Evil is a problem for everyone. Only the Judeo-Christian tradition, however, has faced evil squarely and called it what it is. The biblical account of evil places the blame squarely upon the free choices made by humans.

One of the objections that I heard and believed as a non-Christian was the objection from evil: A truly good and just God would not permit evil. The God of the Christians permits evil. Ergo, he is neither good nor just. The first (major) premise is to be doubted. The middle (minor) premise is to be qualified and the conclusion rejected.

Some Christians have tried and failed to satisfactorily explain the problem of evil.

There is evil in the world. It is a problem for Christians, and some Christian accounts of the problem are unsatisfactory. For example, the Christian neo-Platonic answer—evil is the privation of good; God is all good; therefore, evil has nothing to do with God—is unsatisfactory. It requires us to believe in a sort of scale of being between the creature and the Creator. There are two great problems with this approach.

First, Scripture does not present us a world in which God and creatures are on a continuum of being. Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning God.” Humans are nowhere to be found. As far as the Genesis narrative is concerned, we do not come into the story until later. God has not even yet spoken creation into existence. When he does create us, it is out of the dust of the earth (Gen. 2:7). When we were created it was not out of the divine being but out of created matter. We were animated, i.e., given life by the Spirit, but we were not created little deities. We were created as image bearers, analogues to God (Gen. 1:26-27). We were created as God’s “image” and “likeness” (these are parallel expressions, not two distinct things).

There are other unsatisfactory explanations of the relations between God and evil. One of them says that the world is “open” to God. He observes it, but he does not have particular influence over it. He would like to do something about evil, but he is unable to do anything. He is more or less helpless and dependent upon us. This picture of the Christian deity is virtually unrecognizable to the Christian tradition, which has confessed since about AD 170 (e.g., in Irenaeus’ “rule of faith,” which grew up to become the Apostles’ Creed): “I believe in God the Father almighty.” The God of so-called “Open Theism,” as Richard Muller observed 37 years ago, reduces the God of the Christians to an “incompetent Marcionite” deity. The god of Open Theism is much closer to the gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon than to the God of Scripture. The god of so-called “Process Theism” is no more useful for addressing the problem of evil. That god is swept up into the historical process. He is a victim of circumstances. In their attempt to save “God” from the problem of evil, the Open Theists and the Process theologians have made little more than an idol.

Perhaps the cleverest Christian attempt to save God from the problem of evil has been the doctrine of “Middle Knowledge.” This theory, which emerged in Jesuit circles in the late sixteenth century, theorized that instead of the traditional Christian doctrine of two kinds of divine knowledge, natural and free, there is a third kind of knowledge wherein God may be said to know exhaustively a set of hypotheticals, all the free choices made by humans and all the consequences of those choices, which he may be said to have limited, but he does not actually determine what those choices will be. Both Roman and Reformed critics savaged this theory as making God contingent upon his creatures. The God of middle knowledge is a very apt chess player with very good reflexes, but he is not the God who spoke into nothing, nor is he the God who raised Pharaoh up that he might show to and by him his glory (Exod. 9:16; Rom. 9:16).

The God of Scripture offends our sensibilities. He unleashes Satan briefly to sift Lot, so much so that righteous Lot is finally provoked to complain, to which Yahweh replies: pound sand (see Job, chapters 38 and following). The book of Job is meant to shock our sensibilities. That God is not taken up in the historical process nor is the future “open” to him. He is not contingent upon our free choices. He is sovereign, free, and beyond our judgment.

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