What Is God Doing About Evil?
by Jeph Holloway,
Professor of Theology and Ethics East Texas Baptist University
A man was concerned about his elderly father. The father lived alone in a basement apartment in the city and was engaged in a set of practices that disturbed his son. Whenever the son came for a visit he would see that his father had been out rummaging around in the trash and had brought home odd bits of other people`s rubbish. The elderly man would retrieve someone`s broken toaster, a worn-out coffee pot, a busted tri-cycle, and so-forth and would dump the refuse in the middle of his floor. Daily he would accumulate more and more of other people`s tossed-away junk and bring it home. He would then arrange the items in some precise manner and secure them to one another with wire, string, or unraveled coat-hangers. "Why are you doing this," the son would ask? "If I don`t," the father replied, "the world will fall apart."
Needless to say, such a response disturbed the son who, after repeated but unsuccessful attempts at reasoning with his father, determined that his father must be placed in some secure institution for his own good. The son contacted a social worker who was to visit the father in his basement apartment to evaluate his condition. Of course when the social worker visited the father he saw for himself the odd conglomeration of useless items strung together with wire, string, and unraveled coat-hangers. "Why are you doing this," the social worker asked? "If I don`t," the father replied, "the world will fall apart." That was good enough for the social worker and the father was committed into the hands of professional care-givers that very day.
After his own long day of professional care-giving the social worker himself went home to watch the evening news. The news was disturbing. Conflicts had broken out between formerly peaceful countries. Drastic shifts in weather patterns threatened flood here and drought there. Wild gyrations in the stock markets were feeding the fears and dreads of skittish investors. The social worker shook his head and comforted himself that he had at least done his part by caring for an eccentric but confused elderly man.
The news, though, got worse. Conflicts escalated, the weather grew more erratic and deadly, and world economies stumbled. Day by day the pattern was repeated with increasing intensity. Could it be? Finally, we see the social worker in the former basement apartment of the elderly man stringing together odd bits of other people`s rubbish with wire and unraveled coat-hangers. "If I don`t do this," the social worker said to himself, "the world will fall apart."
What might this story have to tell us about Christian ethics? Could it be that the character of God`s governance of his creation is of a different sort than often imagined? How does God rule his universe? By what means does God order creation? In light of the threats and challenges to the good order of God`s good creation, how is God`s sovereign rule expressed? In the face of disorder and corruption, what is God doing? What is God doing about evil?
Let me stress that asking the question "what is God doing about evil?" is different from how the question of the relationship between God and evil is often raised. Philosophers ask, "How can we believe in a perfectly good, perfectly wise, and all-powerful God in the face of the evil and suffering our world knows?" The questions of theodicy are not unimportant, but I am raising what I believe is a more strictly biblical question that assumes a standpoint of faith that God is the good creator of a good creation. And yet the extent of sorrow and evil in our world needs no great demonstration. A faithful question must certainly be, "What is God doing about such?"
I want to offer a response to that question with reference to Paul`s Letter to the Ephesians, finding in Ephesians a helpful and concise resource for themes and emphases that I believe are representative of a much wider witness. I believe it is the task of Christian ethics to ask, "What is God doing about evil?" A faithful response, informed by God`s story in Scripture is that God, through God`s redemptive work, is creating a people whose lives, sustained in worship, bear witness to his purposes for creation. A brief exploration of this statement will indicate what sort of approach to Christian ethics I think is truly faithful to God`s engagement with a creation that knows evil and suffering.
This understanding of Christian ethics will ask what in the world is God doing. That is, it will be a theocentric approach to Christian ethics. Many approaches to ethics, and even many approaches to Christian ethics, begin elsewhere. Often enough the first question asked is, "What should I do?" While Christian ethics cannot ultimately ignore that question and its myriad permutations, a Christian approach to the moral life as a whole must begin with the affirmation that our decisions and actions do not take place in the vacuum of an isolated moment but within the context of God`s faithful pursuit of the good God intends for all of creation. A theocentric approach to Christian ethics will ask, "What should I do?" but only in light of the larger and specific question "What is God doing about evil?"
A theocentric approach to Christian ethics will approach the ethical task in light of God`s initiative, God`s abundance, and God`s agenda.[x] There are many ways in which each of these aspects of a theocentric ethic finds expression in Ephesians. Let me start with some attention to how Ephesians stresses the divine initiative with respect to the moral life.
Paul`s letter to the Ephesians has much to say about the moral life of Christians. In fact, chapters 4-6 are generally described as containing a heavy dose of what biblical scholars call parenesis-or moral exhortation. Paul`s moral instruction ranges from stressing those moral virtues that sustain Christian community-humility, gentleness, patience, and love-to encouraging practices and dispositions to be put on display in the household relations of wife/husband, child/parent, slave/master. These chapters follow the first three chapters of the book in which Paul describes how God is at work in the world to achieve its redemption and restoration through Christ.
The division between distinct blocks of material in Ephesians is often described in a manner that cleanly separates theology (chapters 1-3) from ethics (chapters 4-6). In a pluralistic world that prefers to approach moral questions from the standpoint of religious neutrality, the apparent separation of ethics from theology in Ephesians encourages a reading of the text reinforced by an idea of ethics as a project that need not depend on some particular vision of world order, theological or otherwise. In this light, "ethics" is simply the universal quest for moral insight into human action. Does the clear emphasis on moral matters in Ephesians 4-6 underwrite the modern assumption that ethics can be pursued strictly as a human project independently of a theological framework?
A detailed response to that question would require more time than presently available, but briefly put the structure of Ephesians intends to communicate something very different than the separation of theology from ethics. What does Paul want to emphasize?
It is the case that we live in the world in light of the world we live in. That is, our decisions, our commitments, our daily practices, our way of relating to others, what consumes our energy and time, what rises to the top of our list of priorities, all of how we live in the world reflects our vision of reality-the world we think we live in. As Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon put it, "We can only act within that world which we see. So, the primary ethical question is not, What ought I now to do? but rather, How does the world really look?"[xi] For Christians to live in the world faithfully, we must first be able to describe the world truthfully. It is no small matter that the topic of truth runs throughout Ephesians, for it is this true account of the world that Paul offers in Ephesians 1-3, not some incidental religious talk that we can safely discard as long as we uphold our allegiance to something called values or morality or ethics. For Paul, we can only live in the world faithfully as we describe the world truthfully; and that is what he offers in Ephesians 1-3-a way to describe the world truthfully.
The concern to describe the world truthfully is itself no small matter, particularly when grappling with the issues of evil and suffering. Every complaint is a cry against disorder. Every groan expresses resistance to "the way things are." To raise the questions of evil and suffering is to question the very order of reality and whether it can be trusted. In her most recent work Susan Neiman argues that modern philosophy, usually assumed to be occupied mainly with matters of epistemology (what can I know and how can I know it?), actually has been most concerned with the questions of evil and suffering. The questions of epistemology are inquiry into "the way things are." And what is the way things are? In a world burdened with earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, terrorism, child abuse, poverty, racism, fetal alcohol syndrome, and Alzheimer`s we press the issue: "Is there another, better, truer order than the one we experience, or are the facts with which our senses confront us all that there is? Is reality exhausted by what it is, or does it leave room for all that it could be?"[xii]
The apostle Paul urges us to enjoy a wider vision of reality than what is afforded by the immediate and the apparent and prays that "the eyes of [our] heart may be enlightened, so that [we] might know what is the hope of [God`s] calling" (1:18). This calling is all about God`s initiative, God`s faithful insistence that the world is not abandoned but is the object of eventual transformation. Christian ethics begins with the affirmation of God`s gracious initiative displayed in his intent to create a people defined by truth, who know the miracle of forgiveness, and who live in hope of the restoration of all things in heaven and on the earth (1:3-14). Ephesians 1-3 gives an account of a world in which God is at work, revealing in a world of hostility, enmity, estrangement, and death what is the breadth and length and height and depth of the all-encompassing love of Christ (3:16-17) that gives life out of death and achieves reconciliation even among strangers (2:1-22).
Before Paul says a word about this moral responsibility or that moral obligation, he first describes a world in which any such actions would make sense-one in which God is at work to provide for new life and peace in the gracious creation of a people who are called to participate in a work of new creation. Chapters 4-6 give specific content to the concrete witness of this people in the world, but it is to a people who have responded in faith to the divine initiative-to God`s calling-that Paul admonishes, "Walk worthy of your calling" (4:1). A Christian ethic that affirms this theocentric pattern will not ask first, "What should I do?" but will ask first, "What is God doing?" It will emphasize the divine initiative.
A theocentric ethic, however, will also celebrate divine abundance. The language of abundance in Ephesians is notorious: believers are blessed with "every spiritual blessing" (1:3); God`s grace is "freely bestowed on us in the Beloved" (1:6); God`s forgiveness is granted "according to the riches of his grace," a grace "lavished upon us" (1:7-8); God`s calling has to do with "the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, and what is the surpassing greatness of his power toward us who believe" (1:18-19)-and all this just in the first chapter! Later Paul will speak of "God, being rich in mercy" (2:4), of "the unfathomable riches of Christ" (3:8), and of "the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge" (3:19). British theologian David Ford announces, "If I were choosing just one theme to emphasize about the God of Ephesians . . . it would be that of abundance-the pervasive sense of lavish generosity in blessing, loving, revealing, and reconciling. This is a world of meaning in which there is an inexhaustible, dynamic and personal source of abundance and glory with an all-inclusive, universal scope of operation."[xiii]
What bearing should such an emphasis on divine abundance have on the task of Christian ethics? In other words, how might the account of the divine initiative that reveals divine abundance in Ephesians 1-3 relate at all to admonitions such as, "Do not lie to one another, for we are members of one another" (4:25)?
Another theologian, John Milbank, asks the odd question, "Can morality be Christian?" His odder answer is that "Christian morality is a thing so strange, that it must be declared immoral or amoral according to all other human norms and codes of morality."[xiv] How can that be? Because, Milbank argues, discussions of morality and ethics are most often driven by and presuppose a situation of scarcity. The reality of poverty raises the issues of distributive justice. Ethics committees in hospitals establish criteria for whose name gets on the list for organ transplants. Many a college course on ethics has begun with the infamous "life-boat" dilemma, forcing students to assess the value of one life over another and to defend any choices that consign the weak to the watery depths. Is not scarcity a fact of life? Is not scarcity "the way things are?" Must not Christian ethics confront the world as it is?
Milbank and others have argued that Christian ethics must not accept the conventional starting point of any ethical system that begins with scarcity; to do so is to begin from the standpoint of unbelief and is to sanction a practical atheism. In this light we must hear from Sam Wells, who begins a recent work on Christian ethics with this astonishing thesis: "God gives his people everything they need to worship him, to be his friends, and to eat with him."[xv] Do Milbank and Wells not watch the news? Do they not hear the stories of famine and poverty, of privation and lack? At this point, Wells makes a very important qualification: "Everything they need does not mean everything they want. And everything they need to follow him does not mean everything they need to live a long, healthy life free from suffering, disappointment, frustration, or loneliness and full of achievement, recognition, and contentment."[xvi] It might be argued that because we are so often concerned (because we do not trust in God`s abundance) with pursuing a long, healthy life and safeguarding ourselves against suffering, disappointment, and frustration that we ourselves contribute to the manufacture of scarcity that we believe ethics can address without at all confronting our unbelief. Ethics, in such a context, becomes a means by which we attempt to manage systems of inherent injustice created often enough even by Christians whose efforts at self-protection expose our lack of trust in God`s abundance. "Ethics" is the name of the discipline concerned with managing the scarcity created by our idolatry. How we often address issues of world hunger is a good example of this. Thus, says Wells, "abundance is the grain of the universe, and starvation is a symptom of things being badly against the grain. The truth is that the world is not short of food, and the solution to starvation is not making more food (overcoming scarcity); the solution is sharing the food the world already has and reconciling the divisions that lead to ruinous conflict."[xvii]
The uncomfortable truth is that we often accept as givens certain practices, structures, arguments, institutions, and so forth that begin with a decidedly different set of assumptions than those displayed in the language of abundance in Ephesians 1-3. How astonishing the rationale for work that Paul gives in 4:28! The former thief is encouraged to work "with his own hands what is good, in order that he may have something to share with him who has need." Paul can only offer such an explanation for the place of work in our lives if he believes that there is more going on in this world than the apparent and immediate nexus of cause and effect. He can only offer such an account if he believes that our lives are not ultimately safeguarded by our own contrivances, but by the God "who is able to do exceeding abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us" (3:20).
We live in the world in light of the world we live in. The admonitions of Ephesians 4-6 reflect belief in the world described in Ephesians 1-3, a world in which God is at work through the gospel to bless abundantly, to bestow richly, to dispense lavishly, to work powerfully, all with the intent of creating a people who will reflect God`s goodness and wisdom in this world.
But that is to say that divine initiative and abundance serve the divine agenda. God`s action and abundance constitute "everything his people need to follow him." Scarcity and lack are themselves the products of a disbelief that seeks the good in some order other than that defined by God (cf. Gen. 3). In the doxology that begins Ephesians Paul unveils the order God intends and the agenda outlined for a world trapped in the deceptions of misdirected desire. Without the support of detailed exegesis let me simply suggest that what God is doing in the world is creating a people whose lives are shaped by the truth of the gospel (1:13), who are embraced by and who in turn embody in practice God`s forgiveness (1:7), and who live today in anticipation of God`s ultimate plan for cosmic reconciliation (Eph. 1:9-10). Truth, forgiveness, and reconciliation make up the divine agenda and both grow out of and express the divine initiative and abundance.
Truth and truth-telling figure large in Ephesians. As Ford observes, there is in these chapters "a pervasive concern . . . with transformative language . . . aimed at building a mature community by `speaking the truth in love` (4.15)."[xviii] The entire moral instruction of Ephesians might be summarized in 4:24 where Paul describes the identity of this community in terms of "the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth." Fundamental among the obligations of this new self and the immediate consequence of assuming such an identity is ". . . laying aside falsehood, speak truth, each one of you with his neighbor, for we are members of one another" (4:25).
Truth-telling in any particular instance is itself the child of the larger truth that is described in Ephesians as "the message of truth-the gospel of your salvation" (1:13) or as "the truth in Jesus" (4:21). While the precise connection between truth-telling and "the truth in Jesus" is not made explicit in Ephesians, Paul Griffiths` analysis of Augustine`s absolute prohibition on lying might help us here. According to Griffiths, Augustine`s "ban on the lie only makes sense in the light of God`s graceful gifts." For Augustine, the lie can only be avoided when disordered loves (cf. "the lusts of deceit" in contrast to "the truth in Jesus" in 4:21-22) find redirection when life is turned from self to God. But, "a necessary condition for all this is that God gives himself to be gazed at, that God ceaselessly batters our hearts with the gift of himself." What better way to speak of "the message of truth-the gospel of your salvation?" For Augustine, then, as I believe it was for Paul in Eph. 4:25, "The lie`s ban has sense and purchase . . . only when understood and expressed as an element in the syntax of grace."[xix]
It should be obvious that the divine agenda of truth relates to the agenda of forgiveness. The message of truth-the gospel of your salvation, is both the painful message of our own need and the joyful message of God`s response. We can afford to speak truth to our neighbor because the truth is already out about ourselves-that we are in over our heads in our own sin and "we have redemption, through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace" (1:7). These twin truths of sin and grace that meet in forgiveness are basic to the world in which we live. They communicate a divine initiative that bestows a divine abundance that calls forth the particular agenda of creating a people who are familiar enough with the truth about themselves and God`s love that they can "be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you" (4:32).
Christians are quite used to this talk of truth, sin, grace, love, and forgiveness. I am not sure that we have actually caught on to the radical dimensions of the divine agenda voiced in Ephesians, though. We have not fully considered the demands of truth-telling and the work of forgiveness (as challenging as these demands are in and of themselves) until we consider them in relation to the divine agenda for reconciliation as expressed in Ephesians 1:9-10.
Speaking the truth in love and forgiving as God forgives serve a larger and final feature of the divine agenda, "the gathering together of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things upon the earth" (1:10). Paul defines in this verse what he calls "the mystery of [God`s] will." This is the ultimate trajectory of the divine purpose and the main theme of Ephesians: "the summing up and bringing together of the fragmented and alienated elements of the universe in Christ as the focal point."[xx] While this grand act of reconciliation awaits its full realization in an age yet to come, it is the divine agenda now and basic to the moral task of the people of God to celebrate God`s creation of a people defined, not by ethnic, national, or religious identities that occasion division and hostility, but by the cross of Christ that has broken down the barriers of division and enmity, establishing peace (2:11-18). The concrete expression of this work of reconciliation is the formation of a people for the worship of God through Christ made up of reconciled Jews and Gentiles. This is the mystery (that humanity, formerly defined by division and enmity can now be reconciled through Christ; 3:6-9) that is made known by a church whose witness of reconciliation is sustained by speaking the truth in love and the practice of forgiveness. It is this mystery-the very existence of such a church-that makes known to the rulers and authorities (whose power and rule are so often secured by the maintenance of division and enmity) the true means of reconciliation (3:10). And it is this mystery-a people reconciled to God and to one another-that is sustained and guarded by the practice of gentleness, patience, humility, and forbearing love-by a walk worthy of the calling (4:1).
What is God doing about evil in the world? God is creating a people called to provide a witness to the power of the gospel to reconcile-to create a new humanity that practices a peace, not achieved through threat and intimidation, but through truth-telling and forgiveness. What is God doing about evil? Through the message of truth-the gospel of your salvation, God creates a new humanity that embodies an alternative politics to the prevailing order that defines peace in terms of security maintained through threat of violence.
We have grown used to a diminished form of the gospel, one that rests content solely with the truth about our sin and the comfort of God`s forgiveness. But the divine agenda presses on to the goal of reconciliation, the formation of a people in this world that puts the power of the gospel to reconcile enemies on display. This is what it means to be God`s workmanship-God`s poiema: that which has been fashioned by God for a purpose (2:10). The poetics of God`s grace establishes a claim that will seem counter-intuitive to say the least. It is a peculiar notion that God might gather the broken remnants of a fragmented world and bind them together through the cords of truth and forgiveness to fit them for a world-redeeming purpose. But the message of truth-the gospel of our salvation is precisely God`s insistence, "If I don`t do this, the world will fall apart
[x] This emphasis does recall James Gustafson`s Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective: Volume 1: Theology and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), particularly with its emphasis on the divine initiative. The Book of Ephesians, however, will be much more robust in asserting divine abundance and the divine agenda than is Gustafson.
[xi] Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1989), 88.
[xii] Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 11.
[xiii] David Ford, Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 113.
[xiv] John Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 219.
[xv] Sam Wells, God`s Companions: Reimagining Christian ethics (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2006), 1.
[xvi] Ibid., 5.
[xvii] Ibid., 8.
[xviii] Ford, Self and Salvation, 108-109.
[xix] Paul J. Griffiths, Lying: An Augustinian Theology of Duplicity (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004), 225-226.
[xx] Peter T. O`Brien, The Letter to the Ephesians (Grand rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 59.
