“The first question, almost anywhere, as it was at Harvard, too—’How can you talk about the existence of an all-loving and an all-perfect God, when there is so much of evil in this world? Does it not strike you as contradictory?’ “
—Christian apologist and university guest lecturer, Ravi Zacharias, responding to D. James Kennedy about the most frequently asked questions by university students.
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“If the believer finally sees himself obliged to speak of God’s ‘inscrutable decrees’, he is admitting that all that is left to him as a last possible consolation and source of pleasure in his suffering is an unconditional submission. And if he is prepared for that, he could probably have spared himself the detour he has made.”
—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
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CHAPTER ONE
The First Problem of Theology
When Anne Darwin died at age 10 after a two-year struggle with the aftereffects of scarlet fever and suspected tuberculosis, it had a tremendous impact on her father, the naturalist, Charles Darwin. According to the eminent Darwin scholar, E. Janet Browne:
Anne was … the apple of her proud father’s eye, his ‘favourite child’, he confessed to (his friend and cousin William Darwin) Fox. More than any of the other children she treated him with a spontaneous affection that touched him deeply; she liked to smooth his hair and pat his clothes into shape, and was by nature self-absorbedly neat and tidy, cutting out delicate bits of paper to put away in her workbox, threading ribbons, and sewing small things for her dolls and make-believe worlds.i
Charles was so overwrought with Anne’s death that he could not bring himself to attend his daughter’s burial or visit her grave.ii Brown, in fact, claims that the traumatic impact of Anne’s death led Darwin to become an atheist.iii Seven years later, and despite his lingering regrets over how his Christian wife, Emma, might be affected, Darwin published his landmark book, On the Origin of Species. In it Darwin outlined his new theory of nature in which species evolved in a natural world through natural processes. Not at all confrontational himself, Darwin would leave it to his disciples to figure out the implications his theory would have on religion. But it was plain from the first that Origin left little necessity for a personal God who claimed to have an abiding interest and love for His creation.
Such tragedies as the death of Anne Darwin or of any child remind us that the first problem in life, as in Christian theology, is the problem of evil. The question persists: Why do bad things happen in the world if God is truly sovereign and good? Indeed, what answer can we Christians give to one who has lost a child to disease, a loved one to violent crime, a house to a flood, or a career to unjust office politics? How do we tell people that many Evangelicals believe that all these experiences are ordained and predestined by a loving Providence? Well-known Christian pastors and/or authors, such as James D. Kennedy, Charles Stanley, John MacArthur, Chuck Swindoll, R.C. Sproul [all of whose ministries, by the way, I have personally benefited from (esp. Dr. Stanley’s)], and a host of others too numerous to mention, have represented a rising tide of pastors and theologians across the conservative, denominational spectrum who explain the problem of evil along the line of John Calvin and his disciples. For God to be God, the argument goes, He must be in control of everything at all times. For God to allow someone or some thing to supersede His will at any point would mean that God ceased being God. If the internet is any judge of the preponderance of this view among today’s Evangelicals, John Calvin’s view is by far the dominant one.
Calvin’s view on the predestination of all events is not without its controversy, of course. Not many folks, Christian or otherwise, feel at ease with the idea that God has chosen some people for heaven, ’sovereignly passed over’ others for hell, and is doing it all for reasons known only to Himself. Nor under the umbrella issue of God’s sovereignty, in which the subjects of Foreknowledge, Election, Predestination, and Adoption have been debated, has the problem of evil gone away for the Calvinist. In fact, the idea of God’s sovereignty is so problematic that its notoriety has sometimes reached beyond Christian in-house debates. Here I recall a certain multiple-choice SAT question during my high-school days in the mid-70s. It asked me to define ‘the paradox of Christianity.’ I didn’t feel comfortable with answering a question that assumed Christianity rested on a fundamental contradiction, though I knew the test answer was B) the sovereignty of God and the free will of man. So entrenched, apparently, was Calvin’s view of the sovereignty of God, that even the public education-minded SAT examiners assumed no distinction between Christianity and Calvin’s understanding of Christianity. It was as though other biblical interpretations did not exist.
When I said a moment ago that Calvin’s explanation of evil is ‘problematic,’ I was only saying what at least one Calvinist himself has already stated. Popular speaker and Reformed theologian, R.C. Sproul, in his book, Chosen By God, admits with candor:
Surely the most difficult problem of all is how evil can coexist with a God who is both altogether holy and altogether sovereign. I am afraid that most Christians do not realize the profound severity of this problem. Skeptics have called this issue the “Achilles’ Heel of Christianity.” . . . For years I sought the answer to this problem, scouring the works of theologians and philosophers. I found some clever attempts at resolving the problem, but, as yet, have never found a deeply satisfying answer.iv
Elsewhere in his book, Sproul claims that he also came to discard such analogies as “parallel lines meet in eternity” that were being used by some Christians to explain the paradox of Calvinism.v
Regardless of whether one is an adherent or critic of Calvinism, the problem of evil is admittedly a tough question. Moreover, sometimes the Bible is hard to understand on difficult issues. The apostle Peter himself said that some things in Paul’s writings were ‘hard to understand,’ and it is primarily in Paul’s books that the subjects of Foreknowledge, Election, Predestination, and Adoption are discussed. But there is hope in Peter’s phrase. The fisherman-turned-apostle said that some of Paul’s writings were hard to understand, i.e., he did not say they were impossible to understand. Unfortunately, today’s evangelicals appear to believe that the problem of evil is impossible to understand. Doesn’t the Bible, they say, tell us that evil is a mystery? Aren’t God’s ways inscrutable and His judgments past finding out? Shouldn’t we just embrace the seeming contradiction that God decides what events shall happen, yet not be blameless for the evil events that happen?
Notwithstanding the widespread support for Calvin’s theology among today’s Evangelicals, this book contends that Calvin’s teachings on the sovereignty of God and the problem of evil are biblically incorrect (and therefore dangerous to the Church). This book also argues that Calvin’s views have so decimated Evangelical apologetics that rational debate on the issue of divine sovereignty is hardly understood within Evangelicalism anymore, even by many pastors and teachers. Furthermore, this kind of Calvinistic model has led to an inability to express true biblical Christianity to those outside (or even inside) the Evangelical faith. What is offered instead is a confusing amalgam of believing in Christ and believing for believing’s sake, since, in the case of the unbeliever, he is asked to entrust his soul to the same ‘caring’ God who is said to have foreordained all the animus of human experience, including Hitler’s fascism, Stalin’s communism, religions that oppose Christianity, and whatever other atrocities and contradictions history may offer. Thus despite all the confident-sounding rhetoric Calvinists make about keeping God safely ensconced in His own sphere of Being, what has largely taken place within Evangelical apologetics is a complete breakdown of definition. The result is an Evangelical apologetic where God is no longer distinct in His person or His moral character.
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i Browne, E. Janet. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Darwin].
ii Desmond, Adrian, and James Moore. Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition, 1994).
iii Browne, E. Janet. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Darwin]. [Note: Darwin himself claimed he was agnostic, not atheist.]
iv Sproul, R.C. Chosen By God. (Wheaton, Illinois; Tyndale House Publishers, 1994). p. 28.
v Sproul pp. 39-40 “The more I thought about the analogy the more I realized that it did not solve the problem. To say that parallel lines meet in eternity is a non-sense statement; it is a blatant contradiction… I don’t like contradictions. I find little comfort in them. I never cease to be amazed at the ease with which Christians seem to be comfortable with them. I hear statements like, “God is bigger than logic!” or “Faith is higher than reason!” to defend the use of contradictions in theology.” Despite appearances, Sproul fails to spot contradictions consistently, and ultimately defines various terms (such as Augustine’s bogus distinctions between “free will” and “liberty”) irrationally, so that, in effect, “free will” equals (so to speak) parallel lines, while “liberty” equals the intersection of parallel lines in eternity. Much of Sproul’s methodology follows a system whereby synonyms (free will and liberty) or chronologically simultaneous events (becoming born again and becoming a son upon believing) are defined differently in order to allow for dialecticism. In the former example, for instance, Augustine does not use the same exact word twice, and Sproul allows this trick to fool him into accepting Augustine’s argument that free will exists in a system that is absent liberty. And so I find it ironic that Sproul is upset about the ease with which Christians accept contradictions.