Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

Author:N. T. Wright
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Religion, Spirituality
ISBN: 9780062230539
Publisher: HarperOne
Published: 2014-06-02T22:00:00+00:00

An Inadequate View of the Problem of Evil

The older ways of talking about evil tended to pose the puzzle as a metaphysical or theological conundrum. If there is a god, and if he is a good, wise, and supremely powerful god, why is there such a thing as evil? Even if you’re an atheist, you face the problem: Is this world a sick joke that contains some things to make us think it’s a wonderful place and other things to make us think it’s an awful place, or what? You could, of course, call this the problem of good rather than the problem of evil: If the world is the chance assembly of accidental phenomena, why is there so much that we want to praise and celebrate? Why is there beauty, love, and laughter?

The problem of evil in its present metaphysical form has been around for at least two and a half centuries. The Lisbon earthquake on All Saints’ Day 1755 shattered the easy optimism, the straightforward natural theology, of the previous generation. The wrestling of the great Enlightenment thinkers—Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel—can be understood as ways of coping with evil. And when we come to Marx and Nietzsche, and to the twentieth-century thinkers, not least Jewish thinkers who wrestled with the question of meaning following the Holocaust, we find a continuous thread of philosophical attempts to talk about the world as a whole and about evil within it.

Unfortunately, the line of thought that has emerged at a popular level is less satisfactory. I refer to the doctrine of progress. Everything is moving toward a better, fuller, more perfect end. If there has to be suffering on the way, so be it; omelets are made from broken eggs.

This belief in progress, which you find in poets such as Keats, was in the air in the pantheism of the Romantic movement and was given an enormous boost by the popularization of Charles Darwin’s ideas and their application to fields considerably more diverse than the study of birds and mammals. The heady combination of technological achievement, medical advances, Romantic pantheism, Hegelian progressive idealism, and social Darwinism created a climate of thought in which, to this day, a great many people, not least in public life, have lived and moved. The world is improving! It’s our article of faith. Things are getting better. Evil is on the decline. Progress is winning. This belief in progress has overcome many challenges, and it has remarkably survived and flourishes. The First World War shook the old liberal idealism; Auschwitz shattered the idea of Western civilization as a place of nobility, virtue, and humanizing reason. Yet, despite everything, people still suppose that the world is basically a good place and that its problems are more or less soluble by technology, education, “development” in the sense of “Westernization,” and the application or imposition of Western democracy and capitalism.

This state of affairs has led to three things that I see as characterizing the new problem of evil. First, we ignore evil when it doesn’t hit us in the face.

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