N. T. Wright is a Bible scholar and now a bishop. In the course of his studies and under the onslaught of world events, he has come to realize "that 'the problem of evil' is not something we will 'solve' in the present world, and that our primary task is not so much to give answers to impossible philosophical questions as to bring signs of God's new world to birth on the basis of Jesus' death and in the power of his Spirit, even in the midst of 'the present evil age.'" Here is part of his understanding of the problem:
"The big question of our time . . . can be understood in terms of how we address and live with the fact of evil in our world. Growing out of the traditional philosophers' and theologians' puzzlement, the problem of evil as we face it today on our streets and in our world won't wait for clever metaphysicians to solve it. What are we going to
do? If we are not to react in an immature way, either by ignoring evil, or by declaring it's all the other person's fault, or by taking the blame on ourselves, we need a deeper and more nuanced way of answering the question many (not least the politicians) are asking. Why is this happening? What, if anything, has God done about it? And what can we or should we be doing about it?
"The Christian belief, growing out of its Jewish roots, is that the God who made the world remains passionately and compassionately involved with it. Classical Judaism and classical Christianity never held an immature of shallow view of evil, and it is one of the puzzles of the last few centuries how mainstream philosophers from Leibniz to Nietzsche could think and write about the problem of evil as though the Christian view could be marginalized or dismissed with cheap caricature. Were there no theologians to stand up and take issue? Did the case simply go by default?
"In particular, there is a noble Christian tradition which takes evil so seriously that it warns against the temptation to 'solve' it an any obvious way. If you offer an analysis of evil which leaves us saying, 'Well, that's all right then; we now see how it happens and what to do about it,' you have belittled the problem. . . . We cannot and must not soften the blow; we cannot and must not pretend that evil isn't that bad after all. That is the way back to cheap modernism. . . . That is the intellectual counterpart to the immature political reaction of thinking that a few well placed bombs can eliminate 'evil' from the world. No: for the Christian, the problem is how to understand and celebrate the goodness and God-givenness of creation and, at the same time, understand and face up to the reality and seriousness of evil. . . .
"The questions that ought to be occupying us as a society, never mind as a church, are these: How can we integrate the various insights about evil which the greatest thinkers and social commentators have offered? How can we offer a Christian critique of them where necessary? And how can we tell the Christian story in such a way that, without attempting to 'solve' the problem in a simplistic way, we can nevertheless address it in a mature fashion, and in the middle of it come to a deeper and wiser faith in the creator and redeemer God whose all-conquering love will one day make a new creation in which the dark and threatening sea of chaos will be no more?"
N. T. Wright,
Evil and the Justice of God (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2006), pp. 11, 39-41.
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