What’s Love Got to Do with It?: The Problem of Love Part 1
It would seem that the problem of evil has been a large mountain that stands between the unbeliever and her belief in God. For if there are true horrors in the world, and yet the religious claim in the goodness of their deity, what good is that supreme being who is impotent to relieve the world of all this great misery and pain? The great apologist C.S. Lewis answers. Best known in pop culture for his Chronicles of Narnia series, as well as some of his “pop-theology” works such as The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce, he himself had lived through the sufferings of the Great War and the loss of his beloved wife, Joy, and in many of his most famous works wrestled with the problematic presence of evil. In Mere Christianity, he asks, “If a good God made the world, why has it gone wrong?”[1] A fair point to be sure. If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, why is this world not better? And what would count as “better” or “good?” The answer of course is found in God’s nature. Simply, God is love. So, one must also ask, what is “love?” That our world is a product of a loving creator is called into question for the great brokenness and resulting misery all people in history have endured.
Why is this world not better?
If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, why is this world not better? And what would count as “better” or “good?” The answer of course is found in God’s nature. Simply, God is love. So, one must also ask, what is “love?”
With the perceived problem of evil, God’s omnipotence is questioned if God can’t (or won’t) stop great suffering and pain, including natural evils such as earthquakes, fires, hurricanes, famines, disease, etc. Robert Francis Allen attributes this allowance under the divine will and sovereignty of God.[2] Only God can give power to the devil, and in his permission, such as what we see in the Book of Job, does this strengthen a person’s faith. It is reasonable to look at evil through the lens of understanding God’s nature as the standard of good. It is God’s good character that permits the pain we suffer in this life, not of His own doing, but our own and Satan’s agents. K. Scott Oliphint attributes natural disasters to our fallenness in that we are so knit with the rest of creation, as Romans 8 speaks of in the world groaning, it is because “Creation, in covenant with man, fell because we fell.”[3]
In his book, The Problem of Pain, Lewis challenges skeptics of God’s omniscience and omnipotence by demonstrating the reason for human suffering can be attributed, ultimately, to God’s love. Not wanting the worship of puppets, it is by His love that He allowed humans to exercise free will and He knew what that would lead to, namely pain and suffering. Specifically, the cross. We cannot ignore that as much as God is love, He is also just, and cannot leave transgressions unpunished, injustice unanswered. Norman Geisler and Ronald Brooks define love as “desiring (and doing) the good of the other.”[4] So we see Jesus is the answer. We can understand that real love is certainly a choice, and “God is responsible for the fact of freedom, but humans are responsible for the acts of freedom. In his knowledge, God might persuade people to make certain decisions, but there is no reason to suppose that he coerces any decision so as to destroy freedom. As all-loving, God works persuasively, but not coercively.”[5] Mankind is invited into our truest freedom in Jesus. We find the answer to the problem of evil in God’s ultimate illustration of love, Christ.
God is Love
Mankind is invited into our truest freedom in Jesus. We find the answer to the problem of evil in God’s ultimate illustration of love, Christ.
According to Lewis, the problem people have with evil is that it exists—this is problematic for the skeptic if believers insist on the existence of a good God. If God were truly good, thinks man, perhaps we would worship him—but for the presence of evil how could a good God exist? Here is the great misunderstanding of what is good. Since there is pain in the world, God cannot be good, or is not in control, which ultimately makes Him not God. Lewis begs to differ. Whether to blame evil on God, or call it nature, karma, or causes unknown, Lewis postulates, “It is men, not God, who have produced racks, whips, prisons, slavery, guns, bayonets, and bombs; it is by human avarice or human stupidity, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork.”[6] It is by man’s choices has evil crept into the world of God’s good creation. “Good,” then is what God makes, and God did not make evil.
Lewis’ problem with evil is not with God, but man. And yet in his personal journey with losing his beloved “H” as he calls her, his wife who died of cancer after a brief time of marriage, he grapples with his grief and God. He speculates, “If God’s goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God.”[7] And yet, surely there is a God and He is good, says Lewis, and evil is “primarily remedial or [a] corrective good”[8] leading us back to our Creator. Left to our own devices, human kind would never venture back to her God in surrender. Lewis means to say that God is our Father, and in much the same way we would correct our children whom we love by some discipline of consequence, He does mean, in the most loving way, for us to die to self, a most painful process. Pain is “God’s megaphone” to turn us from our rebellion.[9] It alerts us to what is wrong, that is, we are separated from our source of Life itself. So what of the sovereignty of God in light of human freedom?
In the next few weeks we’ll be exploring what the problem of love is–that it by nature must allow us freedom, and with freedom comes the choice to do great good as well as great evil.
[1] C.S Lewis, Mere Christianity, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001, 38.
[2] Robert Francis Allen, “St. Augustine’s Free Will Theodicy and Natural Evil,” Ars Disputandi,
Vol 3, Issue 1 (2003): 84-90.
[3] K. Scott Oliphint, Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith, Wheaton: Crossway, 2013, 95.
[4] Norman L. Geisler and Ronald M. Brooks, When Skeptics Ask: A Handbook on Christian Evidences, Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2013, 293.
[5] Ibid., 26.
[6] C.S Lewis, The Problem of Pain, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001), 86.
[7] C.S. Lewis, Grief Observed, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994), 27.
[8] Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 85.
[9] Ibid., 93.