The Personal Problem of Evil

By Joshua Eller

Margaret, are you grieving Over
Goldengrove unleaving? Leaves, like the
things of man, you With your fresh thoughts
care for, can you? Ah! As the heart grows
older It will come to such sights colder By
and by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds
of wanwood lea/meal lie; And yet you will
weep and know why. No matter, child, the
name: Sorrow s springs are all the same. Nor
mouth had, no nor mind, expressed What
heart heard of, ghost guessed: It is the blight
man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn
for. —Gerard Manley Hopkins

There is but one truly serious philosophical prob­lem, and that is suicide. —Albert Camus

The Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines the Prob­lem of Evil as "the contradiction, or apparent contradiction, between the reality of evil on the one, and religious beliefs in the goodness and power of God...on the other." This contradiction is essential a metaphysical issue that takes two forms - deductive and inductive. However, Ronald Nash offers a third categorization of evil viewed as a "personal or pastoral problem." While a well-informed Christian should be equipped with the knowledge and ability to refute the philosophical and theological arguments that utilize the problem of evil against God, it is the pain and iso­lation that individuals suffer—the effects of evil—that constitute evil as a problem. Because man cannot overcome evil, he is left with his consciousness that now tortures him with its understanding. In a funda­mental way, the problem of evil is now a problem of consciousness. In this I will attempt to redefine the problem of evil as man's consciousness or self-aware­ness and, in the light of this definition, to explain the Scriptural approach to dealing with both believers and non-believers about the problem of evil. Dr. Martha Nussbaum, a professor at Brown Uni-
versity, used Lucretius' epic poem. On the Nature of Things, to offer indirectly a definition of the problem of evil. Lucretius organized conscious beings into three distinct categories. The first category consists of the first humans who lacked the reflection to consider the frailty and mortality of life - they were undis­turbed by death. The second category consists of the Epicurean gods who "have reflection without vulner­ability" and thus live in eternal bliss. Caught between these extremes are modern men who are "the only beings both vulnerable and reflective, who go through life in the grip of fear of their own existence, straining to understand and also improve their condition through the reflective capacity that is also the source of much of their agony." Lucretius thought that human anxiety-stemmed from the vulnerable-fear of the god's wrath and offered a mechanistic explanation of the universe in order to dismiss the blind actions of foolish deities. His answer was to conquer the unknown by reason. Perfect reason would cast out all fear.
In modern times, Albert Camus reformulated the problem of evil when he said, "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide." Camus also understands man's essential problem as his consciousness. This is most clearly asserted in his treatment of the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus who convinced Pluto to temporarily release him from the underworld and the spent several years hiding from the gods. As punishment, he was eternally condemned to roll a large boulder up and down a long, steep hill forever. Camus comments, "If this myth is tragic, it is because [Sisyphus] is conscious. Where would his torture be...if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks... [but] it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious." Thus man's consciousness of his dilemma, and not the di­lemma itself, haunts him.Although written well over a century before Camus, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther is a brilliant presentation of man's tragic situation. Werther, blind­ly ensnared by youthful passions and foolish hopes, is driven to suicide in an act of pure hatred of life and his fellow man. In the midst of his digression, he becomes acquainted with a local lunatic. Reflecting on the lunatic, he says of the man, " 'You were happy!' I exclaimed, 'as gay and contented as a man can be!' God of heaven! And is this the destiny of man? Is he only happy before he has acquired his reason, or after he has lost it?"
Significantly, the Bible's most extensive treatment of the problem of evil, the book of Job, also pres­ents the perspective that man's consciousness is his real problem. In the third chapter, when despair has finally overwhelmed Job, the reader is given a chilling glimpse of suffering. Forsaking all pretense, Job curs­es his own existence. "'May the day perish on which I was born. May that day be darkness; May God above not seek it, nor the light shine upon it. May darkness and the shadow of death claim it." What can the Chris­tian say to such despair? What is the answer that will heal the wound of sin?
First we must acknowledge that there is no "answer." The fall is not fixed with formulas or arguments. The problem of evil is separation from God and man. The answer, then, must be unity; the Biblical model for unity—for salvation—begins with communication. Indeed, God's image in man is distinguished by the type of communication God shares with man and the type that men share with one another. The mark of man qua man is linguistic in nature.
Walker Percy, inspired by the work of Charles Sander Peirce, simplified the anthropological hypoth­esis man is linguistically distinguished from non-man in his essay, "Is a Theory of Man Possible?" Percy classifies every event in the universe as either dyadic or tryadic. A dyadic event is "nothing more or less than the phenomena studied by the conventional sci­ences, whether the collision of subatomic particles...or the performance of a rat in learning to thread a maze." Triadic events are "man's transactions with symbols, of which...the prime example is his use of language." For humans, the first triadic event occurs when a child understands, for instance, that when his parent makes the sound "ball", the parent means that the sound "ball" means (i.e., signifies, refers to, etc.) the round object. It is the association of the sign with the object.
A triadic event between a person and a non-person occurs between two fundamentally dissimilar things. They share an "I-it" relationship. However, triadic events that occur between two humans are universally unique. Triadic interaction between people is more than a biological classification of the other but an af-
firmation of being, an interplay between equals. This "I-you or interpersonal relation is, accordingly, not merely a desirable state of affairs...but is rather the very condition of being and knowing and feeling in a human way." Understanding the importance of triadic communication is the key to understanding how God dealt with Job's suffering.
A surface reading of Job in light of the problem of evil, especially the tension between God's power and goodness, will seem lacking. God's entire confron­tation with Job is one long-winded assertion of His own unfathomable power and purpose which Job has no right to question. However, Eleanore Stump, a philosophy professor at Cornell University, suggests that the form of God's communication constitutes an entirely separate mode of communication and, in the end, shapes the actual content of the words.
Dr. Stump asserts that the second-person dialogue from God to Job serve to personalize God's message to Job. The exact content cannot be known by a third party, but its effect upon Job was unmistakable, caus­ing Job to instantly repent. Dr. Stump suggests that Job's complaint, which only questioned God's good­ness, was personal. Job's prior relationship with God was one of trust and obedience. "His protest against God in the dialogues thus at least includes a charge of betrayal of trust. But for this charge, a face-to-face en­counter can make all the difference." The significance of Job's story is three-fold. First, it clearly testifies that there is no answer for evil for the fallen human mind. Second, it shows that pain can be comforted. Third and most important, it shows that the method by which comfort is shared begins with a fundamental recognition of equality between humans. It redraws the lines by which Christians parse the world. More fundamental than the sinner-saved distinction is the unity of triadic beings - a unity that bridges all nation­alities and cultural barriers. This final point is also im­portant because it demands that Christians understand and share not only the content of God's communica­tion but also the form of that communication insofar as the form determines the content. Therefore, just as God shows His own dealings with Job. so ought Chris­tians deal with their fellow man.
While the problem of evil has no solution, there is hope for deliverance beyond the grave and hope for relief on this side. The core of the Biblical response is to imitate God and active care for our fellow man as equal beings before our almighty father.