[This article is originally published in the booklet Ecumentical Papers – Contributions to Interfaith Dialogue, compiled by the Office of the Manager Christian Science Committees on Publication, published by the Christian Science Publishing Society in Boston, Massachusetts]
It was unthinkable, Henry Adams wrote after his sister, racked with suffering, had died of tetanus, “That any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments” ( The Education of Henry Adams, Book League of America, 1928, p. 289 ). Yet millions of Christians have believed traditionally in just such a God.
Cruelty, waste, indifference, and pain are inherent in the very structure and texture of the natural world. Much of this cannot easily be attributed to human wickedness. It is “natural” evil, in the common phrase, and the Christian apologist has usually explained it as the condition of man’s creatureliness. In this explanation the agonies and accidents of material existence are held to be the necessary matrix of its blessings and possibilities.
But why create such a universe in the first place? Could not a perfect God create a perfectly good universe, as in the great vision of Genesis 1, where the flawless creation metaphorically presented for contemplation bears little resemblance to nature as we encounter it through the physical senses, with its ceaseless, savage struggle for existence? From a perfectly good creator would one not expect a world of limitless goodness?
“Ah, but …” says traditional apologetics, “that would be tame, ignoble, leaving man incapable of real development through pitting himself against his environment.”
Really? Is God tame and ignoble because He is the very Principle of good? Does supreme goodness, supreme Love, lack the power of intelligent self-development? Must God, in Manichaean fashion, have an opposite in order to be really God? Must the joy of pure being rest on a base of blind, appetitive thrust and mutual destruction?
If not, then why must it be assumed that the answer is different in the case of man? “What man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?” ( Matt. 7:9 ) Are we then to believe that God has deliberately arranged a natural order which over the centuries has brought into existence countless deformed and imbecile children, children destined to suffer hideous pain, to die of famine and accident, to be slaughtered in war or burned alive in holocaust, to have their lives distorted by inherited criminal tendencies and vicious social systems? Are these the children of a loving heavenly Father?
There is no logical necessity for creating man subject to the gigantic injustice of the natural order and the drag of animal instincts. Faced with this fact, Christian apologists have tended to take refuge in the inscrutable mystery of the divine purpose.
Is there, then, a rational explanation of moral, evil, or sin?
If God makes men capable of sin, it would seem reasonable that he must take responsibility for their sinning. “Oh, no!” shocked tradition replies. “Free will, and all that.” But if He knew from the outset that His hapless creatures would choose to sin, and if He still chose to create them, how can He escape ultimate responsibility? “Because,” the answer goes, “permissiveness is the necessary precondition of freedom of will. Because without freedom to sin, man would be the mere slave or puppet of God’s will.”
There is a curious assumption in this: that human dignity demands the right to become the opposite of what one really is. But is God free to sin? Is Truth free to falsify? Is light free to be darkness? Is good free to be evil? If we say no to these questions, do we then pity God and consider Him to be a slave to His own goodness?
True freedom is freedom to fulfill one’s highest possibilities. The sinner is the slave, not the man made in God’s image who acts spontaneously but inevitably from his God-bestowed nature. The physical organism determined by chancy genes and contingent circumstance is the puppet — though not of God’s will (unless one chooses to make God responsible for the worst as well as the best of human behavior). If the man of God’s creating is identified with the puppet-mortal evolved from primal matter, free will becomes logically untenable and sin becomes, as in modern scientism, mere sickness and maladjustment, to be healed by social reconditioning rather than by spiritual rebirth.
… Once again it remains an unfathomable mystery why God, as traditional Christianity maintains, should have created such a universe in the first place. Creation, seen in these terms, may well be considered synonymous with the “fall.”
A generation with a distaste for unfathomable mysteries rebels naturally enough, against being held guilty of the sin of being born estranged and wayward. Is even the proffer of grace through Jesus Christ, as traditionally interpreted, a reasonable recompense for a congenital estrangement so great that millions of people seem incapable of accepting that grace? Or, as some today suggest, is the real message of Jesus: “You’re on your own now in a pretty ghastly universe, but here’s the way to salvage something noble from it”?
A wholly different answer is possible, an answer which suggests that the drama of redemption is misunderstood if the drama of creation is misread. It identifies the message of Jesus with the vision of Genesis 1: man sinless, guiltless, the crowning glory of a perfectly good creation. This is the man glimpsed through the earthly life of the Saviour, culminating in his resurrection and ascension beyond all the limitations of a moral and material sense of existence. God’s grace, so understood, is not His forgiveness of men’s innate sinfulness but His revelation of man’s innate goodness. Christ’s saving work, so understood, is the awakening of humanity from the nightmare of materiality to the present and eternal perfection of God’s spiritual creation.
What this basically involves is putting off the old man for the new — the man determined by genes for the man revealed through Christ — not by changing one into the other but by exchanging appearance for reality, the outward for the inward, the humanly plausible for the divinely certain. And what this does is to bring radical healing to the present imperfect sense of existence. As the inner structure of reality comes to light, the illegitimacy of the merciless claims of evil is progressively demonstrated.
Such a process does not “explain” evil, in the sense of justifying it, but step by step wipes it out — as Jesus wiped out sin, sorrow, pain, death, all the limits implied by the word “matter.” Seen in this perspective, ontology relates directly to ethics, including social ethics. “The belief of life in matter sins at every step,” writes Mrs. Eddy ( Science and Health, p. 542 ). Merely to rearrange the material factors in a given situation through social programming — valid and important though this may often be as an expression of intelligent Christian concern — is to leave the basic need untouched. To the dispossessed who need food, housing, opportunity, human dignity, as well as to the privileged who must learn how to relate the ethics of the good Samaritan to the broad social imperatives of today, the primary demand of Jesus still applied: “Ye must be born again” ( John 3:7 ).
In I John we read: If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us ( I John 1:8 ).
In the same epistle we read: Whoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God ( I John 3:9 ).
Here is paradox par excellence. Viewed through the dismal lens of unregenerate human experience, man is obviously a sinner; seen with the penetrating vision of spiritual insight, he is found to be the sinless child of God. Santayana has written that love is penetrating but that it penetrates to possibilities rather than to facts. Divine Love, however, penetrates to the possibility as the fact; that is, the good which may appear humanly to be mere possibility is already existent fact in the divine order of being. For God to see is to actualize, and for a man to accept himself as God sees him is to be born again. Then instead of trying to find a legitimate origin for the claims of evil he is in a position to reject them as wholly spurious, fraudulent, and alien to God’s purpose for the universe and man.
Jesus made plain that evil is best regarded as a lie, and Paul wrote: Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; and have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him ( Col. 3:9,10 ). What this implies is a different starting point for thought and action. Instead of starting with a sinning, fallen mortal subject to all the contingencies of material existence, one starts with the spiritual man made in God’s image, reflecting God’s purpose and power.
This also means starting with a different universe. The Christian who makes Spirit rather than matter the locus of reality need not flinch from the kind of challenge set forth by Bertrand Russell in a now classic statement: That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the ends they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; … that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe of ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are … nearly certain … Brief and powerless is man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way… ( Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, Ed. Robert E. Egner, Lester E. Denonn: Simon & Schuster, Inc., pp. 67, 72 ).
This picture of cosmic doom suggests a view of reality seen through a distorting lens. The lens in this case is the acceptance of matter as ultimate substance; everything else in the statement follows logically from that premise. Yet the resurrection and ascension of Jesus slash clear across such reasoning — not merely as events in history but as revelations of reality. Even his day-by-day healings constitute evidence of a different kind of substance, a different kind of power. To classify love, intelligence, joy, courage, humility, inspiration as accidental by-products of fleeting electrochemical impulses and neuromuscular reactions is impossible for one who has experienced in his own body the regenerative power of Spirit.
To the disciples who found his sayings “hard” Jesus declared, “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing” ( John 6:63 ). Certainly the commitment to Spirit and its immortal creation as the sole reality of being is hard for the human mind; but in proportion as we yield to the divine logic of this position and come to grips with its demands on our humanity, we find it is life-giving, life-preserving, life-transforming.
This makes for realism about the human scene rather than for wishful thinking. Matter is recognized as a mental outlook which by its nature corrupts our view of man. In Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy writes: Mortals are not fall children of God. They never had a perfect state of being, which may subsequently be regained. They were, from the beginning of mortal history, “conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity.” … Learn this, O mortal, and earnestly seek the spiritual status of man, which is outside of all material selfhood ( Science and Health, p.476 ).
Such a demand calls for regeneration rather than mere rearrangement, for putting off the old man rather than idealizing him, but at the same time it involves a practical transformation of mortal existence, not a mere retreat into otherworldliness. The fact that God’s man is here now, for the proving, demands action, healing, change.
“Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind,” wrote Paul, “that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God” ( Rom. 12:2 ). Surely this is the fundamental Christian answer to the problem of evil, an answer leading step by step to the end implicit in our true beginning: “We all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” ( II Cor. 3:18 ).