerful as we may have thought; perhaps God “cannot do everything.”53 Or perhaps God is not altogether good,54 creating us with flaws that have to be navigated. The problem with any and all of these “solutions” to the problem of suffering is that they set aside the promise of creation—that God makes us and meets us, wholly good and perfectly present. In Genesis, as we have said, this utter goodness is emphasized, and God is present in our midst, walking in the Garden. When sin enters the story, it is viewed as an aberration and adulteration, utterly inconsistent with what God has made, what God desires, and what God intends.

There is a way, however, of accounting for the suffering of the world without compromising on the goodness of either God or creation. Augustine got at it by asking (after affirming the goodness of creation as made by the good and singular God): Then where did evil come from? Augustine recognized that he could posit neither that evil was made by God nor that it was made by one other than God without running into theological difficulties. He struggled to find another response to the problem and finally arrived at what has ever since been a defining way theologians have framed evil and sin. What approach did Augustine take?

Augustine’s brilliant solution to the dilemma of how to account for suffering in the face of the created goodness is to define evil as “the absence of good.”55 Evil has no substance, he argues. It was not created. It could not have been created, he thinks, since everything that was created is good. Evil, he thinks, is the antithesis of the good creation.

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