Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look in an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth for the Colson Center. I'm John Stone Street. In this world, you will have trouble. Those words, which Jesus said to his disciples, are actually true for all human beings at all times. But at certain times, like the last few months, they seem to be even more apt.
The ongoing war in Ukraine, a hunger crisis in Gaza, last week's shooting at a target store in Austin, which took three lives, including a grandfather and his granddaughter. These things only punctuate what has been a summer of suffering. That began with devastating floods in Texas. We all shuddered at the reports of what those girls at Camp Mystic endured. and we all mourned the news that twenty-seven campers had lost their lives.
Tragedies expose our deepest beliefs about life and the world. Not only do they reveal what those beliefs are, they test whether or not those beliefs are big enough to sustain us. Skeptics often talk as if the problem of evil and suffering is only of concern for Christianity, but every single religion, every single worldview, has to explain why the world is the way that it is. Naturalistic explanations of reality deny that God exists. The world is a product of purely material causes and processes.
In this view, there's no way things ought to be. There's only the way things are. Therefore, what happened to those girls in Texas wasn't really evil, it's really just bad luck. Eastern religions, like Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as the New Age ideas that share the same basic worldview, deny the existence of real evil altogether. In this view, the physical world is an illusion.
And if that's true, then the evil that inflicts the physical world has to be an illusion as well.
Now, that, of course, is more of a deflection than an explanation. Instead of asking why do bad things happen, we're now asking why do the illusions of bad things happen. According to postmodern ideologies, we cannot even access reality because we're all trapped within our own perspectives and experiences. But of course, even those who did not physically experience a particular evil can still know that it was bad. Critical theory, a more recent offspring of postmodernism's perspectivalism, reduces evil to oppression, places the blame on certain groups of people who do the oppressing.
However, that's no explanation for natural disasters, nor can it explain the evil deeds that are done by members of so-called oppressed communities. The only worldview that's big enough to both explain the existence of evil and also to offer a way forward is Christianity. The Bible explains the human condition in all of its fullness. Created in God's image, humans have an incredible capacity to bring good into the world.
However, we're fallen, and so we also have an incredible capacity to bring evil and suffering into the world. In the same way the world that God created is full of beauty and truth and goodness, but our sin has broken that world. in profound and deep ways, and so we often find ourselves victims of harmful forces that are well beyond our control. The very fact that we perceive evil in the world and in human beings as in fact evil, despite how common it is, is a clue to the meaning of the universe and also how we were made. Even more we perceive acts of heroism and sacrifice, even in the midst of grave evil, as being deeply good and deeply true.
And that says something as well. During the Texas flooding there was a 26-year-old Coast Guard rescue swimmer named Scott Ruskin who was sent on his very first mission. The sole rescuer on site at Camp Mystic, he saved the lives of 165 kids and camp counselors. In fact, he also saved a number of stuffed animals. when the girls that he rescued asked if they could bring them along.
As Eric Erickson put it, quote, this man's money should be rejected in every bar in America for the rest of his life. He drinks on the house. And yet still, within the framing of critical theory, that kind of masculine heroism would be toxic and oppressive. If the physical world is just an illusion, like the transcendental worldviews claim, then both the suffering of the girls and the heroism of Ruskin is nothing more than illusion too. And if life evolved according to the neo-Darwinian survival of the fittest story of the world, there was no honor in what Ruskin did, nor was there value in the lives that were lost that night.
A Christian worldview is able to take horrible tragedies as being truly horrible. It's right to weep, and it's even right to be angry in the face of evil and suffering because this world is not as it's supposed to be.
However, evil does not have the final say. As soon as evil entered the world, we learn that God began to act. to confront it, to protect his image bearers, and ultimately to rid the world of it. Of course, we will always wonder why a particular evil might happen, but our efforts to overcome evil with good will always matter, because we are made in the image of the God who made the world and so loved it that He sent His only Son. And so it's really true what Sam Wisegamgee said to Mr.
Frodo: there's good in the world, and it's worth fighting for. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast.
For more resources to live like a Christian today, you can go to breakpoint.org.
